Threat Level over at Wired blogs has a good post about a recent New Yorker article (link is to an audio file page, not the article) - Threat Level’s post title is:
NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says
an exe
rpt follows below:
In other words, McConnell claims the NSA couldn’t intercept a terrorist’s e-mail by tapping a fiber optic cable in Pakistan, if there was a chance the message would pass through a U.S. router or end up in a Hotmail account.
I’m no rich man, but I’ll bet any reader $1,000 that, when and if those rulings are ever released, we’ll see they say no such thing. Send me an e-mail to take me up this bet. U.S. government officials are welcome to participate.
The FISA law that created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only applies to intercepts that physically happen within the borders of the United States. The NSA has always been free to intercept foreign communications overseas — the mission for which they were created and funded — even if the call passes through a U.S. switch.
So in the case of the now debunked Iraqi kidnappers anecdote that leads off the New Yorker story, the NSA would only have needed to get a court order if its Iraqi targets initiated communications that flowed through U.S. servers or switches and the NSA decided to tap them physically at a United States internet or telecom facility, by burglarizing it, digging up its cables or getting the company to cooperate. (As for why that happens and how common it is, check my story: NSA’s Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became the Switchboard to the World.)
Simply put, the FISA law is intended to prevent the NSA from operating inside the United States.
In any event, that restriction collapsed this summer with the fear-induced, strong-armed passage of the so-called Protect America Act. That law radically re-architected the nation’s surveillance apparatus.
Now the NSA can turn Gmail’s servers and AT&T’s switches into de facto arms of the surveillance industrial complex without any court oversight.
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It’s currently difficult to find an online print version of the New Yorker article- apparently the WSJ had a .pdf of it up for awhile @ http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/WashWire.pdf
Anyway, while it’s still available from a Google cache, I figured I’d copy and paste the html source of that cache below. Sorry I can’t do better than that at the moment. But, FWIW, here’s a copy/paste/cache of the code- (I tried to put it up here, but formatting issues made it illegible) which, since it is an important educational issue on the internet, since I can’t find an online print copy of the article elsewhere, and since the WSJ put up a .pdf on a New Yorker article which Google then cached… I figure Fair Use. If not, let me know. We’ll take it from there.
As far as I can translate, the article seems to begin more or less as follows:
A Reporter At Large
The Spymaster
Can Mike McConnell fix America’s intelligence community?
By Lawrence Wright
Last May, the director of National Intelligence, a soft-spoken South Carolinian named Mike McConnell, learned that three U.S. soldiers had been captured by Sunni insurgents in central Iraq. As a search team of six thousand
Tags: article reprint, data mining, datamining, education, emails, Fair Use, Google cache, Google search history, Lawrence Wright, New Yorker, news, NSA, privacy, surveillance, Threat Level, Wall Stret Journal, wiretapping
