They weren’t just international calls

December 21, 2005

During his press conference on Monday, the president fielded a series of questions about his NSA domestic surveillance program, prompting Bush to emphasize the fact that the spying was directed at international discussions.

“…I want to make clear to the people listening that this program is limited in nature to those that are known al Qaeda ties and/or affiliates. That’s important. So it’s a program that’s limited, and you brought up something that I want to stress, and that is, is that these calls are not intercepted within the country. They are from outside the country to in the country, or vice versa. So in other words, this is not a — if you’re calling from Houston to L.A., that call is not monitored.” (emphasis added)

It’s a common part of the administration’s defense. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA director who is now the second-ranking intelligence official in the country, said this week that in order for the program to be used, “one end of these communications has to be outside the United States.” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the same thing on Monday, insisting that it is “very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States.”

Except the facts show otherwise. Bush’s warrantless-search program did include surveillance of entirely domestic conversations.

A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.

The officials say the National Security Agency’s interception of a small number of communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact “international.”

I suppose it’s supposed to be reassuring that officials eavesdropped on domestic calls without a warrant “accidentally,” but in some ways, it may actually make the controversy slightly worse. The administration has insisted that the program is applied only when one of the parties on the call is outside the U.S., but this story suggests the NSA, due to the globalization of communications networks, isn’t exactly sure where both parties are located.

In other words, the administration may intend to exclude purely domestic communications, but they’re eavesdropping on these calls anyway, without a warrant, because they can’t tell the difference.

Game, set, match. Time to impeach.

  • I am sorry, but the argument that they ‘accidentally’ tapped into those phone calls is the biggest load of manure. Commercially available technology can pinpoint cell-phone locations within yards. Think about what toys the NSA has. I can hardly believe that they even try to say with a straight face that this was accidental. Heck, if I go out of country and use my phone, the phone company sure as heck knows to bill me outrageous roaming charges… and they want to claim that the NSA isn’t even that advanced, let alone a few technological worlds ahead?

  • I’m not surprised or shocked that they are monitoring domestic calls given the recent revelations of monitoring domestic groups. I’m a little offended they’d lie about “accidentally” intercepting those calls or that they’re constrained by technology. They could give us some credit.

    I’m just waiting for the bombshell that they weren’t really monitoring “terrorism suspects” but were instead keeping tabs on their critics.

  • Hello,
    I wonder how the system would handle VoIP calls. When I traveled to China for two weeks, I extended my Vonage service to have a “soft phone” on my PC. So I had a 703 area code (northern Virginia) and the phone would ring on my PC in China.

    I could make / receive calls to a US domestic phone number. In theory, you could have two VoIP calls where the entire phone call is carried out over the internet to domestic phone numbers where both “phone numbers” are US numbers.

    I suppose the soft phone has to “register” with Vonage servers, so US servers are involved in this type of communication. But I wonder how these types of call would be classified.

    Alex

  • From a technical point of view this is really a mess. I want to see a communications expert speak up on this. With cell networks and particularly VOIP (internet phone calls) it is virtually impossible to pinpoint a call as purely international or domestic. You may know where a cell phone is by triangulating the towers it is using but you do not know about the other end of the call.

    IF I were a terrorist trying to communicate covertly I would be all over the VOIP option. A cell phone linked in to a PC with intenet access could route a call (in pieces or all together) through thousands of nodes around the world. It can be encrypted. The fact that they found PC’s on some of the terrorists leads me to believe they have good technical skills and know how to use the system. These are not people hiding in caves. On the contrary they are trees hiding in a forest and even if you find one you only have a piece. Think about Spam and how hard it is to control. It is just like that but with voice communications. The people who will catch the terrorist are at MIT not NSA!

    I seriously doubt this illegal wire tapping will catch anyone and it is so Anti -American that is makes me sick..

  • If, in fact these interceptions were “accidental”, it really makes me wonder what they’re doing here.

    Castor’s right about cell-phone calls – a cellphone company can not only tell if you’re on their network, but what network you’re on & where that network is located. If you’re on their network, because of E-911 requirements, they’ll be able to tell where you are within 100 meters of your location.

    If you’re criminally-inclined, leave your cellphone at home.

    This has to be some automated drift-net-like system if they’re accidently picking up calls between people inside the country.

    Lots of people are talking about Eschelon in regards to this business, I wonder how many of them are aware of the CALEA program – http://www.askcalea.net – I get the feeling that this has some part in what’s going on.

  • Alex,

    This is exactly what I am saying. So now is the government going to ask private companies to monitor their server activity?

    Someone asked about how a Democracy would slip into facisim the other day. This ia good step. The government having private corporations spying on private citizens.

    Everyone on my christmas list is getting a copy of 1984 this year.

  • Here is my favorite part about W’s latest defense. His prior defense was that if they asked Congress to change FISA or really did anything other than clandestine law-breaking it would take away the element of surprise and let the bad guys know what intelligence we are gathering and how.

    Now he defends by saying “we aren’t monitoring US-to-US calls.” I’m sure the terr’ists were happy to know that!

  • MNProgressive – since VOIP is, well, IP-based, you should be able to tell where each caller is based on their IP address – which would be really, really, really easy to get if you know what you’re doing.

    Of course, if your call is encrypted, it’s a different story, but I think only Skype uses encryption on their VOIP system – don’t know that, though.

    That’s why this has got to be automated – an individual running something like this should be able to determine whether or not an IP address is domestic or not. An automated system wouldn’t know & wouldn’t care (unless some kind of filter was built into it).

  • It’s just another example of the incremental criminality that this admin espouses.

    First, it was: We get warrants for all wiretaps, we value the Constitution.

    Then they said: We have a secret program to wiretap without warrants, but its limited to those with al-Qaeda ties and with one party overseas.

    Tomorrow it will be: There were some calls we monitored that were domestic but they were made between suspected terrorists within this country.

    Next week: Yes, there was some monitoring of citizens with no ties to al-Qaeda, but we believed they may have been unknowingly aiding and abetting the enemy or otherwise engaged in unrelated criminal activity.

    Next month: Sure, there was some monitoring of people we felt were politically harmful to this country and this administration, but the Democrats hate America. We need to know what they’re saying and what they’re planning.

    And the beat goes on…dun da dun da dun dun.

  • Maybe I was incorrect.
    http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1102120.1102133

    “Our results demonstrate that (1) tracking anonymous peer-to-peer VoIP calls on the Internet is feasible and (2) low latency anonymizing networks are susceptible to timing attacks. ”

    Looks like they can track VOIP. I like the names of the authors of the paper best:
    Xinyuan Wang George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
    Shiping Chen George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
    Sushil Jajodia George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

    Looks like two Chinese and a Japanese computer scientist at an American University. I wonder if the NSA knows these guys. I wonder how big their files are over at the FBI?

  • “If this were a dictatorship, it would be easy, as long as I’m the dictator” he said.

    “It’s hard work. It’s hard work” he said

    “Bush’s authorization lasts just days or weeks, and requires only the approval of a shift supervisor. Hayden said getting retroactive court approval is inefficient because it “involves marshaling arguments” and “looping paperwork around.” They said.

    So illegal wiretaps are, what, just a way of making Bush’s job easier?

    What next? Postpone federal elections until the ‘people are safe’?

    O’l Ben was right, we deserve neither our rights nor our security.

  • Bush states that these calls are not intercepted within the country. Does he mean the calls are only intercepted by listening posts ouside the country? I assume he was trying to say that no totally within the US calls were intercepted, except by accident. He’s more confusing than the phone companies explanations of services.

  • When you’re tapping so many phone calls it’s impossible to keep track of who’s international and who’s domestic.

    Can’t you just trust John Negroponte and stop asking so many questions?

  • A few things occurred to me as I read the NYT story about domestic calls being “accidentally” monitored.

    1. Only speculation, but I can’t escape the feeling that NSA are admitting to a small portion of the actual magnitude of domestic surveillance because it was going to be impossible to maintain the fiction that no domestic surveillance was occuring. This “admission” seems to have been done preemptively.

    2. I find it hard to believe the government intelligence agencies can’t determine whether a call originates or terminates domestically. I have read of many examples of how the government works closely with telecoms and software vendors to make various technologies traceable and possible to monitor via backdoors. Not just communications technology but even printers and xerox machines (supposedly to be able to trace counterfeiters). I do leave open the possibility however of human error. With that in mind…

    3. Even if I am persuaded that the agency can’t always know for sure whether the call is domestic or international, am I to now understand that the call is being monitored, not on the basis of who the person is and whether there is probable cause (or “reasonable basis” according to the secret program’s standard), but rather on the basis of the call’s location? Either you know the people are up to something, or you’re just fishing, it seems to me.

    3b. Or am I to understand and believe that even if the call is between two known terrorists but both happen to be in the U.S., that these agencies will suddenly feel that following the normal rules is more important than getting the terrorists, and not monitor them?

    The NSA’s story has quite a few holes in it if you ask me.

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