NSA responds to Amanpour questions

January 6, 2006

I guess the questions surrounding the Christiane Amanpour controversy grew intense enough to compel the National Security Agency to respond. According to what the agency told CNN, nothing happened.

A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Thursday that the National Security Agency did not target CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour or any other CNN journalist for surveillance.

The senior official said that from time to time NSA surveillance overseas “inadvertently” acquires recordings or copies of communications involving Americans — or what the government calls “U.S. persons,” which includes most U.S. residents and employees of American companies. By law, however, such materials are required to be erased or destroyed immediately, the official said.

That sounds pretty categorical. If Amanpour communications were inadvertently picked up, the administration was required by law to destroy the information.

Except, as Matt Yglesias noted, unambiguous legal restrictions don’t mean quite as much as they used to.

Yes, we do know that the NSA “by law” is supposed to eliminate unintentional surveillance of “US persons.” The reason we all know that is that there was recently a big story about how the NSA was doing a whole bunch of illegal surveillance and the Bush administration thought that was great. The issue is whether the NSA was monitoring journalists, not whether the NSA was legally monitoring journalists. Plenty of illegal stuff is going down nowadays.

The ball is now in Andrea Mitchell’s and NBC’s court. Something led them to believe there’s a story surrounding Amanpour and administration surveillance. What was it?

Wow, I can’t believe the NSA denied it. I mean, I honestly believed they’d come out and incriminate themselves.

Also, I love how they used the word ‘target.’ They don’t even say they didn’t spy on her, just that she wasn’t the goal. Nice.

And they ‘it’s against the law so we didn’t do it’ defense is the weakest I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait until that’s used in a murder trial. ‘No your honor, I didn’t kill him. That would be illegal.’

Bah, what a bunch of hacks.

  • What a bunch of crap. All they “deny” is that they set out to spy in Amanpour. Well, since they don’t have to request ahead of time under Bush’s “interpretation” of the law, they could retroactively say that about ANYBODY—there is no record to state otherwise! And they only need admit it if the target confronts them. No warrant, no transcript, and no tapes, all essentially leaves them free to “listen” at will? What the fuck?

    That can easily evolve into, “We didn’t MEAN to listen in on Senator Edwards and Senator Kerry’s conversation, it was inadvertant.” In plenty of instances, especially in political arenas, maintaining copies or tapes in unnecessary or even undesirable.

    I’m not even sure how much of a denial that statement is…”If we did tape her, we didn’t target her, and don’t worry, we wouldn’t keep the tapes anyway.”

    Even their excuse is inexcusable.

  • Spying on reports is the missing link in the Bush analogue to Nixon. This is the reason that this story has legs. However, for this very reason we must be very careful about our claims. If we are wrong on the Amanpour story the right will use it as an excuse not to take seriously any future evidence of such spying. Again I say hold our fire, do our homework, and let’s see what develops. Don’t go off half-cocked.

  • According to my friends who are Bush supporters, if the NSA is listening in on Americans, then those who have nothing to fear should have nothing to fear.

    Come comrade, join Fearless Leader and have nothing to fear.

  • On Tuesday I sent a question to Howard Kurtz’s online forum on the Washington Post’s website. I asked if he was aware of any journalists who are concerned that their communications are being monitored. Yesterday I sent a question to Post reporter Dana Priest, who broke the secret prison camps story, asking if she personally was concerned that her communications were being monitored. Neither one addressed the question.

  • If it is the case that the NSA is deliberately blanket spying on the media in order to track down terrorists, then I’m sure they would have intercepted the original leak to the Times about the warrantless spying, which they obviously haven’t…
    In which case, there is a staffer somewhere being transferred to a non-existent secret prison camp in North Africa as we speak, where s/he will be given rigorous spa treatments…since we don’t torture.

  • I am surprised NSA denied it – not that they would say they had – but considering how this administration ignore Congress and basically thinks it has the right to ignore those laws/rules it finds inconvenient, I have no confidence that if (stress the if) it was inadvertant than information was destroyed. This says more about the adminstration than the NSA bureaucrats – who I think are more than a trifel irked and who are the likely leakers of the whole NSA story.

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