{"id":6268,"date":"2006-01-06T12:47:24","date_gmt":"2006-01-06T17:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6268"},"modified":"2006-01-06T12:47:24","modified_gmt":"2006-01-06T17:47:24","slug":"nsa-responds-to-amanpour-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/nsa-responds-to-amanpour-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"NSA responds to Amanpour questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

I guess the questions surrounding the Christiane Amanpour controversy<\/a> grew intense enough to compel the National Security Agency to respond. According to what the agency told CNN, nothing happened<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That sounds pretty categorical. If Amanpour communications were inadvertently picked up, the administration was required by law to destroy the information.<\/p>\n

Except, as Matt Yglesias noted<\/a>, unambiguous legal restrictions don’t mean quite as much as they used to.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> and the Bush administration thought that was great. The issue is whether the NSA was monitoring journalists, not whether the NSA was legally<\/i> monitoring journalists. Plenty of illegal stuff is going down nowadays.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The ball is now in Andrea Mitchell’s and NBC’s court. Something<\/i> led them to believe there’s a story surrounding Amanpour and administration surveillance. What was it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}