NSA eavesdropping wider than White House admitted-NYT report
NEW YORK, Dec 24 (Reuters) The volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet communications by the National Security Agency without court-approved warrants was much larger than the White House has acknowledged, The New York
Times reported on Saturday. Citing current and former government officials, the Times said the information was collected by tapping directly into some of the U.S. telecommunication system's main arteries. The officials said the NSA won the cooperation of telecommunications companies to obtain access to both domestic and international communications without first gaining warrants.
A former telecommunications technology manager told the
Times that industry leaders have been storing information on
calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid
in tracking possible terrorists since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Government and industry officials with knowledge of the
program told the newspaper the NSA sought to analyze
communications patterns to gather clues from details like who
is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of
day it is made, as well as the origins and destinations of
phone calls and e-mail messages.
Calls to and from Afghanistan were of particular interest
to the NSA, the Times said. This so-called "pattern analysis"
on calls within the United States would often otherwise require
a warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.
U.S. President George W. Bush and his aides have said his
executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was
limited to monitoring international phone and e-mail
communications linked to people with connections to al-Qaeda.
What has not been acknowledged, according to the Times, is that
NSA technicians combed large amounts of phone and Internet
traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism suspects.
Some officials described the program as a large data mining
operation, the Times said, and described it as much larger than
the White House has acknowledged.
Several officials said senior government officials went to
the nation's big telecommunications companies to get access to
switches that act as gateways between U.S. and international
communications.
Many calls going from one foreign country to another are
routed through U.S. switches and a communications expert who
once worked at the NSA said in recent years government
officials have been encouraging the telecommunications industry
to bring more international traffic through U.S.-based
switches.
The officials who spoke to the newspaper requested
anonymity because the program's details remain classified. Bush
administration officials declined to comment on the operation's
technical details, the Times said.