[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 157 (Wednesday, November 6, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7871-S7873]
NSA OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, we are at a watershed moment in the history
of intelligence oversight, like nothing I have seen since the Church
Committee. Some of the recent revelations have led to important
national conversations about the scope of our Nation's intelligence
gathering powers here at home, and to renewed legislative efforts to
recalibrate those authorities and the related oversight regimes. The
USA FREEDOM Act that Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner and I introduced
last week along with more than 100 members of Congress does just that.
It is important, however, to acknowledge that some of the leaks have
led to needless risk to our national security and have threatened our
relationships with some of our most important international partners.
And all of this leads back to a 29-year-old contractor named Edward
Snowden.
Let me make clear once more that I do not condone the way any of
these highly classified programs were disclosed. I am deeply concerned
about the potential damage to our intelligence gathering capabilities,
foreign relationships, and national security.
I am also deeply concerned that one person could wreak this much
havoc in such a short period of time. Especially in the wake of the
Private Manning leaks, I do not understand how the National Security
Agency could have allowed this to happen.
This past weekend, Colbert King wrote in the Washington Post that
this damage was, in a sense, self-inflicted. I ask unanimous consent
that the King op-ed be printed in the Record. As Mr. King put it, ``I
want to know how Snowden got his hands on so much of the nation's most
sensitive intelligence and was able to flee the country, all within
three months.''
I want to know too. We need to hold people accountable for allowing
such a massive leak to occur and we need to change the way we do
business to ensure that we prevent this type of breach in the future.
In public and in private, I have continued to ask the leaders of the
intelligence community to tell me who is being held accountable and
what is being done to prevent this from happening again.
Without adequate answers to these questions, the American people are
rightly concerned that their private information could be swept up into
a massive database, and then compromised. The NSA has acknowledged that
it is collecting U.S. phone records on an unprecedented scale, and that
it is also collecting massive amounts of Internet content against
targets abroad, which also includes some communications of law-abiding
Americans. And yet the government asks us to trust that it will keep
this information safe, and that we should have faith in its internal
policies and procedures.
This plea comes from the same intelligence community that the FISA
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court found to have made substantial misrepresentations about the scope
of its collection; and the same intelligence community that allowed
Edward Snowden to steal such vast amounts of information.
And it comes from the same intelligence community whose inspector
general just wrote to tell me that he is unable at this time to conduct
a communitywide review of government activities conducted under section
215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act. I ask unanimous consent that the September 23, 2013,
letter from a bipartisan group of Senate Judiciary Committee members to
the inspector general of the intelligence community be printed in the
Record, as well as his November 5, 2013, response.
The intelligence community faces a trust deficit, and I am
particularly concerned that the NSA has strayed and overreached beyond
its core missions. One important step toward rebuilding that trust
would be for the NSA to spend less of its time collecting data on
innocent Americans, and more on keeping our Nation's secrets safe and
holding its own accountable.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will continue its work on these issues
in the next few weeks. On November 13, the Subcommittee on Privacy,
Technology, and the Law will hold a hearing on Senator Franken's
Surveillance Transparency Act, which I have cosponsored. And on
November 20, I have invited back to the committee Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Keith Alexander, and Deputy
Attorney General James Cole for another hearing to review the
intelligence community's surveillance authorities.
[From the Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2013]
Latest NSA Spying Revelations Distract From the Real Issues
(By Colbert I. King)
What's this about governments spying on their closest
allies?
We called it ``the bubble.'' It was a 12-by-15-foot
acoustic conference room made of clear plastic and aluminum.
There were at least five inches of space between the walls of
the bubble and the walls of the room in which it was located.
The bubble's plastic walls, ceiling and floor allowed visual
inspection for electronic listening devices, or ``bugs.''
As an extra security measure, a noise-generating machine
was installed in the outer room to prevent interception of
any discussions of classified information within the bubble.
The outer room was secured by a combination lock, the code
known only to my office.
The first U.S. ``bubble'' was installed after hidden
microphones were found in American diplomatic missions in
Moscow, Prague and elsewhere in the 1960s.
Our bubble, within a room on an upper floor of the U. S.
Embassy in Bad Godesberg, West Germany, was a countermeasure
against possible technical penetration by the Soviet KGB and
the East German Stasi. But Eastern Bloc countries weren't the
only concern.
Our bubble allowed classified discussions to occur beyond
the hearing of our host and ally, the-then Federal Republic
of Germany, and our friends down the road in the French and
British embassies.
That was nearly 50 years ago.
This year, in my current capacity, I was sitting in the
office of an ambassador in Washington when a member of his
staff alerted him to an important call. There was a phone on
the ambassador's desk. But he left the room to take the call.
It turns out that his prime minister was calling from
overseas. The ambassador went to a secure location in the
embassy where he could conduct a confidential conversation.
True, he was in the capital city of his nation's closest
ally. But the matter to be discussed was for the ears of his
countrymen only, U. S. friendship notwithstanding.
Today, as the United States has been doing for decades,
close allies in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere take
similar precautions even when their missions are in friendly
countries.
Gentlemen may know that it is bad form to read each other's
mail or to eavesdrop. But in diplomacy and national security,
the desire to know what another country is up to tends to
overwhelm any sense of rectitude.
Consequently, the European outrage over snooping among
friends may be slightly overdone. That is an entirely
separate matter from the National Security Agency's (NSA)
vacuum-cleanerlike collection of the communication records
and metadata of millions of Americans, including private
citizens and, apparently, foreign citizens both here and
overseas. The scope of that intelligence-collection program,
disputed by Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA,
this week is the cause of uproar around the country and in
Congress. There is still much to sort out and probably
reform.
The monitoring of foreign leaders' phone calls, however, is
closer to the larger deed of spying on allied governments.
Which takes us to an indelicate question: Why is a foreign
leader, a repository of a nation's secrets, communicating by
text messages and smartphone?
The most junior Foreign Service officer or government civil
servant entrusted with sensitive information assumes that e-
mails and cellphones are susceptible to eavesdropping. What
makes a head of state behave as if he or she is immune from
monitoring?
Which brings up another tactless question: Why haven't the
security services of those foreign leaders developed
countermeasures to prevent successful spying on personal
communications?
The danger here isn't simply that the NSA may have
overstepped its bounds with respect to U.S. allies. The
intelligence services of the foes of Germany, France, Spain,
Brazil and the like may have the capacity to listen in on
high-level conversations.
The naivete of outraged foreign leaders and their
vulnerability to spying are nearly--but not totally--as
surprising as the scale of NSA snooping.
The NSA revelations, meanwhile, should not draw attention
away from the revelations' primary source: Edward Joseph
Snowden.
How in the world is it possible that a high school dropout
with a GED, a community college student who didn't graduate,
a failed Army recruit and security guard can catapult himself
into a CIA information technology job, an overseas posting
and subsequently a $200,000-a-year job with a company
contracted to do NSA work in Hawaii, where he was able to
gain access to the crown jewels of America's secrets?
Whistleblower, traitor, patriot: Debate the labels all you
want. The government has charged him with espionage. Take it
up with Attorney General Eric Holder.
I want to know how Snowden got his hands on so much of the
nation's most sensitive intelligence and was able to flee the
country, all within three months.
Damage? Done by the U.S. government to itself.
____
U.S. Senate,
Committee on the Judiciary,
Washington, DC, September 23, 2013.
Hon. I. Charles McCullough III,
Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Office of
the Director of National Intelligence, Washington, DC.
Dear Inspector General McCullough: Recent disclosures about
classified government surveillance activities have generated
significant public discussion about the breadth of these
programs, many of which are conducted pursuant to the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the need for
appropriate oversight and checks and balances.
In particular, concerns have arisen about activities
conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and
Section 702 of FISA, which was enacted as part of the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008. Recently declassified documents
appear to reveal numerous violations of law and policy in the
implementation of these authorities, including what the FISA
Court characterized as three ``substantial
misrepresentation[s]'' to the Court. These declassified
documents also demonstrate that the implementation of these
authorities involves several components of the Intelligence
Community (IC), including the National Security Agency,
Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence, among others.
We urge you to conduct comprehensive reviews of these
authorities and provide a full accounting of how these
authorities are being implemented across the Intelligence
Community. The IC Inspector General was created in 2010 for
this very purpose. Comprehensive and independent reviews by
your office of the implementation of Sections 215 and 702
will fulfill a critical oversight role. Providing a publicly
available summary of the findings and conclusions of these
reviews will help promote greater oversight, transparency,
and public accountability.
In conducting such reviews, we encourage you to draw on the
excellent work already done by the Inspectors General of
several agencies, including the Department of Justice, in
reviewing these authorities. But only your office can bring
to bear an IC-wide perspective that is critical to effective
oversight of these programs. The reviews previously conducted
have been more narrowly focused--as might be expected--on a
specific agency.
In particular, we urge you to review for calendar years
2010 through 2013:
The use and implementation of Section 215 and
Section 702 authorities, including the manner in which
information--and in particular, information about U.S.
persons--is collected, retained, analyzed and disseminated;
applicable minimization procedures and other
relevant procedures and guidelines, including whether they
are consistent across agencies and the extent to which they
protect the privacy rights of U.S. persons;
any improper or illegal use of the authorities or
information collected pursuant to them; and
an examination of the effectiveness of the
authorities as investigative and intelligence tools.
We have urged appropriate oversight of these activities
long before the problems
[[Page S7873]]
with the implementation of these FISA authorities became
public. We believe it is important for your office to begin
this review without further delay.
Please proceed to administratively perform reviews of the
implementation of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and
Section 702 of FISA, and submit the reports no later than
December 31, 2014. Thank you in advance for your efforts to
ensure a full accounting of the implementation of these
surveillance authorities across the Intelligence Community.
Sincerely,
Patrick Leahy, Charles Schumer, Sheldon Whitehouse,
Christopher Coons, Richard Blumenthal, Chuck Grassley,
Ted Cruz, Michael S. Lee, Jeff Flake.
____
Inspector General of the Intelligence Community
Washington, DC, November 5, 2013.
Memorandum for: See distribution.
Subject: IC IG Review of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act
and Section 702 of FISA Authorities.
Thank you for your 23 September 2013 letter requesting that
my office review the Intelligence Community's (IC) use of
Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act authorities and Section
702 of FISA authorities.
At present, we are not resourced to conduct the requested
review within the requested timeframe. As you stated in your
letter, several IC inspectors general have oversight of the
IC's use of foreign electronic surveillance authorities.
While my office has the jurisdiction to conduct an IC-wide
review of all IC elements using these authorities, such a
review will implicate ongoing oversight efforts. Therefore, I
have been conferring with several IC Inspectors General Forum
members in order to consider how such a review might be
accomplished given the potential impact to IG resources and
ongoing projects. As my IG colleagues and I confer regarding
the possibility of conducting a joint review of the requested
topic, I will keep you and the committee staff informed.
Again, I thank you for your continued support of the IG
community. If you have any questions regarding this subject,
please contact me or my Legislative Counsel, Melissa Wright,
at 571-204-8149.
Sincerely,
I. Charles McCullough, III,
Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.
____________________
