ACLU Says Recent NSA Spying Allegations
Bolster its Lawsuit Against FISA Bill
"NSA was targeting relief workers and journalists,
including U.S. persons, without cause"
By Kim Zetter
Wired.com, October 14, 2008
go to original 
See Article III.5 Corrupting
the FISA Courts
| |
Adrienne Kinne: former Army reservist
and Arabic linguist at Ft. Gordon, told Threat
Level last year that her group received a
waiver that allowed them to listen to and
report on calls involving Americans and U.S.
allies.
Source: Un
|
The American Civil Liberties Union says that recent
allegations that the National Security Agency eavesdropped
on communications of U.S. aid workers and journalists
based in the Middle East will help bolster a lawsuit
challenging the constitutionality of amendments to
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which were
passed earlier this year.
Two Arabic linguists who worked at an NSA listening
post at Ft. Gordon, Georgia, have alleged that the
NSA systematically targeted U.S. aid workers and journalists
in the Middle East for eavesdropping. The linguists
say the calls were personal in nature and not terrorist-
or military-related.
Adrienne Kinne, a former Army reservist and Arabic
linguist at Ft. Gordon, told Threat Level last year
that her group intercepted satellite communications
of businessmen, aid workers and journalists in the
Middle East and that they had received a waiver that
allowed them to listen to and report on calls involving
Americans and U.S. allies, including calls they made
to other Americans in the U.S. Kinne's account appears
in a new book published this week by NSA expert James
Bamford, called Shadow Factory, and were the focus
of an ABC news report last week.
Under guidelines of the United States Signals Intelligence
Directive 18, also known as USSID 18, the NSA must
not target U.S. persons for interception except under
special circumstances and, if such communications
are intercepted incidentally, NSA monitors must stop
listening to the call once they realize the party
is a U.S. person and must not keep a recording of
the call or disseminate a report on its contents.
Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, an Arabic linguist
with the Navy who was also at Ft. Gordon, said they'd
been told that USSID 18 didn't apply and that they
were allowed to listen to conversations of U.S. persons
and report on them. The linguists said they monitored
conversations among callers in the Middle East and
among U.S. persons based in the Middle East and their
family members back home.
Melissa Goodman, staff attorney in the ACLU's National
Security Program, said the allegations confirmed that
despite the government's repeated assertions that
after September 11 it targeted only suspected terrorists
for surveillance, the NSA was targeting relief workers
and journalists, including U.S. persons, without cause.
Goodman added that the allegations underscore the
need for transparency and proper oversight of surveillance
programs to ensure that abuses don't occur, which
is the basis for a lawsuit her organization filed
earlier this year.
"Whenever you have a law or program that gives
the NSA the power to conduct this kind of surveillance
where there is not sufficient checks and balances,
the targeting of innocent Americans is always a possibility,"
she said. "If these allegations are true, it
suggests that whatever safeguards were in place were
ineffective or were being ignored. There needs to
be oversight to ensure that the NSA isn't running
rampant and engaging in mass surveillance of Americans."
The ACLU filed a suit in the Southern District of
New York in July challenging the FISA Amendments Act
of 2008, which legalized secret warrantless wiretapping
that the government had been conducting since 2001
and granted the President and the NSA broader surveillance
powers.
The ACLU is challenging the law on constitutional
grounds, saying it violates the Fourth Amendment by
allowing the government to conduct untargeted, dragnet
surveillance regardless of whether the person or entity
being targeted is suspected of wrongdoing. The ACLU
says the new law also removes effective oversight
by not requiring the government to tell a court who
it's targeting for surveillance. (The Electronic Frontier
Foundation filed another suit challenging provisions
in the Act that granted immunity to telecommunications
companies that cooperated with the NSA in conducting
warrantless surveillance.).
The ACLU filed its suit on behalf of a coalition
of human rights groups, journalists and attorneys
who regularly communicate with sources and clients
in the Middle East.
The ACLU unsuccessfully sued the NSA in another case
filed in 2006.
In January 2006, shortly after the New York Times
broke the story about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping
and the government's Terrorist Surveillance Program,
the ACLU sued the NSA on grounds that the surveillance
violated the First and Fourth Amendments. Eight other
plaintiffs joined the suit to stop the surveillance
on grounds that it violated their free speech and
privacy rights. Those plaintiffs included the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Greenpeace,
the Council on American-Islamic Relations, writer
Christopher Hitchens (Hitchens is a contributing editor
for Wired's sister publication Vanity Fair), and James
Bamford.
Although a federal appeals court judge declared that
the NSA surveillance program was illegal, the appeals
court panel ruled in July 2007 that the plaintiffs
didn't have standing to sue the NSA because they couldn't
prove they'd been spied on by the agency. The ACLU
petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case, but
the Court declined.
Senate intelligence committee chair Jay Rockefeller
(D-W.Va.) has ordered his staff to open a probe into
the surveillance abuses alleged by the two Arabic
linguists, Kinne and Faulk. The Senate Judiciary Committee
has also announced it wanted a full investigation
of the allegations. The Senate Judiciary Committee
has known about Kinne's allegations for more than
a year.
Last year, Kinne provided an account of her allegations
to the staff of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), which
passed them to the Senate Judiciary Committee, of
which Leahy is chairman. The Judiciary Committee in
turn passed the allegations to the Department of Defense
Inspector General's office, which passed them to the
Inspector General of the NSA. Kinne was never interviewed
by the inspector general offices about her allegations.
Last week the NSA released a statement saying that
“Some of these allegations have been investigated
and found to be unsubstantiated; others are in the
investigation process.”
House Intelligence Committee chair Silvestre Reyes
(D-Tx.) has also sent an inquiry to the NSA asking
about the allegations. The NSA had contacted Reyes'
office prior to the publication of ABC's story last
Thursday to let him know that the story would be coming
out.
