Untitled Document
May 2 issue - The National Security Agency is not supposed to target Americans;
when a U.S. citizen's name comes up in an NSA "intercept," the agency
routinely minimizes dissemination of the info by masking the name before it distributes
the report to other U.S. agencies. But it's now clear the agency disseminates
thousands of U.S. names. U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton told a Senate confirmation
hearing he had requested that U.S. names be unmasked from NSA intercepts on a
handful of occasions; the State Department said he had made 10 such requests since
2001, and that the department as a whole had made 400 similar requests over the
same period. But evidence is emerging that NSA regularly supplies uncensored intercepts,
including named Americans, to other agencies far more often than even many top
intel officials knew.
According to information obtained by NEWSWEEK, since January 2004 NSA received-and
fulfilled-between 3,000 and 3, 500 requests from other agencies to supply the
names of U.S. citizens and officials (and citizens of other countries that help
NSA eavesdrop around the world, including Britain, Canada and Australia) that
initially were deleted from raw intercept reports. Sources say the number of
names disclosed by NSA to other agencies during this period is more than 10,000. About one third of
such disclosures were made to officials at the policymaking level; most of the
rest were disclosed to other intel agencies and, perhaps surprisingly, only
a small proportion to law-enforcement agencies. Civil libertarians expressed
dismay at the numbers. An official familiar with NSA procedures insisted the
agency maintains careful logs of all requests for U.S. names and doles out such
info only after agency officials are satisfied "that the requester needs
the information [and that it's] necessary to understand the foreign intelligence
or assess its importance."
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