The whole time I was living in Atlanta and working at CNN, I had no idea these big surveillance operations were just up the road in Fort Gordon, GA, near Augusta.
Kind of brings it all home. There are both scary and funny bits in these two stories above. I'll try to keep them separate, but bring out the details that jumped out at me.
The whole time, I thought there was a chance what they were really doing was voyeuristic, and I used to voice that to folks around the newsroom, just in passing. People pooh-poohed me, saying "Oh, they have WAY too much data to be getting off on listening to people's private and intimate stuff! It's just computer-scanned for keywords like "bomb" or "jihad"
Uh, yeah, right.
First, from the ABC News report, by way of Americablog (and I'm listening to Rachel Maddow talk about the same thing right now too): (emphasis below comes from Americablog)
But as humorously pathetic as a bunch of drooling, giggling eavesdroppers is, Wired has the scarier stuff on 27-B-Stroke-6, with some deeper research going back before the ABC story broke. There's some real red meat below regarding official procedures BEFORE 9/11, to contrast what happened AFTER it. Those are the details I hold on to most tightly (emphasis below is mine).
A top secret NSA wiretapping facility in Georgia accused of spying
on Americans illegally was hastily staffed with inexperienced
reservists in the months following September 11, where they worked
under conflicting orders and with little supervision, according to
three former workers at the spy complex.
"Nobody knew exactly what the heck we were doing," said a former
translator for the project, code named Highlander, who spoke on
condition of anonymity. "We were figuring out the rules as we were
going along."
Former Army Reserve linguist Adrienne Kinne, who worked at the
facility at Fort Gordon, won new attention this week for her year-old
claim that she intercepted and transcribed satellite phone calls of
American civilians in the Middle East for the National Security Agency.
Senate intelligence committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) opened a
probe into the alleged abuses after ABC News reported on them Thursday.
Threat Level spoke with Kinne extensively last year about the
alleged systematic surveillance of Americans and others operating in
the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks. She provided a number of
details about some of the calls and how the operation was conducted.
Aid workers and journalists were specifically targeted in the
program, and their phone numbers were added to a "priority list", Kinne
said last year. Among those under surveillance were workers from
nongovernmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, the
International Committee of the Red Cross, and the United Nations
Developing Countries Program, as well as journalists staying in Baghdad
at the time of the Iraq invasion. The intercepted calls included
conversations among American, British, Australian and other civilian
foreign nationals in the Middle East, as well as conversations between
aid workers and journalists in the Middle East and their family members
in the United States.
"If it was happening then I'm sure it's happening now, and who knows
on what scale," Kinne said. "That's the thing that really bothers me."
But at the time we were unable to confirm her account of the spying.
Two coworkers of Kinne's, who spoke with Threat Level on condition of
anonymity, conceded that the group operated under ambiguous rules and
with poor supervision, but insisted no deliberate eavesdropping on
Americans occurred.
Now a second former Arabic linguist with the Navy has corroborated
her claims to ABC, and to NSA expert James Bamford, who includes the
story in his upcoming book Shadow Factory.
If the allegations are true, it would seem to indicate that
warrantless spying of Americans approved by President Bush following
9/11 expanded rapidly beyond U.S. borders to citizens overseas,
notwithstanding United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, or USSID 18 -- an NSA rule that bars overseas surveillance of Americans without authorization and probable cause.
[...]
Kinne, who is 31, served in the U.S. Army Reserves as a sergeant and an
Arabic linguist from October 2001 to August 2003 at a U.S. Army Signal
Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia, which operated as a listening post for
the National Security Agency. Kinne had served active duty in the U.S.
Army as an intelligence linguist with a top secret SCI security
clearance from 1994 to 1998, and was in the reserves on September 11,
2001.
[...]
At first, Kinne didn't think they were doing anything wrong because in
mid-2002, several months after the surveillance began, a supervisor
told her group of linguists and analysts that they had received a
"waiver" that allowed them to intercept and listen to the conversations
of Americans. The waiver also gave them permission to spy on British,
Canadian and Australian citizens Kinne said.
Under federal law, such a waiver would usually require special national
security circumstances –- such as an imminent threat of death or
attack. But Kinne said the people whose conversations she targeted
didn't discuss information of a military or terrorist nature, and the
interceptions occurred over the entire Middle East –- not just in war
zones. The surveillance was still going on when Kinne left active
reserve duty in August 2003.
Kinne's mission at Fort Gordon, which was given the name Highlander,
intercepted only communication sent through satellite phones, which
included faxes. This represented a change from her active duty in the
1990s when her group had intercepted only live radio transmissions
involving military targets in the Middle East. The operation that began
in 2001 involved region-wide interceptions, which meant that satellite
calls of businessmen, journalists and other civilians were sometimes
vacuumed up with everything else.
Generally, when incidental interception of Americans occurs, there are
procedures for handling the intercepts. Under USSID 18, recordings of
such calls are supposed to be abandoned and destroyed when a U.S.
citizen is identified. The only exceptions to this rule are when the
attorney general affirms that the surveillance target is believed to be
an agent of a foreign power, or the purpose of the collection is to
acquire "significant foreign intelligence information."
Kinne's description of the interceptions, however, indicated that
U.S. aid workers and journalists were routinely targeted without cause.
To illustrate that contrast, Kinne recalled a conversation intercepted
by her army intelligence unit in 1997, in which one of the parties to
the call mentioned the name of a U.S. politician who was coming to the
Middle East for a visit. Under USSID 18, the names of members of the
U.S. legislative branch cannot appear in intelligence reports without
special authorization, and Kinne said her group deleted every record
they collected that mentioned the politician's name.
William Weaver, who worked in the U.S. Army signals intelligence for
eight years in Berlin and Augsberg, Germany, concurred with her
assessment of how seriously USSID 18 was regarded.
"The way USSID 18 was treated by us was that it came down from God and
was sacrosanct," said Weaver, who is now an assistant professor of
political science at the University of Texas, El Paso. "We were told at
training and many times after that, that if you violated USSID 18 you
could spend the rest of your life in prison. The mindset was that you
do not intercept U.S. citizens. And the minute you recognized that you
intercepted, you immediately reported up the chain of command."
[...]
For the first couple of months Kinne and her colleagues didn't know the
identity of the people connected to the phone numbers they monitored.
"At that point in time, we were just given numbers and we ... were
still sorting out who belonged to what," she said. "That's why we
initially started collecting Americans and other nationals because we
didn't know whose number belonged to whom."
Once they identified speakers, they typed the person's name or
organization into the system, so that when a conversation involving
that number was intercepted again, the name appeared on their computer
screen. Although the system allowed them to block phone numbers
identified as belonging to a nongovernmental organization or
journalist, they never did so. Instead, she said, they added the
numbers of humanitarian aid organizations and journalists to a priority
list.
"They were 'priority five,' from what I remember," she said. "'Priority
one' was terrorist organizations. 'Priority five' is middle of the
road. 'Priority nine' was just unidentified numbers. Not only were we
given the ability to listen to [NGOs and journalists], but it was
programmed into our system to listen to them."
[...]
They wrote a report on each call, except those made to parties in the
U.S. Kinne said they were just instructed to listen to those calls. She
later said in another conversation that some people in her group did
write reports involving conversations of Americans and Australians, but
didn't reference the nationality of the speaker in their report.
"Americans 'in-country' were fair game as long as you didn't identify
them as American," she said. "People wrote reports on what journalists
said all the time."
[...]
For example, Kinne was reprimanded for listening to one call when
she should have been focused on a fax that her unit intercepted
purporting to identify the location of weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq.
The fax arrived in the middle of the night, around the time of the Iraq
invasion Kinne was monitoring a call involving two English-speaking
humanitarian aid workers who were in a vehicle frantically trying to
reach their office to find cover before bombs began raining on the city.
"I just remember they were ... calling in their position [to their
colleagues] every 10 to 15 minutes or so because they were worried
about their safety," she said.
Kinne filed several reports about the aid workers and gave their
location to her supervisor, believing that U.S. military personnel
might help the aid workers, or at least refrain from shooting their
vehicle. But while she was monitoring the workers, a fax arrived,
several pages long and written in Arabic. Even though the fax was from
a phone number with a higher priority, Kinne ignored it because she
felt the lives of the aid workers were more important.
When another worker later read the fax and realized its
significance, all of the workers were instructed to drop everything to
translate it. Kinne said the fax purported to describe the location of
chemical, biological and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
As soon as her group completed the translation, she said it was sent to
the White House -– the only time information was sent directly in this
manner.
After the information was on its way, Kinne looked at the source of the
document and began to doubt its authenticity. She said it came from the
Iraqi National Congress or Iraqi National Accord -- she couldn't
remember which.
Kinne said she expressed doubts to her commanding officer, John Berry,
about the authenticity of the information and was told that her job was
to collect the information, not analyze it. "He said I didn't care
about our mission or our country ... and I needed to stop asking
questions," she said.
Kinne was written up in an incident report for having ignored the fax when it came in.
When she later read news reports confirming that an Iraqi group had fed
the military intelligence false information, she suspected the fax had
been deliberately sent through an open satellite network so that her
unit would intercept it and give it to the White House.
The only other conversations Kinne recalled with any detail involved
journalists staying at a hotel in Baghdad around the time of the U.S.
invasion. The journalists revealed their location in calls to U.S.
family members. Kinne said she'd been monitoring the conversations of
journalists at the hotel for a while, when the name of the hotel
appeared on a military list of targets for bombing. Kinne said she
brought the information to Berry's attention.
"I told him, you realize there are journalists staying in that hotel
and we have just said that we are going to bomb it," she said. "I
assumed that ... whoever made the targeting list didn't know
journalists were staying there."
She didn't know if the information was passed on to anyone, but in
April 2003, a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine hotel, which was serving
as a base for many journalists. Two journalists were killed. Two
subsequent investigations by the army and the Committee to Protect
Journalists concluded that the gunners had never been told journalists
were at the hotel.
Two fellow linguists who had worked with Kinne at Fort Gordon
disputed Kinne's story of illegal surveillance. They asked to remain
anonymous because they were violating orders to not discuss their work
at Fort Gordon.
Both linguists said they never violated USSID 18 and had never heard
about a waiver, which one of them called implausible. They said USSID
18 was drummed into their heads and was posted everywhere at work as a
constant reminder.
[...]
The other translator noted that Kinne had conflicts with a number of
people she worked with -- particularly her supervisor Berry -- and had
a negative view of their team and its mission, which may have affected
her perception of the operation. They described Berry as a problematic
and hostile manager who didn't seem to know what he was doing. Adding
to this was a pervasive sense of confusion around their mission, which
was set up quickly on the fly and being run by reservists who had no
experience intercepting phone calls.
The unit was overworked, understaffed and undertrained. They didn't
have a standard of operation, or SOP, when they started the mission and
had to cobble one together from other SOPs. Many conversations they had
to translate were in dialects unfamiliar to them or languages, such as
Pashtu, in which they had no proficiency.
[...]
It's worth noting that Kinne began speaking about her surveillance
activities only after becoming an anti-war activist, and working with
groups calling for the impeachment of President Bush.
When Threat Level spoke with her last year, she was working as a
research assistant for the Veterans Administration in Vermont and was
becoming increasingly active politically. She had worked on
get-out-the-vote campaigns for Moveon.org in November 2006, and in
January 2007 began meeting with members of Iraq Veterans Against the
War. She participated in a rally and a sit-in at the Vermont state
house and went on a bus tour with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan
calling for the impeachment of President Bush.
Kinne said that after the White House announced a troop escalation
in Iraq, she became very angry that the 2006 mid-term elections and
subsequent changes in Congress hadn't led to pressure on the
Administration to pull out of Iraq.
But it wasn't until details of the government's illegal domestic spying
operation on Americans were revealed in late 2005, that she had reason
to ponder her surveillance work, she said. Even then, her realization
came slowly.
"I never really thought about how what we did related to [those news
reports]," she said. "It took me quite a while to put the pieces
together. I just figured we were one mission, and I never thought that
probably military intelligence groups across the country were all being
given waivers to listen to whomever they wanted."
It was another year and a half after the New York Times
broke the story on the domestic surveillance program before Kinne
uttered her first public words about the surveillance she had conducted
on behalf of the NSA.
"I still felt like it was all classified and I wasn't supposed to talk
about it," she said. "But the more I got involved in things, the more I
started getting really angry that people in government were not telling
the truth and that people who know what's going on [are] not speaking
out. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I should
tell people what I knew and hopefully that would encourage other people
to say what they know."
She said she just wanted to pass the information to others who could
determine whether the army and administration broke the law. To that
end, she had submitted her allegations to Sen. Patrick Leahy's office
(D-Vermont) in the hope that his staff would look into the matter to
determine if laws had been broken. Leahy's staff sent her an e-mail
indicating that they sent her letter to the Department of Defense
Inspector General. But Kinne never heard anything after that.
Given her political activities and the delay in reporting the alleged
abuse, the denials of her peers and the lack of corroborating evidence,
Threat Level elected not to publish her claims last year. But in his
upcoming book, The Shadow Factory,
journalist James Bamford -- the leading civilian expert on the NSA --
reports that he confirmed the illegal surveillance with another
linguist named David Murfee Faulk, who worked on the program through
the Navy. One of Faulk's coworkers -- not Kinne -- asked a supervisor
about USSID 18, and was ordered to disregard the directive, Bamford
reports.
[...]
Sins
of the Father aired last night on CNN. SOTF detailed the abuse HLN
anchor Thomas Roberts was subjected to by a Catholic priest. Yesterday
Roberts wrote 
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