NSA Gave Up Names of Americans Wiretapped to John Bolton

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NSA Gave Up Names of Americans Wiretapped to Ex-State Dept. Official
Written by Jason Leopold
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 08:53

By Jason Leopold

Three years ago, John Bolton, the former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, told Congress that he had asked the NSA to reveal to him the identities of 19 American citizens who were caught up in 10 of the NSA's raw intelligence reports since 9/11.

By law, the agency is prohibited from spying Americans and if the NSA intercepts the names of Americans in the course of a wiretap, the agency is supposed to black out the names prior to distributing its reports to other agencies. But the NSA did not second guess Bolton's requests and willingly turned over the identities of U.S. citizens caught up in the wiretaps.

The NSA, based in Fort Meade, Maryland, operates under the Department of Defense. It distributes analysis summaries of its intelligence-gathering to a certain number of senior US officials, but it is prohibited from sharing its raw data - transcripts from wiretaps - with anyone. The raw data is prized by intelligence analysts because it provides additional context and more leads than the watered-down summaries.

But it turned out that Bolton, who was nominated by George W. Bush to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about his requests to the NSA, was just one of many government officials who learned the identities of Americans caught in NSA intercepts in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, by 2006 the State Department had asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American citizens 500 times since May 2001.

The NSA also disclosed to senior White House officials and other policymakers at federal agencies the names of as many as 10,000 American citizens the agency obtained while purportedly eavesdropping on foreigners. The Americans weren't involved in any sort of terrorist activity, nor did they pose any sort of threat to national security, but had simply been named while the NSA was conducting wiretaps.

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http://www.pubrecord.org/nationworld/1013-nsa-gave-up-names-of-americans-wiretapped-to-ex-state-dept-official.html