NSA monitored personal conversations of innocent Americans

Oct. 9- National Security Agency (NSA) officials have intercepted,
listened to and passed around the phone calls of hundreds of innocent
U.S. citizens working overseas, according to an ABC News report out
today. The new information shows the government has misled the American
public about the scope of its surveillance activities, according to the
American Civil Liberties Union.

"The NSA used its surveillance powers to intentionally collect the
personal communications of innocent Americans, including service members
and humanitarian aid workers," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU
National Security Project. "Today's report is an indictment not only of
the Bush administration, but of all of those political leaders,
Democratic and Republican, who have been saying that the executive
branch can be trusted with surveillance powers that are essentially
unchecked."

In the ABC report, two former military intercept officers who worked at
the NSA charge that the government spying agency listened in on calls to
the United States made by soldiers, journalists and human rights workers
working in the Middle East, even after it was clear that the calls were
not in any way related to national security. The NSA officials regularly
passed around salacious calls such as the private "phone sex" calls of
military officers calling home, according to the report.

The new information seems to contradict the statements of Bush
administration officials who assured the public that the NSA's
surveillance activities were directed at suspected terrorists.

"The American public is led to believe that the NSA is eavesdropping on
calls where one party is a member of al Qaeda, but in reality the NSA is
monitoring and collecting the personal communications of innocent
Americans," said James Bamford, who first interviewed the former
intercept officers for his book, "The Shadow Factory," due out next
week. "What's worse, once a telephone number or e-mail address gets
picked up, it stays in the system. Every communication from the number
or address is picked up, monitored and stored permanently."

The ABC report suggests that the surveillance program was ineffective
and even harmful to national security because it diverted surveillance
resources from actual threats. By collecting so much information about
innocent people, said one of the former officers, the NSA was actually
"hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security." The
report also raises troubling concerns that the NSA was listening in on
the calls of aid workers at organizations including the International
Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.

"What's tragic is that Congress recently enacted a law giving the NSA
even more authority to collect our telephone calls and e-mails - in
fact, more authority than the agency has ever had before," said Melissa
Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "Rather
than reining in NSA lawbreaking and abuse, Congress has given the NSA
carte blanche to conduct dragnet, suspicionless monitoring of all our
international communications - precisely the kind of invasive and
ineffective monitoring described by whistleblowers in the ABC story."

In 2005, the New York Times reported that President Bush had repeatedly
authorized the NSA to monitor the phone calls and e-mails of innocent
Americans, without a warrant and in violation of the Constitution. The
ACLU won an initial legal challenge to the program in August 2006, but
in July 2007 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case,
ruling the plaintiffs in the case - which included scholars and national
nonprofit organizations, as well as Bamford and other journalists - had
no standing to sue because they could not state with certainty that they
had been wiretapped by the NSA. In February 2008, the Supreme Court
denied to hear the ACLU's appeal of the case.

In July 2008, Congress enacted the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, giving
the NSA even more power to spy on Americans without warrants than it
exercised under its illegal surveillance program. The ACLU filed a
landmark lawsuit to stop the government from conducting surveillance
under the new wiretapping law, arguing that the law violates the Fourth
Amendment by giving the government virtually unchecked power to
intercept Americans' international e-mails and telephone calls. The case
was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights,
labor, legal and media organizations.

"This is exactly what we warned Congress would happen when it was
debating the FISA Amendments Act," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director
of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "The fact that NSA employees
treat the most personal communications of our troops and overseas
civilians as break room entertainment is shocking. This kind of
untenable spying power should never have been granted. Congressional
leadership is obligated to revisit this statute and fix its mistake."

Source: ACLU