If the National Security Agency says that it is not “intentionally” doing something—say, collecting records of the locations of Americans’ cell phones—then it is almost certainly taking that very action.
If it says it is doing so “incidentally,” it’s probably doing so on a large scale. If it adds that said effort does not “target” Americans or isn’t “directed” at them, that means it doesn’t believe those Americans—or Congress, or the courts—should mind, because the N.S.A. analyst who entered a search term or tapped into a mobile-network cable had first closed his eyes and thought about terrorists.
And if the director of the agency, General Keith Alexander, says in testimony before the Senate that “the N.S.A. does not collect locational information under section 215 of the Patriot Act,” it does collect it, just maybe under a different section, or with no real authority at all.
If General Alexander then says, after Senator Ted Cruz asks him to clear up the “suggestion” in an earlier hearing that there might be something Americans weren’t being told about location-data collection, that the N.S.A. had simply “in 2010 and 2011 received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format, but that data was not used for any other purposes and was never used for intelligence analysis purposes”—that it might be a “future requirement,” but “not right now”—it means, as the Washington Post reported Tuesday, that it right now receives five billion location records a day, a great many of them involving Americans, and stores them in a repository called Fascia (not the most reassuring code name the N.S.A. has ever come up with) and applies its “most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER” to, the Post says, “allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.”
The intelligence agencies get to keep secrets, and even look at ours, within a framework of trust. That framework has been absurdly abused, to the point where it would be helpful if intelligence officials wore little lights that turned on when they switched from plain English to the language that sounds like it but in which the words mean different things. Or they could at least let us see the glossary they’ve been busy writing in their secret courts.
Photograph by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call.
Read more of our coverage of government surveillance programs.
