America’s largest spy agency is charged with monitoring electronic communications. 5 things you need to know about NSA phone tracking

The revelation that the Obama administration is pursuing a massive surveillance program that tracks countless U.S. and international phone calls has brought privacy, spying and civil liberties right back into the spotlight.

But what exactly is the government doing? Why? What are they doing with the information? And what could come next, now that the public has seen one of the secret orders that the intelligence community uses to track Americans’ electronic activity?


Here are POLITICO’s five things you need to know about the phone-tracking story.

( PHOTOS: Pols, pundits weigh in on NSA report)

1. Just what is the Obama administration collecting?

The secret court order obtained by Britain’s Guardian newspaper calls it metadata — it’s a record of calls on the Verizon network made every day within the United States or from the United States to somewhere overseas. Privacy advocates and government critics suspect the U.S. intelligence agencies, led by the National Security Agency, have similar arrangements with the other major telecommunications providers, though they are still secret.

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that this has been going on since 2006. In fact, the order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was set up by Congress to authorize government eavesdropping, looks almost like a standard government form. It has blank fields officials can fill in each time they submit one. The one obtained by the Guardian this week took effect in April and expires July 19, according to the hand-written detail on the page. That’s when the government would have to go back to the court to ask for another authorization.

( Also on POLITICO: Holder faces Hill skeptics on Verizon program)

“This is nothing new,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) told reporters Thursday. “This has been going on for seven years … every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge, there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint.”

The court order does not authorize the NSA or the FBI to listen to the “substantive content of any communication” — in other words, to what people are saying — or gather “the name, address or financial information of a subscriber or customer.” But if the U.S. wants to spy on a specific person, it would likely ask for that separately.

2. Are they listening to our phone calls?

The NSA probably listens to many phone calls, monitors many emails and conducts other kinds of electronic surveillance, but the court order only refers to overall phone records. NSA and other federal agencies are supposed to get court approval before they listen in on actual phone calls, although the eavesdropping laws permit them to seek that approval even after they’ve begun listening.

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“In this particular case, what they’re doing is they’re tracking who talks to who and for how long,” said Dale Meyerrose, former chief information officer for the Director of National Intelligence from 2005-08 during the George W. Bush administration. “If they want to listen in to content, that’s a lot deeper and a lot more justification.”

Meyerrose, who said he wasn’t directly involved in intelligence-gathering during his time in office, said “collateral” information about phone calls that aren’t germane to the investigation would be purged.

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“If the NSA followed the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court order — which I am positive that they would have — while they gather up that Joe in Atlanta called Susie in New York, that information would then be discarded,” he said.

3. Why does the NSA want this information?

America’s largest spy agency is charged with monitoring electronic communications around the world, and to do so it collects as much data as possible. Analysts at NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., feed the phone data from Verizon into their powerful super-computers to try to draw conclusions about what it means that Person X is calling Person Y, as well as to share with other government agencies, including the FBI, for its investigations.

“They use large volumes of data and use algorithms to draw conclusions from that data,” said Wells Bennett, a fellow in national security law at the Brookings Institution. “The more data you have, the more inferences you can draw.”

A senior government official, who asked not to be identified because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court order is classified, defended the efficacy of the NSA’s practice.

“Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” the official said.

( Also on POLITICO: Paul ties NSA to IRS, AP scandals)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) defended the government’s prerogative to see Americans’ phone records in the interest of protecting the country against its enemies.

“It is a worthy cause to try to find out people who may be communicating with people who are members of jihadist organizations … it is a matter of concern,” he said. “If all they’re doing is tracking where my phone calls went to, that doesn’t make me too concerned … it doesn’t matter to me particularly.”

4. Did Verizon agree to this or was this an involuntary mandate from the government?

The NSA has had a close relationship with the telecommunications industry for decades, including with the corporate ancestors of Verizon that ran the physical cable-and-trunk telephone networks. U.S. officials have used eavesdropping since J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men hunted John Dillinger in the 1930s, and more recently, “signals intelligence” has played a central role in the pursuit of terrorists, especially in places where the United States has no human sources with a firsthand perspective of what’s going on.

( Also on POLITICO: Verizon on offense behind the scenes)

In the post-Watergate era of deep unease about government power, Congress passed FISA, which acknowledged the necessity for monitoring and eavesdropping but which created a new secret court to establish more accountability over the executive branch. Congress has since broadened the government’s latitude in eavesdropping with the Patriot Act of 2001 and subsequent amendments to FISA, including one in 2008 that then-Sen. Barack Obama first opposed, then backed.

The senior government official made clear that the NSA is acting within what it believes are the bounds of the law and that it has oversight from the White House, Congress and the courts.

“As we have publicly stated before, all three branches of government are involved in reviewing and authorizing intelligence collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” the official said. “Congress passed that act and is regularly and fully briefed on how it is used, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizes such collection. There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That regime has been briefed to and approved by the court.”

The official continued: “Activities authorized under the act are subject to strict controls and procedures under oversight of the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA Court, to ensure that they comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

But the bottom line is that it’s doubtful that Verizon volunteered to provide the metadata to the government, said Bennett of the Brookings Institution.

“At a bare minimum, they would have said go to the court and get the order, just to protect themselves,” Bennett said. “This is not a situation where the government goes to the third party for help and the third party says, ‘Sure.’”

Verizon has had no comment.

5. What happens now?

The Obama administration is defending its practices, and even some of its biggest critics are applauding the surveillance effort. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has been Obama’s arch-nemesis on Benghazi, Libya, sequestration and other issues, said Thursday morning he thought the White House was doing a good job.

“I’m glad the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country,” Graham said on “Fox & Friends.”

As a customer of Verizon, the subject of the court order, Graham said he and others had nothing to worry about.

“I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to the terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not, so we don’t have anything to worry about.”

If anything, the biggest consequence could be even further pressure from the White House to crack down on leaks. The Justice Department has said it’s monitoring the phone records of The Associated Press to try to find a leaker; it secretly looked at the emails of a Fox News journalist it said was a “criminal co-conspirator” for receiving information about North Korea. With the publication of the top-secret FISA Court order — which includes a line saying it’s slated for declassification on “12 April 2038” — the White House has an even bigger incentive to try to plug the holes it says are hurting its ability to pursue terrorists.

But expect plenty of push-back on the civil liberties front.

“Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation,” said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU, in a statement.

She added: “Since 9/11, the government has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open government and accountability.”