<div dir="ltr">
<div class="">
<div class="">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif" alt="The New York Times" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0"></a>
</div>
<div class="">
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><hr align="left" size="1">
<div class="">September 10, 2013</div>
<h1>Court Upbraided N.S.A. on Its Use of Call-Log Data</h1>
<h6 class="">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/scott_shane/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by SCOTT SHANE"><span>SCOTT SHANE</span></a></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
Intelligence officials released secret documents on Tuesday showing that a judge reprimanded the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about National Security Agency, U.S." class="">National Security Agency</a>
in 2009 for violating its own procedures and misleading the nation’s
intelligence court about how it used the telephone call logs it gathers
in the hunt for terrorists. </p>
<p>
It was the second case of a severe scolding of the spy agency by the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to come to light since the
disclosure of thousands of N.S.A. documents by Edward J. Snowden, a
former contractor, began this summer. </p>
<p>
The newly disclosed violations involved the N.S.A. program that has
drawn perhaps the sharpest criticism from members of Congress and civil
libertarians: the collection and storage for five years of information
on virtually every phone call made in the United States. The agency uses
orders from the intelligence court to compel phone companies to turn
over records of numbers called and the time and duration of each call —
the “metadata,” not the actual content of the calls. </p>
<p>
Since Mr. Snowden disclosed the program, the agency has said that while
it gathers data on billions of calls, it makes only a few hundred
queries in the database each year, when it has “reasonable, articulable
suspicion” that a telephone number is connected to terrorism. </p>
<p>
But the new documents show that the agency also compares each day’s
phone call data as it arrives with an “alert list” of thousands of
domestic and foreign phone numbers that it has identified as possibly
linked to terrorism. </p>
<p>
The agency told the court that all the numbers on the alert list had met
the legal standard of suspicion, but that was false. In fact, only
about 10 percent of 17,800 phone numbers on the alert list in 2009 had
met that test, a senior intelligence official said. </p>
<p>
In a sharply worded March 2009 ruling, Judge Reggie B. Walton described
the N.S.A.’s failure to comply with rules set by the intelligence court,
set limits on how it could use the data it had gathered, and accused
the agency of repeatedly misinforming the judges. </p>
<p>
“The government has compounded its noncompliance with the court’s orders
by repeatedly submitting inaccurate descriptions of the alert list
process” to the court, Judge Walton wrote. “It has finally come to light
that the F.I.S.C.’s authorizations of this vast collection program have
been premised on a flawed depiction of how the N.S.A. uses” the phone
call data. </p>
<p>
The senior American intelligence official, briefing reporters before the
documents’ release, admitted the sting of the court’s reprimand but
said the problems came in a complex, highly technical program and were
unintentional. </p>
<p>
“There was nobody at N.S.A. who really had a full understanding of how
the program was operating at the time,” said the official, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity. The official noted that the agency itself
discovered the problem, reported it to the court and to Congress, and
worked out new procedures that the court approved. </p>
<p>
In <a href="http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/927-draft-document">making public 14 documents</a> on the Web site of the director of national intelligence, <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/james_r_clapper_jr/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about James R. Clapper." class="">James R. Clapper Jr.</a>, the intelligence officials were acting in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and a call from <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Barack Obama" class="">President Obama</a>
for greater transparency about intelligence programs. The lawsuits were
filed by two advocacy groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and
the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/american_civil_liberties_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)" class="">American Civil Liberties Union</a>. </p>
<p>
“The documents only begin to uncover the abuses of the huge databases of
information the N.S.A. has of innocent Americans’ calling records,”
said Mark M. Jaycox, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. He said the agency’s explanation — that none of its workers
fully understood the phone metadata program — showed “how much of a
rogue agency the N.S.A. has become.” </p>
<p>
Judge Walton’s ruling, originally classified as top secret, did not go
that far. But he wrote that the privacy safeguards approved by the court
“have been so frequently and systematically violated” that they “never
functioned effectively.” </p>
<p>
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, welcomed the release of the documents, but said
that they showed “systemic problems” and that the bulk collection of
Americans’ phone records should be stopped. </p>
<p>
Intelligence officials have expressed some willingness to adjust the
program in response to complaints from Congress and the public, possibly
by requiring the phone companies, rather than the N.S.A., to stockpile
the call data. But they say that the program remains crucial in
detecting terrorist plots and is now being run in line with the court’s
rules. </p>
<p>
A different intelligence court judge, John D. Bates, rebuked the N.S.A.
in 2011 for violations in another program and also complained of a
pattern of misrepresentation. The 2011 opinion, which made a reference
to the 2009 reprimand, was released by intelligence officials last
month. </p>
<p>
Since June, Mr. Snowden’s revelations have set off the most extensive
public scrutiny of the N.S.A. since its creation in 1952. Last week,
based on his documents, The New York Times, ProPublica and The Guardian
wrote about the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?hp">agency’s systematic efforts</a>
to defeat privacy protections for Internet communications, including
evidence that the agency deliberately weakened an encryption standard
adopted nationally and internationally in 2006. </p>
<p>
On Tuesday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the
agency charged with setting federal cybersecurity standards, scrambled
to try to restore public confidence, after reports that it had
recommended a standard that contained a back door for the N.S.A. </p>
<p>
The agency said it would reopen the public vetting process for the
standard, used by software developers around the world. “If
vulnerabilities are found in these or any other N.I.S.T. standard, we
will work with the cryptographic community to address them as quickly as
possible,” the agency said in a statement. </p>
<p>
The Times reported that as part of the N.S.A.’s efforts, it had worked
behind the scenes to push the same standard on the International
Organization for Standardization, which counts 163 countries among its
members. </p>
<p>
The national standards agency denied that it had ever deliberately
weakened a cryptographic standard, and it moved to clarify its
relationship with the N.S.A. “The National Security Agency participates
in the N.I.S.T. cryptography process because of its recognized
expertise,” the standards agency said. “N.I.S.T. is also required by
statute to consult with the N.S.A.” </p>
<p>
Cryptographers said that the revelations last week had eroded their
trust in the agency, but that reopening the review process was an
important step in rebuilding confidence. </p>
<p>
“I know from firsthand communications that a number of people at
N.I.S.T. feel betrayed by their colleagues at the N.S.A.,” Matthew D.
Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said in an
interview on Tuesday. “Reopening the standard is the first step in
fixing that betrayal and restoring confidence in N.I.S.T.” </p>
<div class="">
<p>Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting.</p> </div>
<div class="">
</div>
</div>
<br>
<center>
</center>
<div id="upNextWrapper"><div style id="upNext"><div class=""><br style="clear:both"></div></div></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>
<br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
</div>