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  • 6/19/2025
Hedrick Smith profiles how the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and whether it is jeopardizing Americans' privacy and civil liberties.

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00:00Tonight on Frontline
00:18Everybody's a suspect
00:20And if you're good, we won't bother you
00:22And if you look a little strange
00:24Then you might get on a watch list
00:26A permanent war against a hidden enemy
00:28The president turned to me and said
00:30Never let this happen again
00:32A new strategy of prevention
00:34You have to cast the net
00:35A bit more broadly
00:38And new perils to privacy
00:40It is inevitable
00:42That totally innocent Americans
00:45Are going to be affected by these programs
00:47Correspondent Hedrick Smith
00:49Looks into the government's secret surveillance efforts
00:51Here at home
00:53We're talking about a wholesale diversion
00:56Of communications to government control
00:58Oh, that's what they're doing
01:00This is a spy apparatus
01:02And explores the new era of prevention
01:05Hunting them by watching us
01:08It seems to be like the beginning
01:10Of we're going to treat everyone like a bad guy
01:13And that applies to everything
01:14Telephone records
01:15Telephone records, financial records
01:17How much security do you want
01:19And how many rights do you want to give up
01:21Tonight on Frontline
01:22Spying on the home front
01:24What a miracleured
01:26The human rights do you want to give up
01:28To cover everyone's honor
01:28And that seems to be a great
01:29elephant
01:30I've got to be with him
01:30This has been a защ investir
01:31I've got to be with him
01:32I went with him
01:33And he left him
01:33I've got to be with him
01:33I've got to be with him
01:34I've got to be with him
01:35I've got a big deal
01:35I've got to be with him
01:36We'll take you
01:36Put him
01:37He left and his body
01:39And the character grunds
01:39He grabbed him
01:40And the hero・
01:41Spbank darüber
01:42The intense
01:45Spank
01:47Constance
01:48The transistor
01:49Spank
01:50Theodore
01:51Spank
01:51The NIH
01:52问题
01:54Las Vegas.
02:04It was the week before New Year's 2004
02:07when Stephen Sprouse and Kristen Douglas
02:10flew in from Kansas City to get married.
02:14Stephen always wanted to get married in Vegas.
02:17It was sort of a joke.
02:21Stephen and Kristen exchange vows
02:23in front of friends, family,
02:25Ladies and gentlemen, it's showtime.
02:28and Elvis.
02:31You come in and you're thinking,
02:33okay, I'm going to get married.
02:34And then, you know, Elvis comes down the aisle.
02:36Then you're kind of up there,
02:40and all of a sudden you're thinking,
02:41wow, I'm really getting married.
02:43Kristen, I'll give you this ring.
02:44And they're doing the vows,
02:45and you're like, oh, this is for real.
02:48You may kiss your bride.
02:49And then you're singing Viva Las Vegas.
02:53And then you're singing Viva Las Vegas.
02:55Viva Las Vegas!
02:57Viva Las Vegas!
03:00Viva Las Vegas!
03:02Viva Las Vegas!
03:04Viva Las Vegas!
03:07But in fact, things in Vegas weren't looking so good.
03:11There was disturbing news.
03:14Tom Ridge was on national TV,
03:16and, you know, he said, hey, there's three cities
03:17that, you know, we've got to really pay attention to,
03:20Washington, D.C., New York, and Las Vegas.
03:22And, whew, you know, when that happens,
03:25then the whole eyes of the world come on you.
03:28U.S. intelligence from overseas
03:31has prompted an elevated alert.
03:33On Saturday, December 20th, I was contacted, uh,
03:40by, uh, someone from our terrorism division
03:43at FBI headquarters.
03:44The information that I received was that
03:48al-Qaeda could have an interest in Las Vegas,
03:52possibly over the New Year's weekend.
03:58That's it?
03:59That's it.
04:00No names, no targets?
04:02No targets identified, no, uh, threat articulated,
04:08no plot uncovered.
04:11New Year's Eve is a security nightmare for the cops.
04:15You see it as a tempting target for terrorists.
04:19We have 300,000 to 400,000 people on the streets,
04:24on Las Vegas Boulevard, in front of all these beautiful hotels,
04:27waiting for the clock to strike midnight
04:30and all the fireworks to go off.
04:32And that was what the intelligence information, uh,
04:35indicated that that was, you know, the type of area
04:38or venue that they were gonna try to target.
04:40Here was the real dilemma.
04:43Do we cancel our New Year's Eve celebration in Las Vegas?
04:46That was the question being placed on me.
04:49When you're out there, that's when you kind of notice
04:54that you don't see any of the planes flying,
04:55and then you see helicopters off in the distance kind of circling around.
04:59That's when it kind of seemed a little weird, seemed a little odd.
05:03Yeah.
05:04It was a little creepy.
05:05Yeah.
05:07The clock was ticking, just 11 days till New Year's.
05:11They needed to act fast.
05:13We spoke almost an hourly basis at times with our own headquarters,
05:19with the Department of Justice, to try to determine
05:21if there were terrorist operatives in Las Vegas
05:25or preparing to come to Las Vegas.
05:27Who's in Las Vegas?
05:28You know, can we find out who's in Las Vegas today
05:31and who's gonna be here over the New Year's Eve weekend?
05:33Is there the potential that a Mohammed Atta
05:36is staying at the Economy Lodge again?
05:40The feds called in security chiefs of the major hotels and casinos
05:44and asked for help, but much different help from usual.
05:49When Ellen Knowlton, the FBI agent in charge,
05:54in Las Vegas at the time in December 2003,
05:57came to all the casinos and said,
05:59we want all your records, how does that hit you?
06:04To my knowledge, no one has ever made a request
06:08that is as broad as, we want all of your records,
06:11or no one had prior to that.
06:13The hotel records, the airline records, the rental car records,
06:17the gift shop records, the casino records,
06:20when you're talking about all those records,
06:22you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people,
06:28particularly during this two-week period.
06:30That's correct.
06:32Hotel-casino executives resisted,
06:35said they did not want to turn over the information.
06:38There was, according to published reports,
06:41a lot of arm-twisting, a lot of intimidation.
06:44It was an extraordinary step.
06:47It really was.
06:48We were asking for records for the single purpose
06:53of making comparisons.
06:54We were not asking for records that would become incorporated
06:59into the FBI files.
07:02But records for everybody who was here?
07:04As many as we could obtain, yes.
07:06So you're talking hundreds of thousands of people.
07:08It was very, very, very voluminous, yes.
07:13As a citizen, I was very troubled by it.
07:16As an executive with this company, I was very troubled by it.
07:20You know, prior to this, we had dealt with the notion of,
07:22here's a list of people whom we suspect are doing bad things
07:26or have the potential to do bad things.
07:30To simply say, you know, it's a matter of national security,
07:34we need to know the name of every single person checking into your hotel
07:37at any given moment, that seems extremely unusual
07:45and, I think, extremely troubling.
07:47Did you feel like you were doing something unprecedented?
07:51In a way, yeah.
07:52In a way, I did.
07:55But we were doing so in order to safeguard this community.
07:59If someone was not a terrorist or a terrorist associate,
08:03they were not of any interest to us whatsoever.
08:06Trust us, we're the government,
08:08and if you're not up to no good, why should you care?
08:12That's not the way our system works.
08:14We are a country that is founded on a set of principles
08:19relating to individual freedom, including our privacy,
08:22our right to be left alone by the government.
08:269-11 indelibly altered America in ways that are now being seriously questioned.
08:39The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country
08:45were more than acts of terror.
08:48They were acts of war.
08:50A new paradigm of war spawned a new strategy, a proactive strategy of preemption.
08:57When the president turned to me within hours, really, after 9-11, a day or so,
09:02and said, in my direction anyhow, never let this happen again.
09:07Now, not letting something happen is different than proving something happened.
09:12The old business of the Justice Department to be able to prosecute the criminal and declare victory
09:18is not good enough when you lose 3,000 people
09:21and the criminals purposefully extinguish themselves in the perpetration of the crime.
09:27Prevention means disrupting a scenario before it actually all comes together.
09:33The new paradigm of prevention carried a new peril.
09:38Innocent people will get caught in the dragnet.
09:41When you talk about prevention, you're saying to people,
09:43well, you can't just focus on one person.
09:47You have to cast the net a bit more broadly.
09:51And you have to start to work with situations
09:54where you're going to collect a lot of data and then try to connect the dots.
09:59But that means you're going to collect a lot of data,
10:01and that means you're going to end up holding a lot of data
10:04about ordinary people who have nothing to do with your threat.
10:09That sounds pretty intrusive.
10:12It is.
10:13Tonight, Big Brother, the uproar over a secret presidential order
10:17giving the government unprecedented powers to spy on Americans.
10:21Surveillance inside the U.S. without court orders.
10:24It was a bombshell.
10:26The National Security Agency engaged in warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States.
10:32The New York Times story broke on December 16, 2005.
10:36But spying on the home front had begun in the shadow of 9-11.
10:41And there was more going on than the Times story revealed.
10:45Congress erupted in protest.
10:48Mr. President, it is time to have some checks and balances in this country.
10:53We are a democracy.
10:55It's inexcusable to have spying on people in the United States
11:01without court surveillance in violation of our law beyond any question.
11:05This was enormous news.
11:07When the New York Times told us about the NSA wiretap program,
11:11for people like me, it was as though there was this alternate universe.
11:15We had thought we had a legal system and we knew what the moves were,
11:19and it turns out that the NSA was doing something entirely outside of that.
11:25In the Cold War, NSA's mission was to collect communications intelligence on enemies abroad.
11:31Except in very rare cases, its cardinal rule was hands-off Americans at home.
11:38NSA was looked at more as the nuclear weapon for eavesdropping.
11:43Much too powerful to use domestically.
11:45It was never a set-up to use domestically.
11:50It was almost something that was put into your bloodline from the very beginning.
11:54In essence, you were taught that it was not part of the NSA mission,
11:58except under very exceptional and legally approved circumstances,
12:02to be involved with U.S. communications.
12:06But with one sweeping secret order, President Bush had changed all that.
12:11As President and Commander-in-Chief, I have the constitutional responsibility
12:16and the constitutional authority to protect our country.
12:19So consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, I authorize the interception of international communications,
12:26of people with known links to al-Qaeda.
12:29The President minimized the risk to Americans.
12:32His eavesdropping program, he said, was very narrowly targeted,
12:36with one party outside the U.S. and known to be a member of or connected to al-Qaeda.
12:44I just want to assure the American people that, one, I've got the authority to do this.
12:49Two, it is a necessary part of my job to protect you.
12:52And three, we're guarding your civil liberties.
12:55But once before, the NSA was accused of invading American civil liberties,
13:03during the scandals of the Watergate era in the 1970s.
13:07The Select Committee made its first inquiries into this operation last May.
13:12The Church Committee, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho,
13:16exposed widespread abuses of power at the FBI and the CIA,
13:21and revealed that the NSA had been spying on Americans for decades.
13:27What was Operation Shamrock?
13:29Operation Shamrock was a program of the National Security Agency
13:35to collect, to obtain access to telegrams that were leaving the United States
13:42for other countries, for foreign countries.
13:45And the idea was that the NSA would look through these telegrams,
13:50look for telegrams of interest from a foreign intelligence standpoint.
13:54Are you saying all the telegrams going on in the U.S.?
13:57How did they get access?
13:59They asked.
14:01I mean, that sounds very simplistic,
14:03but they approached the communications carriers,
14:07the telegraph companies concerned...
14:09RCA, ITT...
14:10...and Western Union.
14:12So, in Operation Shamrock, what we saw was the NSA
14:15turning its foreign intelligence operations internally
14:18on American communications.
14:21Exactly, yeah.
14:22Operation Shamrock was getting access to all the communications
14:27coming into, going out of, and going through the United States.
14:31There were very few rules back there,
14:32very few laws, regulations that dealt with what NSA
14:37or any intelligence agency could collect back then.
14:40The capabilities were there.
14:43The restraints weren't there.
14:45The temptation is to do it.
14:47The committee believes that serious legal and constitutional questions
14:50are raised by this program...
14:53The exercise of unchecked executive power rankled Congress.
14:58The program certainly appears to violate Section 605
15:01of the Communications Act of 1934,
15:03as well as the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
15:07So Congress passed the FISA law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
15:12and set up a super-secret court here on the sixth floor
15:15of the Justice Department to prevent abuses of civil liberties.
15:20FISA said no intelligence wiretaps inside the U.S. without a warrant,
15:25and the FISA court was designated as the exclusive authority
15:29for getting warrants.
15:31Why is the FISA court, the judge or the Congress,
15:34so important to this process?
15:36Because the cop is a zealous person.
15:39You want your cop, you want your intelligence agent,
15:42to go full board and be really devoted to what they're doing.
15:45And then you want somebody to say,
15:47wait a second, we don't want Dirty Harry,
15:49we have to have some ways to rein that in.
15:51And so you want the energy of the executive,
15:54and you want the checks and balances on that,
15:56so we get energy and we get rule of law.
15:58And that was our American invention.
16:00That's the whole checks and balances, Madison, Federalist Papers.
16:03It's those inventions that can get put at risk if it's just saying,
16:06Commander-in-Chief, stop there, don't question it.
16:09Hence the furor when President Bush went around the FISA court.
16:13And why did you skip the basic safeguard of asking courts
16:18for permission for these intercepts?
16:20You're referring to the FISA court in your question.
16:22Of course we use FISAs.
16:24But Pfizer's is for long-term monitoring.
16:26And what is needed in order to protect the American people
16:29is the ability to move quickly to detect.
16:32The law said the exclusive authority for wiretaps
16:35were these other statutes.
16:37And the president looked at exclusive authority and said,
16:39accept when I feel like it.
16:40I swore to uphold the laws.
16:42It was as though the lessons of Watergate had been forgotten.
16:45It was as though the lessons of centralized executive power
16:48and the problems that come with that had been forgotten.
16:50And now the president just said, I think I can do it my way.
16:53So you're saying the president violated the law?
16:56My view is that the president violated the law, yeah.
16:58What do you say to people who say the president
17:00violated the FISA law?
17:03I think that there's a law greater than FISA,
17:05which is the Constitution.
17:07And part of the Constitution is the president's
17:08commander-in-chief power.
17:10Congress can't take away the president's powers in running war
17:15that are given to him by the Constitution.
17:17There's some decisions the Constitution gives to the president.
17:20And even if Congress passes a law,
17:21they can't seize that from him.
17:24But there was another reason the president went around FISA.
17:28The NSA needed to tap into communications more broadly
17:32than the president had indicated.
17:35The difficulty in this war is that the enemy is not a nation.
17:39So what they do is they disguise themselves as civilians,
17:42and they place their communications through normal civilian channels.
17:48And so the hard thing for our side is to identify where in that stream of civilian,
17:54innocent communications al-Qaeda members are disguising their messages to one another,
18:00trying to intercept those and find out what they mean.
18:03Fishing for possible targets among streams of civilian communications takes a lot of guessing.
18:11If you're trying to prevent future terrorist attacks,
18:14trying to make guesses, trying to use probabilities,
18:16you may not have a lot of information that say this,
18:19this person for sure is a member of al-Qaeda.
18:23But there's a legal problem.
18:25Guessing is not allowed under FISA.
18:27The second difficulty is that it doesn't allow you, for example,
18:32to tap streams of human communication that might be coming, say,
18:35from Afghanistan to the United States,
18:38to try to search through those for terrorist communications,
18:42even though you don't have the specific name of the terrorist leader.
18:44Now, could you do that kind of blanket eavesdropping,
18:48listening to those calls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?
18:53No, I think this is a good example of where existing laws were not up to the job.
18:59In the intelligence game, blanket eavesdropping is called a driftnet,
19:04an electronic driftnet.
19:06But former NSA Director General Michael Hayden said no,
19:10that's not what was going on in the president's eavesdropping program.
19:14This isn't a driftnet out there.
19:16We're soaking up everyone's communications.
19:19We are going after very specific communications that...
19:22Now, you have General Hayden, the former head of the NSA,
19:26and the attorney general, saying,
19:29this is not a driftnet.
19:30We're not doing data mining in this program.
19:33What they've said repeatedly is we're not...
19:35is that we're not doing the driftnet of in this program.
19:39But it might be program number two or program number three.
19:41This program being what? The president's program?
19:43Because they were talking about the president's program,
19:46and then the other things we're worried about
19:48tend to be happening in these other programs they haven't admitted to.
19:52Is there anything, can he stop you from wiretapping without a warrant,
19:57somebody inside the United States, that you suspect of having al-Qaeda connections?
20:02Clearly, Senator, that is not what's going on here, first of all.
20:06The president has authorized a much more narrow program.
20:10So you're suggesting their denials are a word game, not a true denial?
20:13Yep.
20:14Have you looked at it closely?
20:15I looked at the attorney general's testimony very carefully,
20:19and every time he gave the big denials,
20:21they were attached to the words, this program.
20:24Al-Qaeda to al-Qaeda within the country,
20:26you're saying we do not get involved in those calls?
20:31Not under the program in which I'm testifying, that's right.
20:34You're saying al-Qaeda to al-Qaeda within the country is beyond the bounds?
20:39Sir, it is beyond the bounds of the program which I'm testifying about today.
20:43Has the president ever invoked this authority with respect
20:46to any activity other than NSA surveillance?
20:53Again, so I'm not sure how to answer that question.
20:57And the president has exercised his authority to authorize this very targeted surveillance
21:04of international communications of the enemy.
21:07So, I'm sorry, your question is?
21:10Has the president ever invoked this authority with respect to any activity
21:16other than the program we're discussing, the NSA surveillance program?
21:20Senator, I am not comfortable going down the road of saying yes or no
21:25as to what the president has or has not authorized.
21:28He's a former judge, he's a smart lawyer.
21:30The attorney general is speaking very carefully,
21:32but I think there could be lots of room, after you read his testimony,
21:36for other programs to be doing really unprecedented things.
21:42What other things might the NSA be doing?
21:46To answer that, you have to understand what the NSA actually does and how it works.
21:53The average person doesn't have a concept of the massive capability
21:58that is available to the National Security Agency.
22:02Forget about the idea of the guy with the earphones on listening to something.
22:05That's not what happens.
22:07You know, the calls are being sucked up by the millions,
22:09and not just the calls, you're engaged in this data mining.
22:13It's essentially looking for certain kinds of signals in an almost Herculean task,
22:19a much, much larger communications environment,
22:22to find the things that actually have intelligence value.
22:24Data mining, sifting through oceans of phone calls and Internet traffic.
22:31That's a far cry from what President Bush described.
22:34Targeted intercepts of point-to-point al-Qaeda communications.
22:38Another feature of data mining is that you don't have any individualized suspicion going in.
22:43They don't say, hey, we're looking for something that Hedrick Smith is doing.
22:47They are just collecting the data, and then the analysis of the data
22:51gives rise to suspicion of individuals based on these connections.
22:54The inside story of what the NSA has actually been up to
23:02was discovered here in San Francisco by Mark Klein,
23:06a longtime Internet technician for AT&T.
23:10In 2002, I was sitting at my workstation one day,
23:15and some e-mail came in saying that somebody from the National Security Agency, NSA,
23:23was going to come visit for some business.
23:26This NSA representative showed up at the door.
23:30I happened to be the one who opened the door.
23:32I let him in.
23:33He was doing a background check for a security clearance for one of our field engineers.
23:40He was going to be working at the Folsom Street office,
23:44and they were building a secure facility there.
23:47And I heard from our manager, Don, that he's working on some new room that's being built.
23:55So, people start speculating, oh, what's this new room being built?
24:00Mark Klein got suspicious when the workmen constructing the room treated it as hush-hush.
24:05So, how do you know that it wasn't just some kind of newfangled AT&T thing
24:10that was going beyond what had already been established for its security purposes elsewhere?
24:14They wouldn't need the NSA for that purpose.
24:18The odd thing about the whole room, of course, was that only this one guy who had clearance
24:22from the NSA could get in there.
24:25So that changes the whole context of what this is about.
24:32Klein's job was to maintain AT&T's Internet service for several million customers,
24:38domestic and international traffic all mixed together.
24:41We're talking about billions and billions of bits of data going across every second, right?
24:47A co-worker showed Klein how their Internet room was directly connected to the secret NSA
24:53room through a special device called a splitter.
24:55So, what they do with a splitter is they intercept that data stream and make copies of all the data,
25:04and those copies go down on the cable to the secret room.
25:10What this thing was is a very full-scale device to take all communication, voice and data,
25:17and send it both wherever it was supposed to go, but also shunned it off to a little listening room.
25:24So, what exactly was going on in that listening room?
25:27Klein found clues at work one day.
25:30I came across these three documents, and I brought them back to my desk, and when I started looking at it,
25:39I looked at it more, and finally it dawned on me sort of all at once, and I almost fell out of my chair.
25:47Klein eventually found detailed designs for the secret room.
25:51One of the first to see his documents was Internet expert Brian Reed.
25:55Lord, they had a lot of hardware, and they could, with the computers that they had there,
26:00they could do anything they wanted with that data.
26:02There was serious compute power available to process that wiretap data.
26:07But then there was one thing that was odd, because I didn't recognize it.
26:10It was not part of normal day-to-day telecommunications equipment that I was familiar with,
26:17and that was a NARUS, N-A-R-U-S, NARUS STA 6400.
26:25The NARUS STA 6400 made me sit up and take notice and realize that this was not an amateur game,
26:31and so when you see a NARUS box and all that storage space and all that compute power,
26:36you can't help but think, wow, you know, this is some heavy-duty processing power here
26:42to really analyze the data that is siphoned off, what is going on?
26:48The term NARUS is Latin for to know.
26:51The way our software works is it monitors all of the traffic on the Internet,
26:55all of the ones and zeros that make up all of the data that, you know, that you and I generate
26:59data, or looking at web pages, or when corporations are sending emails back and forth, all of that
27:04information, we just sort of peer into the pipes, if you will, and look at the ones and
27:09zeros as they go by.
27:11Peering into the pipes.
27:14What does that mean?
27:16Sort of analogous to a letter inside of an envelope.
27:18So you've got different layers in these things we call packets, and, you know, the first layer
27:23that you get to peer back is the information about where the packet's coming from and where
27:27it's going to, the addresses that identify, you know, who's communicating with who.
27:32And then once you delve into deeper parts of the packets, that's when you get into what's
27:36called the payload, and that includes the actual information that you're trying to send in
27:39the packet.
27:40The content.
27:41The content of the packet, that's correct.
27:44So your customers would be communications providers like AT&T or the Bell system.
27:54Do you also sell to government agencies like the National Security Agency or the FBI?
27:59I can't comment on any particular agencies that we may or may not have sold to because
28:04they haven't given us permission to announce their names.
28:09Why would AT&T put a Norris STA system in a room in its San Francisco office to which the
28:16NSA has access?
28:18That's not a question, I, I, so, as far as I know, no one's ever proved anything.
28:24I don't know, I don't know the answer to that question.
28:26I have no idea if that's ever been done or not.
28:30You've seen the splitter.
28:32You've now got the documents.
28:34You've seen the Norris.
28:36What is it you think is going on here?
28:38When I saw all that, it all clicked together to me.
28:41Oh, that's what they're doing.
28:43This is a spy apparatus.
28:50Klein decided to blow the whistle.
28:53He went to see the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
28:56Cindy Cohn is their senior attorney.
28:59Mark Klein brought us some very good specific information about a specific facility in San
29:03Francisco that confirmed a lot of things that, that we thought were going on.
29:08We found a few other experts who know about the telecommunications companies and the issues
29:13that Mr. Klein was talking about, and we ran what Mr. Klein had given us past them, and
29:18we said, you know, does this fly, does this hold water to you?
29:21And we were told, yes, it does.
29:24Scott Marcus, a former Federal Communications Commission expert, estimated that they set up
29:29eavesdropping rooms at 15 to 20 sites across the U.S., intercepting about 10 percent of all
29:36purely domestic Internet traffic.
29:39And that's just at AT&T.
29:42We're not talking about just targeted person-to-person communications being handed over to the government.
29:47We're talking about something much bigger.
29:49We're talking about a wholesale diversion of communications to government control.
29:55In early 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit against AT&T, asking the court to stop
30:02AT&T from handing over customer communications to the government.
30:07Our case alleges that AT&T is wholesalely providing the communication records and ongoing
30:13live information to the government.
30:16That's a violation of law.
30:18In court, AT&T urged dismissal of the case, citing state secrecy.
30:24Both AT&T and NSA refused to talk to Frontline about the case.
30:29You're aware that there's a case out here in San Francisco where people are saying that AT&T
30:34violated the law by giving the National Security Agency access to all its phone and Internet
30:39traffic.
30:41As a lawyer, is it your opinion that that actually would violate the law?
30:47No, I don't think so if it was part of the President's Commander Chief Power to gather
30:52information on the signals intelligence of the enemy.
30:57Can the government pull out the communications it wants or does it have to have access to
31:01the entire flow?
31:02I think the government needs to have at least access to the flow, even if it was going to
31:08enforce a warrant to have access to the flow.
31:12Under pressure from lawsuits like the AT&T case and from Congress, President Bush made a
31:17dramatic reversal last January.
31:20He put the one NSA eavesdropping program that he has acknowledged under the FISA court.
31:25But he still claims he has the power to go outside FISA any time he wants.
31:31And the government isn't saying whether the eavesdropping at AT&T in San Francisco is covered
31:36by FISA.
31:38As far as we know, the nearest box that Mark Klein told us about is still peering into the
31:43Internet traffic.
31:57They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
32:02But the marketing pitch, like the city itself, is a paradox.
32:09While legions of fund seekers flock to Vegas every day to get lost in the crowd, the reality
32:16is that privacy has become an illusion.
32:23I see this sign on your cab getting in, video and audio recording going on.
32:29Well, what we have here is, first, the minute the doors are open, digital still pictures
32:34are taken, okay, which are saved.
32:38Then the video and audio is running at the same time.
32:43And in the event that there is a problem, then the video camera will now download the 20 seconds
32:52previous to the event and what's going on during the event.
32:56So this is quite a place, Las Vegas.
32:57I mean, there's obviously in the airport lots of video and obviously at the hotels and casinos,
33:03they're loaded with cameras and now taxis.
33:07So we're in film for practically the moment we arrive.
33:09Correct.
33:10People that come to Vegas, the only time they're not on video is when they're in their room
33:16or they're in a public restroom.
33:18They don't have them in those.
33:19But the hallways, the elevators, the gaming area, we've taken that to a level that
33:26has, I think, surpassed any place in the United States.
33:33Las Vegas as surveillance city struck me as an apt metaphor for life in the digital age.
33:40Businesses gather information on us routinely.
33:44Every day we leave digital trails that reveal where we go, what we do, who we are.
33:51After 9-11, government agencies moved aggressively to tap into all that information
33:56compiled in commercial databanks.
33:59That's what the FBI was doing when it asked for records on 250,000 tourists in Las Vegas.
34:06So you're looking at airlines, car rental agencies, hotels, casinos, timeshare apartments, storage
34:14places, the works.
34:16As much as we could get in the few days that we had to work with, yeah.
34:21Were legal papers produced of some kind?
34:24There were official requests for the information.
34:27It was not off the record or in any way inappropriate.
34:33What you wanted was an assurance that this was a legal request backed by the power of law,
34:40not just a voluntary compliance.
34:43Absolutely.
34:44Absolutely.
34:45Absolutely.
34:46And why?
34:47The concept that someone would want all records with no names identified over a period of time,
34:55in this case it would give or take a couple of weeks, is in our industry an extraordinary request.
35:02The Patriot Act includes provisions that permitted the government and the FBI to do exactly what it did,
35:11with very little or no judicial oversight whatsoever.
35:17It gave the FBI broad, sweeping power and authority to engage in precisely this kind of massive fishing expedition.
35:28What the Patriot Act had done was vastly expand the reach of national security letters,
35:35which are FBI administrative subpoenas not approved by any court.
35:40One big change that most people haven't quite seen is that before the Patriot Act,
35:45you could get a national security letter, one of these special without a judge,
35:49get the phone records letters, but it would be about one person, just about me.
35:53But now the language was changed so the government can get the entire database.
35:58And there's just a little change in the language.
36:00NSLs, national security letters, get X.
36:02But X went from the suspect to being the entire database.
36:06And that applies to everything, telephone records, financial records?
36:08Telephone records, financial records, your credit histories.
36:11That applies, and it applies to these other kinds of orders for any kind of record in the American economy.
36:16Did you use national security letters?
36:18I'm not going to be in a position to tell you what the legal avenues we used were.
36:25I can't go there.
36:27Do you know whether or not you got a subpoena, a warrant from a court,
36:30or do you know whether or not you got a national security letter from the FBI?
36:33Here's the fun of the Patriot Act.
36:36If we were to have received a national security letter,
36:39it would be against the law for me to tell you that we did.
36:41And had you received a subpoena signed off on by a judge, you would be able to...
36:46As a rule, usually, we would acknowledge that we received something.
36:50And we're left in blanket silence, which...
36:53Blanket silence in the sense that there are quite a few people who say,
36:56we can't say logical deduction.
36:59They must have received national security letters direct from the government.
37:03It would seem to be a logical deduction.
37:06But the big question remains, what did they do with all that information?
37:11It was burned onto CDs here in Las Vegas.
37:14And then those CDs were transported to Washington, D.C.
37:17for comparison against the various terrorist watch lists.
37:22Back in Washington, the FBI did a batch match,
37:26matching the list of 250,000 Vegas visitors
37:30against watch lists of tens of thousands of terrorist suspects.
37:34And they got a few hits.
37:36Now, when you said there were a few hits, what does that mean?
37:38That there were...
37:39There might be a similar name.
37:41On the hotel list and on the watch list?
37:43And on one of the watch lists, yes.
37:45But how could the FBI decipher those hits?
37:49Were those really terrorists or mistaken identities?
37:53And what if the bad guys had disguised their names to get lost in the crowd?
37:57How could the FBI ferret them out?
38:00Ironically, the answer was right here in Las Vegas.
38:05For years, the casinos had been using special computer software
38:08to ferret out the hidden links between criminals and prospective employees.
38:13At one point, this young computer wizard named Jeff Jonas approached us
38:17and had this idea to use a computer program to compare lots of data.
38:23Things like addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, social security numbers
38:29where things were inverted to make it look different.
38:32Is the idea behind the Jonas software, he calls it Nora, N-O-R-A,
38:36to unmask sort of obscured relationships?
38:40That's exactly the idea.
38:42I mean, the idea was to determine whether or not someone who was applying as a dealer
38:47was in fact associated with or connected with someone who was a known thief.
38:53So the idea was to protect the company's assets before a crime took place.
39:00Our sources said the FBI used Jonas' software
39:04to analyze the data collected in Las Vegas.
39:07But would that invade the privacy of ordinary Americans?
39:10I'm just wondering, in that 2003 episode, was Jeff Jonas a help?
39:14Were you guys able to use it?
39:15I believe he was.
39:16The reason I asked is we were actually told that it was used, that he had some of the...
39:22You got a source there that says it was used.
39:24I'm not going to disagree with you or argue with you.
39:27Did I use it?
39:28I'm not saying.
39:29Did my department?
39:31We may have.
39:32Like I said, there's a lot of privacy concerns and there's a lot of issues
39:37and there's a lot in the weeds when it comes to private information and how it's used.
39:43And I'm simply not in a position today, and maybe never will be, to talk about how we use software to match up tourist information with potential terrorism suspects.
39:57We house 2,400 terabytes of online system storage, enough capacity to contain the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress 48 times.
40:07This is a marketing video for Axiom.
40:10Since the 1990s, companies like Axiom, LexisNexis, and ChoicePoint have marketed their ability to collect vast amounts of data about all of us, from home mortgages to spending habits, and to create virtual digital dossiers.
40:25Watergate-era reforms restricted government use of these private information empires.
40:31But after 9-11, the Bush administration lifted the restraints and pushed agencies aggressively to use private databases.
40:40This internal FBI document, for example, spread the word.
40:45Use ChoicePoint to your heart's content.
40:48When it comes to the Privacy Act, the law didn't change, but there's a change in computers that changed everything.
40:55Used to be the fear was the government would have the government database in some big room, an IBM Brainiac computer.
41:02And the Privacy Act says we're going to protect against problems there.
41:06Today what you...
41:07Can't have a big...
41:08That you can't have the big Brainiac with the one database on all Americans run by the government.
41:12But here's the trick.
41:14What you can do if you're the FBI is you can ping the private sector database.
41:18Hey, LexisNexis.
41:19You can access it.
41:20You can access it.
41:21Say, hey, give me some information on this person or on that person.
41:24And as long as you just access it one at a time, which is the way it works anyways, Privacy Act doesn't apply.
41:29Because it's not a government database.
41:32It's the private sector database.
41:34The law doesn't apply to the private sector database.
41:36Why should Americans worry about the government having the same kind of information
41:41that private companies have, companies like ChoicePoint?
41:45Well, the easy answer is that ChoicePoint can't come and arrest you.
41:50They can't come search your house.
41:52They can't use that information to sort of put into motion the machinery of the justice system.
42:00Once it's in the hands of the government, it has those consequences.
42:04I mean, that's why the government's looking for the information.
42:06If an American company would have access to this data for purposes of conducting business,
42:11I guess I would argue, why wouldn't you want an agency like the FBI in charge of national security
42:16to help you protect American lives?
42:19And again, it's done, to my knowledge, in accordance with strict guidelines and controls.
42:24It's not willy-nilly.
42:25There's a structure to the process.
42:28Well, not exactly.
42:30FBI Director Robert Mueller was called on the carpet by Congress this spring for myriad abuses by the FBI
42:38in using national security letters to secretly collect private records of American citizens.
42:44The FBI had issued 150,000 national security letter requests over the past three years.
42:54And the Justice Department's inspector general determined that thousands were improperly issued.
42:59I'm deeply disturbed by the Justice Department inspector general's report finding widespread illegal and improper use of national security letters
43:08to obtain American's phone and financial records.
43:11Mueller acknowledged the problem and the dangers.
43:14We will correct the deficiencies in our use of national security letters
43:19and utilize each of the critical tools Congress has provided us consistent with the privacy protections
43:26and civil liberties that we are sworn to uphold.
43:29But the FBI is hardly alone in mining the mountains of commercial data now available.
43:34The Government Accounting Office found 199 data mining projects in more than 50 government agencies.
43:42The granddaddy of them all originated inside an elite Defense Department research agency known as DARPA.
43:51The key to fighting terrorism is information.
43:54We must be able to detect, classify, identify, and track potential foreign terrorists in a world of noise.
44:03This is a DARPA video for TIA, or Total Information Awareness.
44:08The concept was to use predictive data mining to detect suspicious patterns of terrorist operations.
44:15Human identification at a distance will improve the ability to identify foreign terrorists from a distance.
44:21TIA's controversial logo was an all-seeing eye.
44:26If one could imagine that, you know, we have an eye in the sky and we could truly get all the transactions,
44:32all the things that that group did to conduct that plot, okay, to conduct that attack.
44:39Our thesis is that that set of transactions across space, time, and by some number of people will be a unique signature.
44:50TIA's mission, which required access to enormous volumes of personal data, triggered controversy in Congress.
44:57The Total Information Awareness Program is over the line.
45:02It is invading the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans on U.S. soil.
45:07In 2003, Congress cut off funding for TIA, or so it seemed.
45:13Is it true that in that black budget, some of the TIA programs were moved over to the National Security Agency?
45:19All I can't—it's classified.
45:21I mean, all I can say is that there were elements of our agenda at DARPA that the Congress recognized as being valuable,
45:28to the point where they said, let's not kill them, let's get them out of DARPA and transition them to another agency within the intelligence community.
45:36And I was the guy that did that.
45:39Is it inevitable that we're moving towards a world in which this kind of mass data mining and analysis is just going to happen?
45:47I mean, I think it is happening.
45:50There's been an explosion of information technology and access to data.
45:54I mean, this is what the Internet and all this IT revolution has done.
45:57You know, the world is getting digitized.
45:59It's ubiquitous, information technology.
46:02Access to data is far more easy.
46:04And a lot of people see tremendous advantage in being able to tap into that.
46:08So, we should be having an open discussion about this and then maybe talking about what privacy safeguards are needed in a new world.
46:15Bless you. Absolutely. Absolutely.
46:18What do we need to do?
46:22Are we just going to have to live with this?
46:24Is this going to happen inevitably and we just have to live with it?
46:27I think that we do need to say, look, data mining or fusion of information or connecting the dots or whatever you want to call it,
46:37is clearly going to be a huge feature of our law enforcement national security apparatus.
46:43Let's start crafting a set of rules for it.
46:47I always said when I was in my position running counterterrorism operations for the FBI,
46:52how much security do you want and how many rights do you want to give up?
46:56I can give you more security, but I've got to take away some rights.
46:59And so there's a balance.
47:01Personally, I want to live in a country where you have a common sense, fair balance.
47:07Because I'm worried about people that are untrained, unsupervised, doing things with good intentions,
47:14but at the end of the day, harm our liberties.
47:17Back in December 2003, Sheriff Bill Young ultimately decided to carry on with Las Vegas' New Year's celebrations.
47:33So your conclusion was, a day or two or three before New Year's Eve, that the threat wasn't that hard?
47:42Well, it wasn't specific enough to me as to time, method or place for me to make the call to say,
47:54let's cancel this New Year's Eve celebration.
47:57It was too vague.
47:58Too vague.
47:59Long after the celebrations were over, Stephen Sprouse and Kristen Douglas received the disquieting news
48:06that they had been swept up in that FBI-dated dragnet.
48:10You found out afterwards that all the hotel records were collected.
48:16What went through your head when you heard that?
48:19They have no reason to be looking at me.
48:22I don't think that I've done anything to raise any suspicion.
48:26So, I mean, just being in Las Vegas on New Year's shouldn't be enough for them to say,
48:31well, you know, she might be a terrorist.
48:34I just tell people that we made every effort to safeguard the privacy of everyone whose records were accessed.
48:42There was no breach.
48:44The information was closely safeguarded.
48:48The FBI says it held all the data from Vegas for more than two years, but has now destroyed it all.
48:55I work with data.
48:56I mean, you know, if it's on the computer, it's not really ever gone.
49:01It's on a tape.
49:02It's on a backup.
49:03It's on a drive somewhere.
49:04A more fundamental concern confronts us all.
49:10The Fourth Amendment protects us against unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause.
49:16So does the strategy of prevention collide with the Constitution?
49:21When the government is doing this kind of data mining, has it moved from individualized suspicion,
49:27getting an individual warrant, to generalized suspicion to check everybody to find out who are the bad guys?
49:34Yeah. Check everybody. Everybody's a suspect. Everybody's phone records, everybody's email is subject to government scrutiny.
49:42And if you're good, we won't bother you.
49:44And if you look a little strange, then you might get on a watch list.
49:47Isn't that a huge change in Anglo-Saxon law?
49:50I mean, Anglo-Saxon law is based on get a warrant.
49:53The Fourth Amendment is based on individual suspicion.
49:56General warrants was part of the reason for the American Revolution.
50:00It was that the King's agent could go in and search a house everywhere, search a whole neighborhood with one warrant.
50:06And the Boston people said, we don't like that. We'll have a tea party. We'll fight you. We said no.
50:11Look, there's no doubt that there are important Fourth Amendment issues here.
50:16One is, is this a reasonable search and seizure?
50:19You can still have warrantless searches, but they have to be reasonable.
50:23And then the second question is, does that restriction apply to wartime operations?
50:29We don't require warrant. We don't require reasonable searches and seizures when the army, the military is out on the battlefield attacking, killing members of the enemy.
50:40But that's usually abroad, and it doesn't involve American homeland and American citizens.
50:44But this gets to my point is, do you want to make it more difficult for our government to try to stop terrorist attacks?
50:51The closer that members of al-Qaeda get to the United States, the closer they get to striking our cities as they did on 9-11, you want to make it more legally difficult for the government to stop that?
51:04I don't think so.
51:06I mean, in our tradition of law, there is this idea that there is private space around the individual, you know, the individual's home, their papers, as it says in the Constitution, that there is this, there is a sphere around you that the government can't come into without meeting this level of suspicion.
51:26And what I see in all of these developments is the sphere is getting smaller and smaller.
51:32You know, we're allowing access to much more information so that maybe the government can't come into that sphere, but they can go all the way around it.
51:39They can get the contours, the outlines of your daily life through a lot of this information that isn't protected as well.
51:46And I think that's what's eroding.
51:53So many people in America think this does not affect them.
51:57They've been convinced that these programs are only targeted at suspected terrorists.
52:03I'm not engaged in any terrorist activities.
52:05Therefore, this does not concern me.
52:08There's no, no way in which I'm going to be caught up in this activity.
52:13And you think that's wrong?
52:14And I think that's wrong.
52:16I think that, as I said, I think our technology is not perfect, our programs are not perfect, and it is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs.
52:31It seems to be like the beginning of we're going to treat everyone like a bad guy to begin with, knowing that most of them are not bad guys.
52:42But we're going to start with the assumption that everybody's a bad guy.
52:46And then if we just collect the right stuff and connect the right dots, we'll find the real bad guys.
52:51Did you find any terrorists?
52:52No. No, we didn't.
52:55So when you got to the bottom of it, you found nothing.
52:59Which was on about the 29th of December, we had gone through everything, and we had no identifiable, no known terrorists or terrorist associates.
53:12Later we learned that, in fact, the original intelligence warning about Las Vegas was mistaken.
53:19In decoding a suspected al-Qaeda message, someone got it wrong.
53:25Next time on Frontline...
53:44He's been so vehemently anti-gay.
53:47A conservative mayor.
53:48And now we find him in gay.com.
53:50An aggressive newspaper.
53:51What if he's using the internet to have sex with underage boys?
53:55And a story that took apart a man's life.
53:58The worst thing you can say about somebody is that they're a sexual predator.
54:01How do you refute that?
54:03Frontline examines the conflict between the public interest and a hidden life.
54:08Next time on Frontline.
54:15To order Frontline's Spying on the Homefront on DVD, call PBS Home Video at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
54:38The End
54:47The End
54:53The End
54:56The End