Monday 29 December 2014

US to declassify secret surveillance documents after uproar

America's top intelligence official is declassifying key details about a secret surveillance programme as the backlash against revelations the US government is monitoring internet and phone activity grows.

Last night James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, released an unusual late-night statement in response to the leak of a secret court order which shows the US is storing information on millions of calls made by Americans each day.

Mr Clapper called the disclosure of a programme that targets foreigners' Internet use "reprehensible," and said the leak of another programme that lets the government collect Americans' phone records would affect how America's enemies behave and make it harder to understand their intentions.

Mr Clapper accused The Guardian of giving a "misleading impression" of how the programme worked and said he had ordered parts of it to be declassified so Americans would understand "the limits of this targeted counterterrorism programme and the principles that govern its use".

He insisted the programme was authorised under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and targeted only "non-US persons" outside the United States, admitting the US had accessed the servers of internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple to spy on foreigners.


His entry into the debate shows how the government has been rattled by a rapid series of disclosures which shed new light onto the shadowy world of domestic surveillance.

The statement came in response to the release of an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which showed the government compelling a subsidiary of the phone company Verizon to hand over records all calls made on its network.

The records show the time, duration and location of each call but do not record what was actually said. It is not know whether the government has similar orders for all US phone companies.

Mr Clapper said: "The unauthorised disclosure of a top secret US court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation."

He went on to defend the programme which he said was used to "prevent terrorist attacks" and was subject to "numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties".

Earlier on Thursday, Representative Mike Rogers, chair of the House intelligence committee, said that the National Security Agency (NSA) programme had disrupted a terrorist attack on the US "in the last few years". Mr Rogers said he was unable to give more details because the information was classified.

In his statement, Mr Clapper said members of Congress had been "fully and repeatedly briefed" on the phone records programme and that all three branches of the US government had authorised it.

He added that while the US collects vast amounts of data it must seek a court order before order before it delves into any specific records.

"The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organisation," he said. He gave no detail on how often the court authorised specific records to be probed.

Mr Clapper said that the programme was reviewed by the secret court every three months but it appears to have been continually approved for the last seven years.

He said he had declassified some details of the programme in order to "reassure the American people" but warned that there was a cost to debating secret operations in public.

"Discussions programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behaviour of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions," he said.

Mr Clapper himself has been under scrutiny since the court order was made public. During a congressional hearing in March he was asked by Senator Ron Wyden, a liberal Democrat, whether the NSA was collecting data on "millions or hundreds of millions of Americans".

"No sir," he replied. When pressed he added: "Not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect but not wittingly".

The Obama administration has been stung by the wave of criticism from civil liberties proponents and the White House announced that Tom Donilon, the president's top national security aide, would brief reporters on Saturday.


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