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Intelligence Chief Says Massive Data Collection Is No Big Deal, But Reporting It Is

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James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence

Following reports in the Guardian and the Washington Post about the National Security Agency hoovering up incredible amounts of information from telecoms and Internet companies, director of national intelligence James Clapper responded Thursday evening with two press releases claiming that the reporting contains "numerous inaccuracies," but conceding that the collection is happening and saying that it is happening legally.

Emphasizing that the collection has been reviewed and approved by Congress, Clapper says it is targeted at "non-US persons" and that the light shone on classified programs and documents "is reprehensible" and "threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation."

With regards to the publication of a top secret document instructing Verizon to turn over all call records (a.k.a. "telephony metadata") over a three-month period, Clapper is declassifying information in order to explain the program. The Wall Street Journal later reported that AT&T and Sprint-Nextel are subject to the same orders. Reiterating that orders of this kind do not give the NSA the ability to listen in on calls -- only to know that they were placed -- Clapper says the broad collection is necessary "because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism-related communications." In other words, bigger is better, baby.

"Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time," writes Clapper. "The FISA Court specifically approved this method of collection as lawful, subject to stringent restrictions."

Those restrictions translate into the NSA needing to have good reason to peek at its massive data treasure trove: "[T]he Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. All information that is acquired under this program is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling. 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 organization."

Clapper acknowledges that most of the information collected belongs to innocent individuals, writing that "only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed because the vast majority of the data is not responsive to any terrorism-related query."

In a separate press release, Clapper addresses Thursday reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian about PRISM, a program that allegedly gives the NSA direct access to the servers of companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook -- a program of which those companies deny knowledge.  Clapper says the reports contain "numerous inaccuracies" -- though he does not specify what they are -- but acknowledges that they refer to "collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," a provision of the law which allows the government to collect information without probable cause but only about non-US persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States. (So this won't be very reassuring to any non-Americans reading the statement. This could make for awkward chit chat between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping this weekend.)

"It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States," writes Clapper. "Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats."

He does not explain why the companies that are allegedly participating in PRISM seem unaware that they are participating.

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