NSA admits foiled terror plot figures misleading; agency tested cellphone location tracking

image credit: CSIS/Flickr

Madison Ruppert
Activist Post

National Security Agency (NSA) chief Gen. Keith Alexander told lawmakers on Wednesday that the figures issued by the Obama administration about terrorist plots foiled by NSA surveillance are misleading.

The public statements made by intelligence officials about the NSA surveillance programs have been notoriously misleading in the past, with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper outright lying under oath to Congress.

Alexander also told legislators that the agency secretly tested bulk collection of Americans’ cellphone location information in 2010 and 2011, though they supposedly scrapped the program, according to The New York Times.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) pressed the alleged link between bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and foiled terror attacks.

“There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” Leahy said, according to The Washington Times.

Of the 54 cases cited by Obama administration officials as evidence of the benefit of NSA surveillance, Leahy contended that they “weren’t all plots, and they weren’t all foiled.”

When Leahy asked if Alexander would agree that only 13 had some connection to the United States, Alexander said it was true.

In “only one case” did the collection of phone records stop terrorist activity, according to Leahy, though Alexander said he believed it was actually two cases, according to Kevin Gosztola.

“We’re talking about massive, massive collection. We’re told we have to do that to protect us,” Leahy said.

If the statistics being released by the Obama administration are “not accurate, it does not have the credibility with the Congress. It does not have the credibility with this chairman. It does not have the credibility with the country,” Leahy said.

The fact that NSA officials have so clearly misled the public and Congress about the effectiveness of NSA surveillance makes one wonder how accurate their claims about cellphone location tracking are.

Alexander said publicly that the NSA is “is not receiving cell-site location data and has no current plans to do so” under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

However, he said that other classified information providing “additional detail” was provided to the committee in July in response to a written version of the same question.

Yet the Times revealed that the NSA indeed tested the bulk collection of such information.

“In 2010 and 2011 NSA received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format, but that data was not used for any other purpose and was never available for intelligence analysis purposes,” a draft answer written for Clapper to read at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing stated.

It is unclear how many Americans had their location data used as part of the project or if the NSA held on to the data. An anonymous official claimed that it was never queried as part of an investigation and was only used to see how the data would flow into NSA systems.

“After years of stonewalling on whether the government has ever tracked or planned to track the location of law-abiding Americans through their cellphones, once again, the intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret — even when the truth would not compromise national security,” Wyden said.

Gosztola argued that these kinds of statements and questions would never have been possible without the Snowden leaks.

“The senators would not have asked questions about whether NSA was creating dossiers on Americans if it had not been for Snowden or the story published by the Times,” he wrote.

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This article first appeared at End the Lie.