WASHINGTON — President Bush has acknowledged that several hundred targeted Americans were wiretapped without warrants under the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, and now some U.S. officials and outside experts say they suspect that the government is engaged in a far broader U.S. surveillance operation.
Although these experts have no specific evidence, they say that the NSA has a vast array of satellites and other high-tech tools that it could be using to eavesdrop on a much larger cross-section of people in the United States without permission from a court.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday December 28, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction
Domestic spying -- An article in Sunday's Section A about the National Security Agency's domestic spying activities said an FBI "data mining" program called Carnivore was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It was created in June 2000.
The suspicion is quietly gaining currency among current and former U.S. intelligence officials and among outside experts familiar with how the NSA operates.
The NSA conducts such "wholesale" surveillance continuously almost everywhere else in the world. It does so by using a sprawling network of land-based satellite transponder stations and friendly foreign intelligence agencies and telecommunication companies to collect millions of phone calls, e-mails and other communications.
Powerful NSA supercomputers search this "sigint" -- short for signals intelligence -- for words that might suggest terrorist plots, such as "bomb," then pass the information to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA and now the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official, has said the NSA does not use the same technologies to purposely spy on Americans. The agency is prohibited from doing so by federal laws enacted after the domestic spying scandals of the 1970s.
Rare exceptions must be approved by a special court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The top-secret tribunal considers requests for warrants when the NSA or FBI believes such surveillance is needed to protect national security.
This month it was disclosed that the Bush administration has circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor hundreds of Americans since the Sept. 11 attacks without any warrants. Bush and his inner circle said the practice is limited to occasions when an individual in the U.S. is communicating with someone overseas who has a known link to Al Qaeda, other terrorist groups or their supporters.
But some officials and other experts believe the top-secret program may be doing more than that.
"It's really obvious to me that it's a look-at-everything type program," said cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has written several books about security.
Schneier and others suspect that the NSA may be turning its satellites toward the United States and gathering vast streams of raw data from many more people than disclosed -- potentially including all e-mails and phone calls from the United States to certain other countries.
Companies Cooperate
These experts were chiefly talking about satellite surveillance, but the NSA can use other means to eavesdrop. The New York Times reported Saturday that the NSA has collected large volumes of telephone and Internet communications since the Sept. 11 attacks by "tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries."
Leading telecommunication companies have been saving information on calling patterns and passing it along to the government, the newspaper said. The companies have also given the NSA access to electronic switches that connect U.S. and overseas communications networks, a "significant expansion" of NSA capabilities, it said.
Phone companies and others have cooperated with U.S. agencies including the NSA for years. In the early 1990s, AT&T agreed to use an NSA-designed chip to ensure that law enforcement had access to phone calls.
And AT&T has a database code-named Daytona that keeps track of phone numbers on both ends of calls as well as the duration of all land-line calls, according to a business executive who has been briefed on the system.
"This started as a way for phone companies to dig out fraud," the executive said Saturday. After Sept. 11, intelligence agencies began to view it as a potential investigative tool, and the NSA has had a direct hookup into the database, he said.
After such massive volumes of information are collected, they are searched for suspicious language. The administration could thus argue that only hundreds of people were monitored because those conversations were the ones that were flagged because they contained suspicious words, Schneier said.
"If a computer looks at all e-mail and says 'bing' once, is that monitoring one person or millions?" Schneier asked. "The Bush numbers are depending on that subterfuge."
One former senior Pentagon official who has overseen such "data mining" said he also believed the NSA was probably conducting such wholesale surveillance.
"It's a reasonable hypothesis," the official said, adding that he believed it was necessary against savvy terrorists who would otherwise remain undetected.
