Is the New NSA COMINT Flap Overblown?

by Anthony L. Kimery

'In a war zone, or any military zone including training, COMSEC monitoring is routine'

New allegations by former National Security Agency (NSA) transcribers of Communications Intelligence – especially via satellite phones - between members of the Armed Services and US citizens in Iraq's "Green Zone" and friends and family in the States were listened to, recorded, transcribed, and passed around has sparked a new round of outrage over the Agency's counterterror (CT) communications eavesdropping activities.

The two former NSA intercept transcribers’ spoke to ABC News just prior to publication of journalist Jim Bamford’s hardly transparent contemptuous new book on the NSA, "The Shadow Factory.” Both were interviewed by Bamford for the book.

The two ex-NSA transcribers are Adrienne Kinne, a former Army Reserve Arab linguist who two years ago traveled Vermont giving speeches promoting the impeachment of President Bush, and former Augusta, Georgia Metro Spirit newspaper staff writer, David Murfee Faulk, a former Navy Arab linguist.

Veteran Intelligence Community (IC) counterterror analysts said while they do not condone the dissemination of transcripts of intercepted “phone sex” and other intimate conversations like has been emphasized in recent reporting, they stressed that there were, and continue to be, legitimate concerns about classified information, military and intelligence operational activities and other secret and sensitive information inadvertently being divulged in such conversations from war and conflict zones, especially by members of the military with family and friends talking on satellite phones.

“These are legitimate concerns – that there may be unauthorized disclosures of classified and sensitive military and operational details,” the officials said.

“Ho hum. In a war zone, or any military zone including training, COMSEC monitoring is routine,” former CIA and IC officer, Robert Steele, told HSToday.us, adding that for him, this is a non-story he sees “no real interest in.”

Still, media reports and bloggers continue to insist conflict zones in which the US military is involved is off limits to COMSEC monitoring. One blogger’s headline clearly was suggestive that it’s wrong: “NSA Spying on US Soldiers,” it read.

Similarly, ABC News reported that when it asked for comment on accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, including reputed “phone sex,” ABC News said a US intelligence official told it "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman told Army Times that members of the Armed Forces should be aware that when they use any government equipment to communicate, “it’s subject to monitoring.”

“Every time I turn on my computer, it tells me that,” Whitman was quoted saying, adding, “service members understand that. They’re trained in that.”

A Senate aide who spoke to Army Times on the condition of anonymity “agreed that military personnel probably know that their overseas phone calls to the States may be overheard by US intelligence agencies and, in some cases, by foreign intelligence agents.

As IC sources explained to HSToday.us, there are legitimate concerns about military operations security that’s been raised by the ruckus over the NSA-controlled communications intercepts which have been left out of all the reporting.

The CT officials said it’s no secret that there have been problems with armed services members wrongly divulging operational details, especially on satellite and other communications systems that could just as easily be intercepted by terrorists or hostile foreign governments, like Iran, which is known to have its own communications intercept assets in Iraq trying to listen in on potentially unsecured communications systems used by military and US citizens.

As one of the former NSA linguists told ABC News, “personal phone calls of American officers – mostly in the [Iraqi] Green Zone – calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, and sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes on the same days, sometimes one phone call following another,” were routinely intercepted.

Other IC officials noted that foreign-originated communications, even placed to the US, are legitimate targets of interception, although if they do not involve terrorists they should not be being stored, catalogued, referenced, shared, etc.

Additionally, interception of satellite phone communications abroad does not require first having to have a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The concern over improper disclosure of secret and sensitive information “does walk a fine line” with regard to what is and isn’t supposed to be the target of CT COMINT interception activities. As a Heritage Foundation blogger noted, “NSA employees have no business entertaining themselves by listening in on phone sex. The employees involved should be disciplined.”

Kinne and Faulk admitted that some of the intercepts had helped to identify possible terrorist plots in Iraq and saved American lives.

"IED's were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time," Faulk said.

Another peculiar aspect of this story is that it’s even news.

While it’s been touted in all the ink this story has received that the ABC report is a new revelation and “is the first time any of the actual intercept operators … [have] come forward,” the two former NSA linguists ABC News interviewed not only voiced their complaints publicly and in a blog much earlier, but they also knew of each other.

Former journalist David Swanson (now a pro-impeach Bush/Cheney activist), stated that ABC News’s position that “the two former intercept operators” had “never met and did not know of the other's allegations … is absolute nonsense … Faulk learned of Kinne's story by reading it on my website,” Swanson declared. “I reported Kinne's story on July 1, 2007 … I first reported Faulk's story on May 19, 2008. He contacted me because he had read the story I'd written about Kinne.”

Swanson’s report from two years ago about Kinne’s allegations also raises questions about the objectivity and politics of Kinne’s decision to “break whatever rules I may have just broken” to vent her allegations. Swanson reported that “she joined a tour of Vermont with activists Cindy Sheehan, John Nichols, Dan DeWalt, and [Iraq Veterans Against the War], a tour promoting the passage of impeachment resolutions in Vermont towns …”

That Kinne and Faulk’s complaints were voiced some years ago seems to be borne out by the Washington Post, which reported that, "while declining to give specifics, an NSA spokesman said some of the allegations were currently under investigation, while others had [already] been 'found to be unsubstantiated.'" The Post also reported that a "US intelligence official familiar with the reports noted that two internal investigations, by the inspectors general of the NSA and the Army, were unable to substantiate the allegations."

Furthermore, Swanson noted that at least one lawmaker, Vermont’s Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, which has oversight over FISA and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, expressed little interest in Kinne’s allegations two years ago. In the wake of ABC’s report, however, Leahy reputedly has suddenly become concerned about the allegations, and whether FISA was violated.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, called the allegations “extremely disturbing” and declared that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he chairs will investigate.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-TX, also said the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that he chairs may also investigate the pairs’ allegations.

There’s little doubt that there will be a flurry of highly publicized hearings and that the respective committee’s will summon the nation’s highest ranking intelligence officials to answer contentious questioning from the panels’ members. What will likely be much less clear though is whether the interception of communications from within a war zone (especially sat-phones) were, and are, illegal.

What’s most likely to emerge out of all the Hill hoopla over this is that some SIGINT collectors and their supervisors who may have indeed played fast and loose with transcripts of tawdry phone sex for their own vicarious thrills will be reprimanded, perhaps even charged with criminal violation of the secrecy oaths they signed.