The Senate Intelligence Committee Chair, Dianne Feinstein, who has a lot of work she could be doing here.
The NSA has been gathering online information of six targeted individuals they believe to be radicalizing others through incendiary speeches. The gathered information is evidence of online sexual activity or use of porn websites, and the information is intended to be used to embarrass or harm the reputations of the targets,
according to the latest Snowden leak. The document also describes these targets as "exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be exploited through surveillance to harm the targets' reputations.
The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT"—or signals intelligence, the interception of communications—"assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues. [...]
The Director of the National Security Agency -- described as "DIRNSA" -- is listed as the "originator" of the document. Beyond the NSA itself, the listed recipients include officials with the Departments of Justice and Commerce and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The list of recipients linked there is remarkable, in that why in the world would the U.S. Trade Representative, or anyone in the Department of Interior or Transportation or Customs or the FAA need this information? Why it would be shared outside of intelligence agencies at all is entirely unclear.
None of these six people is accused in the document of having been part of a terror plot, and all are believed to reside outside of the U.S. One, however, is identified as a U.S. person, which could mean a citizen or permanent resident, and who should have greater legal protections from NSA surveillance. The NSA also examined these six individual contact lists, but the extent of what if anything they gathered about those contacts isn't clear.
Here's the larger concern behind this activity, bolstered by the fact that the information was so widely shared:
James Bamford, a journalist who has been covering the NSA since the early 1980s, said the use of surveillance to exploit embarrassing private behavior is precisely what led to past U.S. surveillance scandals. "The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to 'neutralize' their targets," he said. "Back then, the idea was developed by the longest serving FBI chief in U.S. history, today it was suggested by the longest serving NSA chief in U.S. history."
We've been here before in other dark chapters of American experience. So this is an area of activity that needs to be particularly monitored by Congress, that needs to be checked, before history repeats itself.
