EXCLUSIVE
– Pete Hoekstra: NSA Spying on Congress Requires Suspending State of the
Union Invite
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Elected officials and leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)
must maintain the integrity of America's vast intelligence enterprise as a
lawful, neutral, independent and fair arbiter of facts. Recent news that
the Obama White House obtained intelligence containing private
conversations of members of Congress and American Jewish organizations from
the National Security Agency (NSA) suggests the integrity of our
intelligence agencies have been undermined.
The heads of the 17 organizations in the IC oversee a massive foreign
data collection network that produces sensitive information on adversaries
and allies.
It is an awesome capability for good, but it poses a threat to free
society if exploited for political purposes.
The prospect of the White House – or any political element – using one
of these agencies to mine information on members of Congress and U.S.
citizens is frightening and criminal. So it is of grave concern to learn
that the administration allegedly permitted the National Security Agency
(NSA) to monitor American communications between the Israeli prime minister
and U.S. Congressmen and members of Jewish organizations during the
sensitive domestic political debate on the Iran nuclear agreement.
Lawmakers must respond quickly. This is about the NSA potentially
violating constitutionally protected civil liberties.
The rules are clear. When the electronic communications of U.S. citizens
are inadvertently swept up, which happens frequently, the NSA is required
to immediately minimize them.
First, it needs to identify the phone number associated with the person
and cease monitoring it. Second, any reference to the individual in
collected data must be eliminated.
And there are special NSA rules if information about the discussions or
communications of members of Congress is collected. Under NSA rules, this
information is supposed to be destroyed unless the NSA Director issues a
waiver to collect and disseminate this information because of a compelling
foreign intelligence reason.
The administration likely failed on all of these counts. It apparently
looked the other way and didn't implement long established safeguards. That
is why this issue is so serious.
The government can only retain content on Americans when it contains
national security implications and must obtain a court warrant if it wants
to maintain surveillance on an American person. Israel's prime minister has
no protections.
More to the point, this alleged surveillance was never about national
security. The White House wanted to learn the strategies that opponents of
the Iran nuclear agreement would use to attack the president's political
agenda.
Congress should demand a full accounting, which should not take long.
The NSA has all of the information lawmakers need at its fingertips.
Here are seven questions that the administration needs to answer about
the continued monitoring of U.S. persons by the NSA.
o
Exactly how many and specifically which
Americans were monitored?
o
On which members of Congress did the NSA
spy?
o
How many conversations were collected and
what did they disclose?
o
Who within the IC knew about the ongoing and
intentional collection of American communications with the Israeli prime
minister? Did NSA Director Mike Rogers know? Who approved it?
o
Who within the White House knew of this
collection and who knew of its content? Did they attempt to stop this
collection once they became aware that it was possibly illegal?
o
How did the NSA justify and rationalize
providing the White House with intelligence on the private conversations by
members of Congress and American Jewish organizations? At what security
level was the information transferred to the White House?
o
Did this surveillance practice extend to any
other intelligence agencies?
There needs to be a full public accounting.
This is not an isolated instance of IC negligence. CENTCOM is under
investigation for cooking the intelligence on the threat from ISIS.
Both are serious violations of the public trust, but the NSA case is
potentially so egregious that it threatens the very credibility of the IC.
Whether conservative, progressive, Republican, Democrat or Libertarian, all
Americans fear the immense capability of government to target them. A
proportional reaction is required because it extends to the very heart of
constitutionally guaranteed protections.
I strongly disagreed with Edward Snowden's actions and the substance of
his allegations, but the NSA might have fulfilled his predictions that the
government would unleash the IC capabilities for unlawful domestic
purposes.
Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) should suspend the president's invitation
to deliver his State of the Union address from the House chamber on January
12 until the administration fully complies with all congressional demands.
Congress must act forcefully now. Extraordinary abuse requires an extraordinary
response.
Pete Hoekstra is the Senior Shillman Fellow at the Investigative
Project on Terrorism and the former Chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence
Committee.
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