Monday, December 16, 2013
The National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander and task force
in charge Rick Ledgett have reportedly insisted that the US spy agency
does not listen to private conversations and it is only the suspect
number which is forwarded to the FBI for tracking.Alexander said
that the agency needs to help the American people understand that there
is no intelligence in people's email data or phone conversations and the least intrusive way of doing that is by metadata.
According
to CBS News, an analyst Stephen Benitez explained that a technique
known as 'call chaining' is used to develop targets for electronic
surveillance in a pirate network based in Somalia.
Alexander
further said that before 9/11, this capability didn't exist and the
incidence was the factor in facilitating in setting up the programme.
Meanwhile,
the task force in charge Rick Ledgett, who is probing the damage caused
by whistleblower Edward Snowden's leaks, said that the former NSA
contractor misused his authority of keeping track of the data flowing
through the agency during his tenure.
Ledgett explained that what
Snowden did is called scraping in which he used tools to scrape
information from websites, and put it into a place where he could
download it and there is an exhaustive list of the requirements that
have been against NSA.
He further said that if the leaked
information including topics NSA would be interested in, what its gaps
were, falls into the wrong hands it would give them a roadmap about the
agency's capabilities and downfalls, and function as the keys to the
kingdom.
Snowden, who has been granted a temporary asylum in Russia had said earlier that if he got amnesty, he would come back.
However,
the NSA chief has said that he must be held accountable for
jeopardizing the US' national security, while Ledgitt said that in his
personal view, its worth to have a conversation about it as he needs
assurances that the compromised data would not be further leaked.