Miss Behavin

Bloggers & journalist under NSA surveillance

August 21st, 2008

It’s all fun and games until it’s you under surveillance right? Well the NSA has developed a program specifically to track those journalist and bloggers who venture to talk about the department. Below are excerpts from an article revealing the program:

“NSA maintains a database that tracks unofficial and negative articles written about the agency. Code named ‘FIRSTFRUITS,’ the database is operated by the Denial and Deception (D&D) unit within SID [Signals Intelligence Division]. High priority is given to articles written as a result of possible leaks from cleared personnel.

According to those familiar with FIRSTFRUITS, Bill Gertz of The Washington Times features prominently in the database. Before [NSA Director Michael] Hayden’s reign and during the Clinton administration, Gertz was often leaked classified documents by anti-Clinton intelligence officials in an attempt to demonstrate that collusion between the administration and China was hurting U.S. national security. NSA, perhaps legitimately, was concerned that China could actually benefit from such disclosures.

In order that the database did not violate United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, which specifies that the names of ‘U.S. persons’ are to be deleted through a process known as minimization, the names of subject journalists were blanked out. However, in a violation of USSID 18, certain high level users could unlock the database field through a super-user status and view the ‘phantom names’ of the journalists in question. Some of the ‘source’ information in FIRSTFRUITS was classified — an indication that some of the articles in the database were not obtained through open source means. In fact, NSA insiders report that the communications monitoring tasking system known as ECHELON is being used more frequently for purely political eavesdropping having nothing to do with national security or counter terrorism.

In addition, outside agencies and a ‘second party,’ Great Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are permitted to access the journalist database,. FIRSTFRUITS was originally developed by the CIA but given to NSA to operate with CIA funding. The database soon grew to capacity, was converted from a Lotus Notes to an Oracle system, and NSA took over complete ownership of the system from the CIA.

Tens of thousands of articles are found in FIRSTFRUITS and part of the upkeep of the system has been outsourced to outside contractors, such as Booz Allen, which periodically hosts inter-agency Foreign Denial and Deception meetings within its Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or ‘SCIF’ in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. Currently, in addition to NSA and GCHQ, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) routinely access the database, which is, in essence, a classified and more powerful version of the commercial NEXIS news search database.

In addition to Gertz, other journalists who feature prominently in the database include Seymour Hersh of The New Yorke,; author and journalist James Bamford, James Risen of The New York Times, Vernon Loeb of The Washington Post, John C. K. Daly of UPI, and this journalist [Wayne Madsen].

Entry Filed under: Privacy rights