US intelligence officials: "Dozens" of terror plots disrupted by NSA surveillance

Marc Piscotty / Getty Images file

Najibullah Zazi, seen in 2009 image, was accused of plotting to bomb New York City’s subway system.

By Michael Isikoff
NBC News National Investigative Correspondent

U.S. intelligence officials said Saturday that National Security Agency surveillance programs have disrupted “dozens” of terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 countries around the world.

The statement about the thwarted plots was cleared for release by U.S. officials late Saturday afternoon after requests by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein that intelligence agency officials release more information about the surveillance programs to show their effectiveness.

In the statement, intelligence officials said that, of the hundreds of millions of records of U.S. phone calls collected under a provision of the Patriot Act, only 300 were “queried” in 2012 for additional information about the callers.

---

This was done only after officials found there was a “reasonable suspicion” that the person making the call was “associated with specific foreign terrorist organizations,” according to a statement cleared for release by U.S. intelligence agencies.

The only example cited of a thwarted terrorism plot was what officials described as a ” major Al-Qa’ida directed attack” intended for the U.S. homeland in 2009. After the NSA discovered that al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan were in contact with an “unknown person” in the U.S. , the agency alerted the FBI, the intelligence community statement said. The bureau then identified the U.S. contact as Colorado-based extremist Najibullah Zazi. 

After getting Zazi’s U.S. phone number from the FBI, the NSA ran it against its mass database of U.S phone calls and discovered a “previously unknown” number for a Zazi co-conspirator, Adis Medunjanin.

The FBI then tracked Zazi as he traveled to New York and arrested him. He pleaded guilty in 2010 to a bomb plot aimed at the New York City subway system and was sentenced to life in prison. Medunjanin was also arrested, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Officials described the plot “as the most serious terrorist threat on US soil since 9/11,” according to the intelligence community statement.

The “operational details” of other plots disrupted “must remain secret to allow us to continue to effectively leverage our capabilities in the face of those who still aspire to do great harm to our citizens and allies,” the statement said.  

The statement said that both the program for the collection of telephone metadata and a separate one that intercepts the content of phone calls and emails of foreigners suspected of terrorism operate under “strict controls” that protect the civil liberties of Americans. It emphasized that both are overseen and approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC. 

It also revealed for the first time that records of phone calls that are collected must be destroyed within five years. 

The statement made no reference to what critics have charged have been instances of improper interception of emails and phone calls, including an 86-page, Oct. 3, 2011, FISC opinion — the existence of which was disclosed in a recent Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — finding that some surveillance by the intelligence community was conducted under procedures that violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting “unreasonable” searches and seizures by the government. 

Feinstein’s office said the senator would have no comment on the statement on Saturday. 

More from Open Channel:

• Victim of alleged rape at Marine base: ‘I thought … I would be safe’


• Secret court won’t object to release of opinion on illegal surveillance


• FBI sharply increases use of Patriot Act provision to collect Americans’ data

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

Open Channel

US intelligence officials: "Dozens" of terror plots disrupted by NSA surveillance

Sources: US intelligence agencies tap servers of top Internet companies

By Andrea Mitchell and Jeff Black, NBC News

U.S. intelligence agencies have a direct tap into the servers of the U.S.’s largest Internet companies where agents can troll for suspicious activity, sources confirmed to NBC News on Thursday.

A government program is examining suspicious email and Internet traffic. According to The Washington Post, it allows the NSA and the FBI to tap directly into computer servers at some of the largest Internet service providers. NBC’s Pete Williams reports.

The highly classified program, designed to look at international communications and run by the National Security Agency and the FBI, can peek at video, audio, photos, emails and other documents, including connection logs that let the government track people, according to the sources, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity.

Intelligence officials disputed reports that the program was engaged in “data mining” and instead described the activities as “data collection.” It was unclear what the distinction is in practical terms.

The program, code-named PRISM, was first publicly exposed Thursday evening by The Washington Post and The Guardian.

According to the Post, which reported that it had obtained an internal NSA presentation on the PRISM operation, the tool was so successful that it was the top contributor to President Barack Obama’s daily intelligency brief — with 1,477 articles last year.

The participating technology companies were a virtual “Who’s Who” of Silicon Valley, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple,  the Post said.

Companies contacted by NBC denied knowledge of the PRISM operation, which has been described as a “partnership” with the technology industry.

“Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data,” Google spokesman Chris Gaither said. 

“We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers,” Facebook’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, said in a statement.

“We have never heard of PRISM,” an Apple spokesman told CNBC. “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”

Microsoft and Yahoo also denied to NBC News knowledge of the program, saying they only comply with legal requests for information on specific individuals.

According to the NBC News sources, PRISM works in tandem with another program, code-named BLARNEY, which collects “metadata” — Internet addresses, device signatures and such — as the data streams past intersections on the Internet backbone.

Information from the enormous collection of U.S. telephone calls and their durations has been housed in National Security Agency computers for the past seven years. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports.

Disclosure of the PRISM program comes a day after the Guardian reported that the U.S. government had compelled telephone giant Verizon to turn over phone records of millions of U.S. customers.

Intelligence officials were reeling over the leak about PRISM on Thursday night, sources told NBC News.

The groundwork for doing such widespread monitoring appeared to be first laid in 2007 in the hastily passed “Protect America Act.”

Thursday’s revelations are believed to be the first publicly released results of the law.

Kurt Upsahl, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the digital civil rights organization “has been saying for some time that there has been a warrantless surveillance program going on” for the collection of electronic content.

“It allegedly has the cooperation of nine very prominent Internet companies, from which we’re seeing a slew of denials,” he told NBC News. “Denials that are designed to leave the impression that the companies are not participating.”

At “minimum,” he said, “Congress should start holding some hearings and get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

The American Civil Liberties Union also was quick to offer its concerns about what was reportedly a court-approved program that had the consent of Congress.

“These revelations are a reminder that Congress has given the government far too much power to invade individual privacy, that existing civil liberties safeguards are grossly inadequate,” Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said in a statement, adding that “powers exercised entirely in secret, without public accountability of any kind, will certainly be abused.”

However, James R. Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, said in a statement that the Post and The Guardian articles contained “numerous inaccuracies” in reference to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 

Section 702, he said, is designed to help acquire foreign intelligence for non-U.S. persons outside the country and can’t be used to target Americans or others within the U.S.

He said all activities authorized by Section 702 are subject to oversight by a special court, the executive branch and Congress and must follow “extensive procedures” to “ensure only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted.”

Clapper stressed that the program “does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone’s phone calls” and that “the information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the identity of any subscriber.”

“The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans,” he said.

Pete Williams, Suzanne Choney and Bob Sullivan of NBC News contributed to this report.

Related:

NSA snooping has foiled multiple terror plots: Feinstein

Public wrestles with what’s most important

This story was originally published on Thu Jun 6, 2013 10:48 PM EDT

Open Channel

Sources: US intelligence agencies tap servers of top Internet companies