Ensuring Digital Signature Legality for Security in US

How to eSign a document: digital signature legality for Security in United States

[Music] tonight on front line everybody's a suspect and if you're good we won't bother you and if you look a little strange then you might get on a watch list a permanent war against a hidden enemy the president turned to me and said never let this happen again a new strategy of prevention you have to cast The Net uh a bit more broadly and new perils to privacy it is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs correspondent Hendrick Smith looks into the government's secret surveillance efforts here at home we're talking about a wholesale diversion of communications to government control oh that's what they're doing this is a spy apparatus and explores the new era of prevention hunting them by watching us it seems to be like the beginning of we're going to treat every one like a bad guy and that applies to everything telephone records telephone records Financial records how much security do you want and how many rights do you want to give up tonight on front line spying on the home front [Music] Las Vegas it was the week before New Year's 2004 when Steven Sprouse and Kristen Douglas flew in from Kansas City to get married Stephen always wanted to get married in Vegas was sort of a joke Steven and Kristen exchange vows in front of friends family ladies and gentlemen it's showtime and [Music] Elvis you come in and you're thinking okay I'm going to get married and then you know Elvis comes down the aisle then you're kind of up there and all of a sudden you're thinking wow I'm really getting married Christen I give you this ring and they're doing the vows and you're like oh this is for real you may kiss your [Music] BR and then you're singing Viva Las and then you're singing Viva Las Vegas [Music] but in fact things in Vegas weren't looking so good there was disturbing news Tom Ridge was on national TV and you know he said hey there's three cities that uh you know we got to really pay attention to Washington DC New York and Las Vegas and you know when that happens then the the whole eyes of the world come on you us intelligence from overseas has prompted an elevated alert on Saturday December 20th I was contacted uh by uh someone from our terrorism division at FBI headquarters the information that I received was that Al-Qaeda could have an interest in Las Vegas possibly over the New Year's weekend that's it that's it no names no targets no targets identified no uh threat articulated no plot uncovered New Year's Eve is a security nightmare for the cops who see it as a tempting Target for terrorists we have 3 to 400,000 people on the streets on Las Vegas Boulevard in front of all these beautiful hotels waiting for the clock to strike midnight and all the fireworks to go off and that was what the intelligence information U indicated that that was you know the type of area or venue that they were going to try to Target here was the real dilemma do we cancel our New Year's Eve celebration in Las Vegas that was the question being placed on me when you're out there that's when you kind of notice that you don't see any of the planes flying and you see helicopters off in the distance kind of circling around that's when it kind of seemed a little weird seemed a little odd yeah it was a little creepy yeah the Clock Was ticking just 11 days till New Year's they needed to act fast we spoke almost an hourly basis at times with our own headquarters with the Department of Justice to try to determine if there were terrorist operatives in Las Vegas or preparing to come to Las Vegas who's in Las Vegas you know can we find out who's in Las Vegas today and who's going to be here over the New Year's Eve weekend is there the potential that a Muhammad is staying at the economy lodge again the feds called in security Chiefs of the major hotels and s and asked for help but much different help from usual when Ellen nton the FBI agent in charge uh in Las Vegas at the time in member 2003 came to all the s and said we want all your records how does that hit you to my knowledge no one has ever made a request that is as broad as we want all of your records or no one had prior to that the hotel records the the the airline records the rental car records the gift shop records the records when you're talking about all those records you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people particularly during this twoe period that's correct hotel Executives resisted said they did not want to turn over the information there was ing to published reports a lot of arm twisting a lot of intimidation it was an extraordinary step it really was we were asking for records for the single purpose of making comparisons we were not asking for records that would become uh uh incorporated into the FBI Files but records for everybody who was here as many as we could obtain yes so you're talking hundreds of thousands of people it was it was very very very uh voluminous yes as a citizen I was very troubled by it as an executive with this company I was very troubled by it you know prior to this we had dealt with the notion of here's a list of people whom we suspect are doing bad things or have the potential to do bad things to Simply say you know it's a matter of National Security we need to know the name of every single person checking into your hotel at any given moment that that's that that seems extremely unusual and I think extremely troubling did you feel like you were doing something unprecedented uh in a way yeah in a way I did but we were doing doing so um in order to safeguard this community if someone was not a terrorist or a terrorist associate they were not of any interest to us whatsoever trust us we're the government and if you're not up to no good why should you care that's not the way our system works we are a country that is founded on a set of principles relating to individual Freedom including our privacy our right to be left alone by the government 911 indelibly altered America in ways that are now being seriously questioned the deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of Terror they were acts of War a new paradigm of War spawned a new strategy a proactive strategy of preemption when the president turned to me within hours really after 9/11 a day or so and said in my direction anyhow never let this happen again now not letting something happen is different than proving something happened the old business of the justice department to be able to prosecute the criminal and declare Victory is not good enough when you lose 3,000 people and the criminals purposefully extinguish themselves in the perpet ation of the crime prevention means disrupting a scenario before it actually all comes together the new paradigm of prevention carried a new Peril innocent people will get caught in the drag net when you talk about prevention you're saying to people well you can't just focus on one person you have to cast The Net uh a bit more broadly um and you have to you have to start to work with situations where you're going collect a lot of data and then try to connect the dots but that means you're going to collect a lot of data and that means you're going to end up holding a lot of data um about ordinary people who have nothing to do with your threat um that sounds pretty intrusive it is tonight Big Brother the Uproar over a secret presidential order giving the government unprecedented powers to spy on America surveillance inside the US without court orders it was a bombshell security AG the National Security Agency engaged in warrantless Eve dropping inside the United States the New York Times story broke on December 16th 2005 but spying on the home front had begun in the shadow of 9/11 and there was more going on than the time story revealed Congress erupted in protest Mr President it is time to have some checks and balances in this country we are a democracy it's inexcusable to have spying on people in the United States without Court surveillance and VI in violation of our law Beyond any question this was enormous news when the New York Times told us about the NSA wiretap program for people like me it was as though there was this alternate universe we had thought we had a legal system and we knew what the moves were and it turns out that the NSA was doing something entirely outside of that in the Cold War Ana's mission was to collect Communications Intelligence on enemies abroad except in very rare cases its cardinal rule was hands off Americans at home NSA was looked at more as the nuclear weapon for EAS dropping much too powerful to use domestically it was never set up to use [Music] domestically it was almost something that was put into your bloodline from the very beginning in essence you were thought that it was not part of the NSA Mission uh except under very exceptional and legally approved circumstances to be involved with us Communications but with one sweeping Secret order President Bush had changed all that as president and commander-in chief I have the Constitutional responsibility and the Constitutional authority to protect our country so consistent with us law and the Constitution I authorize the interception of International Communication of people with known links to Al-Qaeda the president minimized the risk to Americans his EES dropping program he said was very narrowly targeted with one party outside the US and known to be a member of or connected to Al Qaeda I just want to assure the American people that one I've got the authority to do this two it is a necessary part of my job to protect you and three we're guarding your civil liberties and regard guarding the civil liberties of the but once before the NSA was accused of invading American civil liberties during the scandals of the Watergate era in the 1970s the select committee made its first inquiries into this operation last May the church committee headed by senator Frank Church of Idaho exposed widespread abuses of power at the FBI and the CIA and revealed that the NSA had been spying on americ for decades what was Operation Shamrock operation Shamrock was a a program of the National Security Agency uh to collect to obtain access to telegrams that were leaving the United States uh for other countries for foreign countries and the idea was that the NSA would look through the these telegrams look for telegrams of interest from a foreign intelligence standpoint are you saying all the telegrams going out of the US how did they get access they asked I mean that sounds very simplistic but they approached the communications carriers the telegraph companies concerned RCA it and Western Union so in operation Shamrock what we saw was the NSA turning its foreign intelligence operations internally on American Communications well exactly yeah operation Shamrock was U getting access to all the uh Communications coming into going out of and going through the United States there were very few rules back there very few laws regulations that dealt with what NSA or any intelligence agency could collect back then the capabilities were there the restraints weren't there the Temptation is to do it the committee believes that serious legal and constitutional questions are raised by this program that the exercise of unchecked executive power rankled Congress the program certainly appears to violate section 605 of the communications Act of 1934 as well as the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution so Congress passed the fisa law the foreign intelligence surveillance act and set up a super secret Court here on the sixth floor of the justice department to prevent abuses of civil liberties fisa said no intelligence wir Taps inside the US without a warrant and the fisa court was designated as the exclusive Authority for getting warrants why is the fisa court the judge or the Congress so important to this process because the cop is a zealous person you want your cop you want your intelligence agent to go full board and be really devoted to what they're doing and then you want somebody to say wait a second we don't want dirty hairy we have to have some ways to re that in and so you want the energy of the executive and you want the checks and balances on that so we get energy and we get rule of law and that was our American invention that's the whole checks and balances Madison Federalist Papers it's those inventions that can get put at risk if it's just saying commanderin-chief stop there don't question it hence the furer of the when President Bush went around the fisa court and why did you skip the uh basic Safeguard of asking Courts for permission for these intercepts you're referring to the fisa court in your question of course we use fisas but visor is for long-term monitoring what is needed in order to protect the American people is the ability to move quickly to detect the law said the exclusive Authority for wir Taps were these other statutes and the president looked at exclusive Authority and said except when I feel like it uphold the laws it was as though the lessons of Watergate had been forgotten it was though the lessons of centralized executive power and the problems that come with that had been forgotten and now the president just said I think I can do it my way so you're saying the president violated the law my view is that the president violated the law yeah what do you say to people who say the president violated the fisa law I think that there's a law greater than fisa which is the Constitution and part of the Constitution is the President's commander-in chief power Congress can't take away the president's powers in running war that are given to him by the Constitution there's some decisions the Constitution gives to the president and even if Congress passes a law they can't seize that from him but there was another reason the president went around fisa the NSA needed to tap into Communications more broadly than the president had indicated the difficulty in this war is that the enemy is not a nation so what they do is they disguise themselves as civilians and they Place their Communications through normal civilian channels and so the hard thing for our side is to identify where in that stream of Civilian in inent Communications Al Qaeda members are disguising their messages to one another trying to intercept those and find out what they mean fishing for possible targets among streams of Civilian Communications takes a lot of guessing if you're trying to prevent future terrorist attacks trying to make guesses trying to use probabilities you may not have a lot of information that say yes this person for sure is a member of Al qada but there's a legal problem guessing is not allowed under fisa the second difficulty is that it doesn't allow you for example to tap streams of IM communication that might be coming say from Afghanistan to the United States to try to search through those for terrorist Communications even though you don't have the specific name of the Terrace leader now could you do that kind of blanket EES dropping listening to those calls under the foreign intelligence surveillance act no I think that's this is a good example of where existing laws were not up to the job in the intelligence game blanket EES dropping is called a drift net an electronic drift net but former NSA director General Michael Hayden said no that's not what was going on in the president's eavesdropping program this isn't a drift net out there where we're we're soaking up everyone's Communications we are going after very specific Communications that now you have General Hayden former head of the NSA and the Attorney General saying this is not a drift net we're not doing data mining in this program what they've said repeatedly is we're not is that we're not doing the drift net of in this program but it might be program number two or program number three this program being what the president's program because they were talking about the president's program and then the other things we're worried about tend to be happening in these other programs they haven't admitted to is there anything any stop uh you from wiretapping without a warrant somebody inside the United States that you suspect of having Al-Qaeda connections clearly Senator the that is not what's going on here first of all the president has authorized a much more narrow program so you're suggesting their denials are a word game not a true denial yep have you looked at it closely I looked at the Attorney General's uh testimony very carefully and every time he gave the big denials they were attached to the words of this program Al-Qaeda to Al-Qaeda within the country you're saying we do not get involved in those calls now not under the program in which I'm testify seems to me you're saying Al-Qaeda to Al-Qaeda within the country is beyond the bounds so is beyond the bound of of the program which I'm testifying about today has the president ever invoked this Authority with respect to any activity other than NSA surveillance again uh sir I'm not sure how to answer that question and the president has has uh exercised his authority to authorize this very targeted um surveillance of international Communications of the enemy so I'm sorry your your question is has has the president ever invoked this Authority with respect to any activity other than the program we're discussing the NSA surveillance Senator I I am not comfortable um going down the road of saying yes or no as to what the president has or has not authorized he's a former judge he's a smart lawyer the Attorney General is speaking very carefully but I think there could be lots of room after you read his testimony for other programs to be doing really unprecedented things what other things might the NSA be doing to answer that you have to understand what the NSA actually does and how it works the average person doesn't have a concept of the massive capability that is available to the National Security Agency forget about the idea of the guy with the earphones on listening to something that's not what happens you know the calls are being sucked up by the millions and not just the calls you're engaged in this data mining it's essentially looking for certain kinds of of signals in a in an in an almost Herculean task a much much larger Communications environment to find the things that actually have intelligence value data mining sifting through oceans of phone calls and internet traffic that's a far cry from what President Bush described targeted intercepts of point-to-point Al qaa Communications another feature of data mining is that you don't have any individualized suspicion going in they don't say hey we're looking for something that hendrik Smith is doing they are just collecting the data and then the analysis of the data gives rise to suspicion of individuals based on these connections the inside story of what the NSA has actually been up to was discovered here in San Francisco by Mark Klein a longtime internet technician for AT&T in 2002 I was sitting at my workstation one day and some email came in saying that somebody from the National Security Agency NSA was going to come visit for some business this NSA representative showed up at the door I happened to be the one who opened the door I let him in he was doing a background check for security clearance for one of our field Engineers he was going to be working uh at U the falam street office and they were building a secure facility there and I heard from our manager Don that uh he's working on some new room it's being built so people start speculating oh what's this new room being built Mark Klein got suspicious when the workmen constructing the room treated it as Hush Hush so how do you know that it wasn't just some kind of new fangled AT&T thing that was going beyond what had already been established for its security purposes elsewhere they wouldn't need the NSA for that purpose the odd thing about the whole room of course was that only this one guy who had clearance from the NSA could get in there so that changes the whole context of what this is about Klein's job was to maintain AT&T's internet service for several million customers domestic and international traffic all mixed together we're talking about billions and billions of bits of data going across every second right A co-worker showed Klein how their internet room was directly connected to the secret NSA room through a special device called a splitter so what they do with a splitter is they intercept that data stream and make copies of all the data and those copies go down on the cable to the secret room what this thing was is a very fullscale device to take all communication voice and data and send it both wherever it was supposed to go but also shun it off to a little Listening Room so what exactly was going on in that Listening Room Klein found Clues at work one day I came across these three documents and I brought them back to my desk and when I started looking at it I looked at it more and finally I it dawned on me sort of full at once and I almost fell out of my chair Klein eventually found detailed designs for the secret room one of the first to see his documents was internet expert Brian Reed Lord they had a lot of hardware and mean they could with the with the computers that they had there they could do anything they wanted with that data there was serious compute power available to process that wiretap data but then there was one thing that was odd because I didn't recognize that it was not part of normal day-to-day telecommunications equipment that I was familiar with and that was a naris n r USU naris sta6 400 the NYS sta 6400 made me sit up and take notice and realize that this was not an amateur game and so when you see it a nerys box and all that storage space and all that compute power you can't help but think wow you there's this is some heavy duty processing power here to really analyze the data that this siphoned off what is going on the term Nars is Latin for to know the way our software works is it monitors all of the traffic on the internet all of the ones and zeros that make up all of the data that you know that you and I generate when we're looking at web pages or when corporations are sending emails back and forth all of that information we just sort of peer into the pipes if you will and look at the ones and zeros as they go by peering into the pipes what does that mean it's sort of analogous to a letter inside of an envelope so you've got different layers in these things we call packets and you know the first layer that you get to appear back is the information about where the packet's coming from and where it's going to the addresses um that identify you know who's communicating with who with who um and then once you delve into deeper parts of the packets that's when you get into What's called the payload and that includes the actual information that you're trying to send in the packet the content the content of the packet that's correct so your customers would be uh Communications providers like AT&T uh or the Bell System uh do you also sell to government agencies like the National Security Agency or the FBI I can't comment on any on any um particular agencies that we may or may not have sold to um because they haven't given us permission to uh to announce their their names why would AT&T put an rssa system in a room in its San Francisco office to which the NSA has access that's not a question I so as far as I know no one's ever Prov proved anything I don't know I don't know the answer to that question I have no idea if that's ever been done or not you've seen the splitter you've now got the documents you've seen the narus what is it you think is going on here when I saw all that it all clicked together to me oh that's what they're doing this is a spy apparatus Klein decided to blow the whistle he went to see the Electronic Frontier Foundation Cindy con is their senior attorney Mark Klein brought us some very good specific information about a specific facility in San Francisco that confirmed a lot of things that that that we thought were going on we found a few other experts who know about the telecommunications companies and the issues that Mr Klein was talking about and we ran what Mr kleene had given us past them and we said you know does this fly does this hold water to you um and uh we were told yes it does Scott Marcus a former Federal Communications Commission expert estimated that they set up eavesdropping rooms at 15 to 20 sites across the US intercepting about 10% of all purely domestic internet traffic and that's just at AT&T we're not talking about just targeted person-to-person Communications being handed over to the government we're talking about something much bigger we're talking about a wholesale diversion of communications to government control in early 2006 the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit against AT&T asking the court to stop AT&T from handing over customer Communications to the government our case alleges that AT&T is wholesal providing the communication records and ongoing live uh information to the government uh that's a violation of law in court AT&T urged dismissal of the case citing State secrecy both AT&T and NSA refus to talk to Frontline about the case you're aware that there's a case out here in San Francisco uh where people are saying that AT&T violated the law by giving the National Security Agency access to all its phone and internet traffic as a lawyer uh is it your opinion that that actually would violate the law uh no I don't think so if it was part of the President's commander-in chief power to gather information on the signals intelligence of the enemy can the government pull out the communications it wants or does it have to have access to the entire flow I think the government needs to have at least access to the flow even if it was going to enforce a warrant has to have access to the flow under pressure from lawsuits like the AT&T case and from Congress President Bush made a dramatic reversal last January he put the one NSA EES dropping program that he has acknowledged on under the fisa court but he still claims he has the power to go outside fisa anytime he wants and the government isn't saying whether the eaves dropping at AT&T in San Francisco is covered by fisa as far as we know the narst box that Mark Klein told us about is still peering into the internet traffic [Music] they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas but the marketing pitch like the city itself is a paradox while Legions of fund Seekers flock to Vegas every day to get lost in the crowd the reality is that privacy has become an illusion [Music] I see this sign on your cab getting in video and audio recording going on well what we have here is first the minute the doors are open Digital still pictures are taken okay which are saved then the video and audio is running at the same time and in the event that there is a problem then the video camera will now download the 20 seconds previous to the event and what's going on during the event so this is quite a place Las Vegas I mean there's obviously in the airport lots of video and obviously at the hotels and s correct they're loaded with cameras and and now taxis well so we're in film practically moment we arrive correct people that come to Vegas the only time they're not on video is when they're in their room um or they're in in a public restroom they don't have them in those but the hallways the elevators uh the gaming area uh we've taken that to a level that has I think uh uh surpassed any place in in the in the United States Las Vegas as surveillance City struck me as an app metaphor for life in the digital age businesses gather information on us routinely every day we leave digital trails that reveal where we go what we do who we are after 9/11 government agencies moved aggressively to tap into all that information compiled in commercial datab Banks that's what the FBI was doing when it asked for records on 250,000 tourists in Las Vegas so you're looking at Airlines car rental agencies hotels s time share Apartments storage places the works as much as we could get in a the few days that we had to to work with yeah were legal papers produced of some kind there there were official requests for the information it was not uh uh off the Record or in any way um uh inappropriate what you wanted was an assurance that this was a legal request backed by the power of law not just a voluntary compliance absolutely absolutely and why the the concept that someone would want all records with no names identified over period of of time in this case it would give or take a couple of weeks is in our industry an extraordinary request the patriot act includes Provisions that permitted the government and the FBI to do exactly what it did uh with very little or no judicial oversight whatsoever uh it gave the FBI broad sweeping power and authority to engage in precisely this kind of massive fishing Expedition what the Patriot Act had done was vastly expand the reach of national security letters which are FBI administrative subpoenas not approved by any Court one big change that most people haven't quite seen is that before the Patriot Act you could get a national security letter one of these special without a judge get the phone records letters but it would be about one person just about me but now the language was changed so the government can get the entire database and it's just a little change in the language nsls national security letters get X but X went from the suspect to being the entire database that's and that applies to everything telephone records telephone records Financial records your credit histories that applies and it applies to these uh other kind of orders for any kind of record in the American economy did you use national security letters I'm not going to be in a position to tell you what the legal uh Avenues we used were I I can't go there do you know whether or not you got a subpoena a warrant from a court or do you know whether or not you got a national security letter from the FBI here here's the fun of the Patriot Act if we were to have received a national security letter it would be against the law for me to tell you that we did and had you received a subpoena with signed off on by a judge you would be able as a rule usually we would we would acknowledge that we received something and we're left in blanket silence which blank it silenced in the sense that there are quite a few people who say we can't say logical deduction they must have received national security letters direct from the government it would seem to be a logical deduction but the big question remains what did they do with all that information it was burned on to uh CDs here in Las Vegas and then those CDs were transported to Washington DC for comparison against the various terrorist uh watch lists back in Washington the FBI did a batch match matching the list of 250,000 Vegas visitors against watch lists of tens of thousands of terrorist suspects and they got a few hits now when you said there were a few hits was does that mean that there were there might be a similar name on the hotel list and on the watch one of the watch list yes but how could the FBI decipher those hits were those really terrorists or mistaken identities and what if the bad guys had disguised their names to get lost in the crowd how could the FBI fet them out ironically the answer was right here in Las Vegas for years the s have been using special computer software to farad out the hidden links between criminals and prospective employees at one point this young computer wizard named Jeff Jonas approached us and had this idea to use a computer program to compare lots of of data things like addresses phone numbers birth dates uh Social Security numbers where where things were inverted to make it look different is the idea behind the Jonas Software he calls it Nora n o r a to unmask sort of obscured relationships that no that's exactly the idea I mean the idea was to was to determine whether or not someone who is applying as a dealer was in fact associated with or connected with someone who was a known Thief so it the idea was to protect the company's assets before a crime took place our sources said the FBI used Jonas's software to analyze the data collected in Las Vegas but would that invade the privacy of ordinary Americans I'm just wondering that 2003 episode was Jeff Jonas a help were you guys able to use I believe he was the reason I asked as we were actually told that it was used that that that he had you got a sourcer that says it was used you I'm not going to disagree with you or argue with you did I use it I'm I'm not saying did did my department we may have um like I said there's a lot of there's a lot of privacy concerns and there's a lot of issues and there's a lot in the weeds when it comes to private information and how it's used and I'm I'm simply not in a position today and maybe never will be to talk about how we use software to uh uh match up tourist information with potential terrorism suspects we house 2400 terabytes of online system storage enough capacity to contain the entire contents of the US Library of Congress 48 times this is a marketing video for axum since the 1990s companies like Axiom Lexus Nexus and choice Point have marketed their ability to collect vast amounts of data about all of us from home mortgages to spending habits and to create virtual digital dossier Watergate era reforms restricted government use of these private information Empires but after 9/11 the Bush Administration lifted the restraints and pushed agencies aggressively to use private databases this internal FBI document for example spread the word use Choice point to your heart's content when it comes to the Privacy Act the law didn't change but there's a change in computers that changed everything used to be the fear was the government would have the government database in some big room an IBM brainia act computer and the Privacy Act says we're going to protect against problems there today you can't have a big you can't have the big brainia act with the one database on all Americans run by the government but here's the trick what you can do if you're the FBI is you can pinging the private sector database hey Lexus can access it say hey give me uh give me some information on this person or on that person and as long as you just access it one at a time which is the way it works anyways Privacy Act doesn't apply because it's not a government database it's the private sector database the law doesn't apply to the private sector database why should Americans worry about the government having the same kind of information that private companies have companies like Choice Point well the the easy answer is the choice Point can't come and arrest you um they can't come search your house they can't use that information to um to sort of put into motion the Machinery of the justice system uh um once it's in the hands of the government it has those consequences I mean that's why the government's looking for the information if an American company would have access to this data for purpos of conducting business I guess I would argue why wouldn't you want an agency like the FBI in charge of National Security to help you protect American lives and again it's it's done to my knowledge in ance with strict guid headlines and controls it's not willy-nilly there's a structure to the process well not exactly FBI director Robert Muller was called on the carpet by Congress this spring for Myriad abuses by the FBI in using national security letters to secretly collect private records of American citizens the FBI had issued 150,000 National Security letter requests over the past 3 years and the Justice Department's Inspector General determined that thousands were improperly issued I'm deeply disturbed by the justice department inspector General's report finding widespread illegal and improper use of national security letters to obtain Americans phone and financial records Müller acknowledged the problem and the dangers we will correct the deficiencies in our use of national security letters and utilize each of the critical tools Congress has provided us consistent with the Privacy protections and civil liberties that we are sworn to uphold but the FBI is hardly alone in mining the mountains of commercial data now available the government Accounting Office found 199 data mining projects in more than 50 government agencies the granddaddy of them all originated inside an elite defense department research agency known as DARPA the key to fighting terrorism is information we must be able to detect classify identify and track potential foreign terrorists in a world of noise this is a DARPA video for Tia or total information awareness the concept was to use predictive data mining to detect suspicious patterns of terrorist operations human identification at a distance will improve the ability to identify foreign terrorists from a distance and knowledge controversial logo was an allseeing eye if one could imagine that you know we have an eye in the sky and we could truly get all the transactions all the things that that group did to conduct that plot okay to to conduct that attack our thesis is is that that set of transactions across space time and by some number of people will be a unique signature Tia's Mission which required access to enormous volumes of personal data triggered controversy in Congress the total information awareness program is over the line it is invading the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans on us soil total information in 2003 Congress cut off funding for Tia or so it seemed is it true that in that black budget some of the Tia programs were moved over to the National Security Agency all I I can't it's classified I mean all I can say is that there were elements of our agenda at DARPA that the Congress recognized as being valuable uh to the point where they said let's not kill him let's get him out of DARPA and transition him to another agency within the intelligence community and and and I was the guy that did that is it inevitable that we're moving towards a world in which this kind of mass Data Mining and Analysis is is is just going to happen I mean I think it is happening there's been explosion of Information Technology and access to data I mean this is what the internet and all this it revolution has done you know the world is getting digitized it's ubiquitous Information Technology access to data is far more easy and a lot of people see tremendous advantage in being able to tap into that so we should be having an open discussion about this and then maybe talking about what privacy safeguards are needed in a new world bless you absolutely absolutely what do we need to do are we just going to have to live with this is this going to happen inevitably we just have to live with it I I think that we do need to say look data mining or uh Fusion of information or connecting the dots or whatever you want to call it is clearly going to be a huge feature of our law enforcement National Security apparatus uh let's start crafting a a set of rules for it I always said when I was in my position running counterterrorism operations for the FBI how much security do you want and how many rights do you want to give up I can give you more security but I got to take away some rights so there's a balance personally I want to live in a country where you have a a a common sense Fair balance because I'm worried about people that are untrained unsupervised doing things with good intentions but in the end of the day harm our Li our liberties [Music] back in December 2003 Sheriff Bill Young ultimately decided to carry on with Los Vegas's New Year's celebrations so your conclusion was a day or two or three before New Year's Eve that the threat wasn't that hard well it it it wasn't specific enough to me as to time method or place for me to make the call to say let's cancel this New Year's Eve celebration was too vague too vague long after the celebrations were over Steven Sprouse and Kristen Douglas received the disquieting news that they had been swept up in that FBI data Dragnet found out afterwards that all the hotel records were collected what went through your head when you heard that they have no reason to be looking at me I I don't think think that I've done anything to raise any suspicion so I mean just being in Las Vegas on New Year shouldn't be enough for them to say well you know she might be a terrorist I just tell people that uh we we made every effort to safeguard uh the privacy of of everyone whose records were accessed there was no breach uh the information was closely uh safeguarded the FBI says it held all the data from Vegas for more than two years years but has now destroyed it all I work with data I mean you know if it's on the computer it's not really ever gone it's on a tape it's on a backup it's on a drive somewhere a more fundamental concern confronts us all the fourth amendment protects us against unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause so does the strategy of prevention collide with the Constitution the government is doing this kind of data mining has it moved from individualized suspicion getting an individual warrant to generalized suspicion to check everybody to find out who are the bad guys yeah check everybody everybody's a suspect everybody's phone records everybody's email is subject to government scrutiny and if you're good we won't bother you and if you look a little strange then you might get on a watch list isn't that a huge change in Anglo-Saxon law I mean Anglo-Saxon law is based on uh get a warrant the fourth amendment is based on individual suspicion General warrants was part of the reason for the American Revolution it was that the king's agent could go in and search a house everywhere search a whole neighborhood with one warrant and the Boston people said we don't like that we'll have a tea party we'll fight you we said no look there's no doubt that uh there are important Fourth Amendment issues here one is is this a reasonable search and seizure you can still have warrantless searches but they have to be reasonable and then the second question is does the that restriction apply to wartime operations we don't require warrant we don't require reasonable searches and seizures when the Army the military is out on the battlefield attacking killing members of the enemy but that's usually abroad and it doesn't involve American Homeland and American citizens but this but this gets to my point is do you want to make it more difficult for our government to try to stop terrorist attacks the closer that members of Al Qaeda get to the United States the closer they get to striking our uh cities as they did on 9/11 you want to make it more legally difficult for the government to stop that I I don't think so in our tradition of law there is this idea that there is private space around the individual you know the individual's home their papers as it says in the Constitution uh that there is this there is a sphere around you that the the government can't come into without meeting this level of Suspicion and and what I see in all of these developments is the sphere is getting smaller and smaller you know we're allowing access to much more information so that maybe the government can't come into that sphere but they can go all the way around it they can get the Contours the outlines of your daily life uh through a lot of this information that isn't protected as well um and I think that's what's eroding so many people in America think this does not affect them they've been convinced that these programs are only targeted at suspected terrorists I'm not engaged in any terrorist activities therefore this does not concern me there's no no way in which I'm going to be caught up in this uh activity and you think that's wrong and I think that's wrong I think that as I said I think our technology is not perfect our programs are not perfect and it is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs it seems to be like the beginning of we're going to treat everyone like a bad guy to begin with knowing that most of them are not bad guys but we're going to start with the assumption that everybody's a bad guy and then if we just collect the right stuff and connect the right dots we'll find the real bad guys did you find any terrorists no no we didn't so when you got to the bottom of it you found nothing which was on about the 29th of December we had gone through everything and we had uh had no uh no identifiable no known terrorists or terrorist Associates later we learned that in fact the original intelligence warning about Las Vegas was mistaken in decoding a suspected Alca a message someone got it [Music] [Music] wrong next time on front line he's been so vly anti-gay a conservative mayor and now we find him in gay.com an aggressive newspaper what if he's using the internet to have sex with underage boys and a story that took apart a man's life the worst thing you can say about somebody is that they're a sexual predator how do you refute that Frontline examines the conflict between the public interest and a hidden life next time on [Music] Frontline to front lines spying on the home front on DVD call PBS home video at 1 1800 play [Music] PBS Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you thank you additional funding for Frontline is provided by the park foundation with additional funding for this program from the jet 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