US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Magda Hassan]

U.S. likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks -officials

Sat Jun 8, 2013 5:53am IST

* Investigation may be required by law, official says
* Articles come in same week as start of WikiLeaks trial
By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON, June 7 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama'sadministration is likely to open a criminal investigation intothe leaking of highly classified documents that revealed thesecret surveillance of Americans' telephone and email traffic,U.S. officials said on Friday.
The law enforcement and security officials, who were notauthorized to speak publicly, said the agencies that normallyconduct such investigations, including the FBI and JusticeDepartment, were expecting a probe into the leaks to a Britishand an American newspaper.
Such investigations typically begin after an agency thatbelieves its secrets have been leaked without authorizationfiles a complaint with the Justice Department.
It was unclear on Friday whether a complaint had beensubmitted by the publicity-shy National Security Agency, whichwas most directly involved in the collection of trillions oftelephone and email communications.
However, one U.S. official with knowledge of the situationsaid that given the extent and sensitivity of the recent leaks,federal law may compel officials to open an investigation.
A criminal probe would represent another turn in the Obamaadministration's battle against national security leaks. Thiseffort has been under scrutiny lately because of a JusticeDepartment investigation that has involved searches of the phonerecords of Associated Press journalists and a Fox News reporter.
Leaks to media outlets this week have revealed a governmentcampaign of domestic surveillance going far beyond anything thathad been acknowledged previously.
Late on Wednesday, Britain's Guardian newspaper publishedwhat U.S. officials later acknowledged was an order, approved bythe secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,requiring a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to givethe NSA raw data showing phone calls made from numbers withinthe United States and from U.S. numbers to those overseas.
The data did not include the identities of people who madethe calls or the contents of the calls.
On Thursday, the Guardian and the Washington Post publishedslides from a secret NSA powerpoint presentation that describedhow the agency gathered masses of email data from prominentInternet firms, including Google, Facebook and Apple under aTop-Secret program called PRISM.
Some of the companies denied that the NSA and FBI had"direct access" to their central servers, as the Post reported.
On Friday, for example, Facebook founder and Chief ExecutiveMark Zuckerberg said his company "is not and has never been partof any program to give the U.S. or any other government directaccess to our servers."
"We have never received a blanket request or court orderfrom any government agency asking for information or metadata inbulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received," Zuckerbergsaid. "And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn'teven heard of PRISM" before Thursday, he said.
James Clapper, the director of U.S. national intelligence,condemned the leaks and asserted that the news articles aboutPRISM contained "numerous inaccuracies."
WIKILEAKS
Journalists involved in The Guardian and Washington Postarticles have reported in depth on WikiLeaks, the website knownfor publishing secret U.S. government documents.
The Post report on the PRISM program was co-written by LauraPoitras, a filmmaker who has been working on a documentary onWikiLeaks, with the cooperation of its founder Julian Assange,and who last year made a short film about Bill Binney, a formerNSA employee who became a whistleblowing critic of the agency.
Last year, the web magazine Salon published a lengthyarticle by the author of the Guardian report, Glenn Greenwald,accusing U.S. authorities of harassing Poitras when she left andre-entered the United States. Greenwald also has writtenfrequently about Assange.
The Guardian and Post stories appeared in the same week thatU.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning went on trial inMaryland accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classifieddocuments to WikiLeaks.
In an email to Reuters on Friday, Poitras rejected thenotion that the trial had any impact on the timing of her story.
"I am fully aware we are living in a political climate wherenational security reporting is being targeted by the government,however, I don't think fear should stop us from reporting thesestories," Poitras wrote.
"To suggest that the timing of the NSA PRISM story is linkedin any way to other events or stories I'm following is simplywrong. Like any journalist, I have many contacts and followmultiple stories."
Kris Coratti, a Washington Post spokeswoman, said the timingof the paper's publication of Poitras' story had nothing to dowith Manning's trial and that Assange had played no role inarranging or encouraging the story.
Greenwald did not respond to emailed requests for comment.The Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, declined tocomment. (Editing by David Lindsey and David Brunnstrom)
http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/06/08...SO20130608