WASHINGTON: A US intelligence agency Requested a criminal probe on Saturday into the leak of highly classified information about secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, a spokesman for the intelligence chief’s office said.
Confirmation that the NSA filed a “crimes report” came a few hours after the nation’s spy chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper launched an aggressive defense of a secret government data collection program.
Clapper blasted what he called “reckless disclosures” of a highly classified spy agency project code-named PRISM.
It was not known how broad a leaks investigation was requested by the super-secret NSA, but Shawn Turner, a spokesman for Clapper’s office, said a “crimes report has been filed.”
The report goes to the Justice Department, which has established procedures for determining whether an investigation is warranted. Prosecutors do not accept all requests, but they have brought a series of high-profile leak investigations under President Barack Obama.
US officials said the NSA leaks were so astonishing they expected the Justice Department to take the case.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
In a statement earlier on Saturday, Clapper acknowledged PRISM’s existence by name for the first time and said it had been mischaracterized by the media.
The project was legal, not aimed at US citizens and had thwarted threats against the country, he said.
“Over the last week we have seen reckless disclosures of intelligence community measures used to keep Americans safe,” Clapper said in a statement.
He said the surveillance activities reported in the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper were lawful and conducted under authorities approved by Congress.
“Significant misimpressions” have resulted from recent articles, he said.
‘APPROPRIATE FOREIGN
INTELLIGENCE PURPOSE’
Internet providers have said they knew nothing about any NSA collection program called PRISM and that they have only cooperated with legal government requests for data.
The government can only target someone for internet surveillance if “there is an appropriate, and documented foreign intelligence purpose” for collection, the fact sheet said.
Those purposes include countering terrorism, weapons proliferation and cyber threats, Clapper said in the statement. He did not further explain how those broad targeting guidelines were used in practice.
Previous administration statements in the wake of leaks about the NSA program had not mentioned that it was gathering information related to cyber threats and weapons proliferation.
The Guardian published a story Yesterday, based on what it said were more leaked classified NSA documents, about what it described as an internal agency data mining tool created to track the focus of NSA’s efforts to collect “metadata” – primitive raw information about message traffic – from around the world.
The newspaper said that a different NSA fact sheet it obtained said that the tool, code-named Boundless Informant, “allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country.” (Reuters)