Former Spook: Don’t Believe Everything You’ve Heard About the NSA

The former No. 2 official at the National Security Agency defended the embattled organization Thursday, one year to the day after an article in the Guardian based on leaked documents revealed that the NSA was collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, sparking the biggest public debate over national security and civil liberties in four decades.

Chris Inglis, who retired in January after working nearly 30 years at the NSA, disputed the allegation that the spy agency cast a dragnet over the private communications of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans who aren’t connected to terrorist organizations — the agency’s stated targets. "The NSA’s surveillance capability is not vast. It’s not what you’ve heard," Inglis said during a debate over NSA surveillance at the Brookings Institution.

Inglis said that the NSA doesn’t know the names attached to the phone numbers it collects under the bulk records program. Nor, he said, can the agency legally use people’s calling history to create a map of their behavior, including their political affiliation, sexual orientation, or fidelity, as critics of the NSA’s programs have alleged. The program is also overseen by three branches of government, he said — it’s run by the NSA, authorized by Congress, and monitored by a court.

Opposing Inglis in the debate, Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said those skeptical of large-scale government surveillance don’t doubt the agency’s legitimate need to collect intelligence for national security. But he questioned whether the phone-records program was as useful or as tightly controlled as Inglis said.

If the system of oversight was so robust, Jaffer asked, "Why was it that only after the program was disclosed, the president determined it was unnecessary?" In January, President Obama announced that the NSA can no longer hold onto Americans’ phone records. Congress is debating changing the law so that phone companies possess the data instead.

But despite legislative attempts to rein in the NSA, and a year of blistering public criticism, Inglis said the agency is generally in the same place it was before the leaks of Edward Snowden when it comes to its ability to gather intelligence to detect and prevent terrorist attacks.

"At the end of the day that data is still available" to the NSA, even if it’s in the hands of phone companies, Inglis said.