CBS News
June 9, 2013
After a pair of mass online and phone surveillance programs were revealed in two stunning reports, the National Security Agency has decided to go after whoever revealed them.
A Director of National Intelligence official confirmed to CBS News correspondent Major Garrett that the highly secretive NSA has asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak. Reuters described the formal request as a “crimes report.”
The Obama Administration has shown a pattern of aggressively going after leakers of highly sensitive information that it does not itself leak, even going so far as to investigate the journalists reporting on them.
The first of the two leaks were reported in the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper. They claimed to have information on a program collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order.
The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and was good until July 19, the Guardian said. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies, on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.
The second leak involved a top-secret arm of the controversial Stellar Wind program set up in the wake of 9/11 is allowing the National Security Agency and the FBI to tap directly into the central servers of nine major Internet companies to extract audio, video, photos, emails and documents that let analysts track an individual’s communication.