Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata'

May 12, 2014 12:59pm

The U.S. government kill[s] people based on metadata, but it doesnt do that with the trove of information collected on American communications, according to former head of the National Security Agency Gen. Michael Hayden.

Hayden made the remark after saying he agreed with the idea that metadata the information collected by the NSA about phone calls and other communications that does not include content can tell the government everything about anyone its targeting for surveillance, often making the actual content of the communication unnecessary.

[That] description is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata. But thats not what we do with this metadata, said Hayden, apparently referring to domestic metadata collection. Its really important to understand the program in its entirety. Not the potentiality of the program, but how the program is actually conducted.

So NSA gets phone records, gets them from the telephone company, been getting them since October of 2001 from one authority or another, puts them in a lockbox and under very strict limitations can access the lockbox, Hayden said and then described a hypothetical situation in which a number connected to a terrorist could be run against the metadata already collected to help investigators find additional leads in the name of national security.

What it cannot do are all those things that allows someone to create your social network, your social interactions, your patterns of behavior. One could make the argument that could be useful, [or] that could be illegal, but its not done, he said. In this debate, its important to distinguish what might be done with what is being done.

Hayden, who served as NSA head from 1999 to 2005 followed by a stint running the CIA from 2006 to 2009, made the remarks early last month while discussing the NSAs mass domestic and foreign surveillance programs at Johns Hopkins Universitys Foreign Affairs Symposium.

David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who was Haydens foil in the discussion, this weekend wrote in the New York Review of Books that Haydens remarks were evidence that arguments from government officials that there is little threat to privacy from metadata collection is misleading. In the April discussion, Cole noted President Barack Obamas remarks to reporters last June, as media reports based on leaks by from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were just beginning, in which he said, Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.

They are not looking at peoples names, theyre not looking at content, Obama said then. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.

Six months later, an expert review panel set up by the White House recommended the government cease the mass collection of metadata on Americans.

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Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata'