US agency shared foreign data with others, aides report

WASHINGTON -- National Security Agency eavesdropping on US-overseas communications has been passed on to other government agencies, officials said.

The NSA has turned such information over to the Defense Intelligence Agency and to other government entities, said three current and former senior administration officials. It could not be determined which agencies had received what types of information.

Data from intercepts, typically including records of telephone or e-mail communications, would be made available by request to agencies that are allowed to have it.

These include the FBI, DIA, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security, a former official said. One organization, the Defense Intelligence Agency, has used National Security Agency information as a basis for watching people suspected of posing a threat, according to two sources. A Defense Intelligence Agency spokesman said the agency does not conduct such domestic surveillance, but declined to comment further.

Aides for the FBI, the CIA, and the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, declined to comment on the use or the dissemination of NSA data.

Since the report last month that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to intercept communications inside the United States, public concern has focused primarily on the legality of the agency's reported eavesdropping.

Less attention has been paid to, and little is known about, how the NSA's information may have been used by other government agencies to investigate US citizens or to cross-check with other databases.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the military used NSA intercepts to maintain files on US peace activists, revelations of which prompted Congress to restrict the NSA from intercepting communications of Americans.

An NSA intercept yesterday yielded two categories of information, said a former administration official familiar with the program: ''content," which would include transcripts of a phone call or e-mail, and ''noncontent," records showing, for example, who in the United States had been called by, or had called, a number in another country thought to have a connection to a terrorist group. The NSA tried to limit identifying names of Americans involved.

''NSA can make either type of information available to other agencies where relevant, but with appropriate masking of its origin," meaning the source and method of getting data would be concealed, the former official said.

Agencies that get the information can use it to conduct ''data mining," or to look for matches with other databases that they maintain, which may or may not be specifically geared toward detecting terrorism threats, he said. ''They are seeking to separate the known from the unknown, relationships or associations," he said.

Sometimes, the National Security Agency would monitor telephones, e-mail messages, or fax communications in cases where individuals in the United States were linked to an alleged foreign terrorist group, officials have said. The NSA, officials said, limited its decisions to follow-up with more electronic surveillance on an individual to those cases where there was some apparent link to terrorist sources.

But other agencies, one former official said, have used phone numbers or other records obtained from NSA in combination with wide-ranging databases to look for links and associations.