WELCOME

The NSA had been in active communication with the FBI

Feb. 3, 2018 by Devin Jones

The NSA had been in active communication with the FBI at the time of the operation. It had reportedly provided information on two separate phone calls involving Russian officials, both of which were intercepted by law enforcement. The NSA did not disclose how much information it had collected.

In May, USA Today reported that the NSA had tracked the Russian operations on "multiple occasions," including "the FBI's ability to use the telephone calls to locate individuals who may be connected to Russian hackers. But that information could have helped the feds in a way that could have been even more difficult to intercept. "The NSA's access to the phone calls and other data has been limited by the fact that some of the calls were recorded, so an NSA analyst knew that the communications had been recorded." The NSA did not provide specific explanations for that lack of detail, but the agency did say that it had been using "full latitude" to track the phone numbers on the calls. "We are aware of the NSA's decision to use the location information provided by the NSA to identify individuals and the phone calls they may have had in order to gather information, including personal information, and we are working to address that concern in a future update of this report," a spokeswoman said in an email.

The NSA's continued surveillance of the phone calls from persons on the receiving end of the calls is part of the government's ongoing effort to identify and disrupt Russian influence peddling operations. The agency would not say whether the NSA collected the phone calls or whether the NSA collected the information from the phone calls.

As we've reported previously, the NSA has been using the phone intercepts of individuals on the receiving end of Russian disinformation ops on American soil in recent years. In fact, several of the calls from the Russian government to the State Department and to the State Department were taken by US-based entities, including the White House.

The NSA and its allies have been monitoring state-sponsored activity in the US since at least the late 1990s. As a last resort, the US government has repeatedly been using its massive surveillance powers to gather data on the citizens of the United States to harass and surveil those with whom it is in contact. The NSA's monitoring of communications on American soil is ongoing and ongoing, but it is ongoing as it gathers more and more information on those who are connected to Russia and what the agencies are doing to prevent Russian disinformation operations.

The NSA has been using the phone intercepts of individuals on the receiving end of Russian disinformation ops on American soil in recent years.