Nobody really knows what the National Security Agency is up to on a day-to-day level. The massive intelligence outfit is responsible for monitoring foreign communication operates in such secrecy that nobody really knows how big its operation in Fort Meade, Maryland is or what they're doing inside. But what they don't do, says NSA chief General Keith Alexander, is spy on Americans. When asked whether the NSA keeps a file on every American at last week's DefCon cybersecurity conference, Alexander said unequivocally: "No, we don't. Absolutely no. And anybody who would tell you that we're keeping files or dossiers on the American people knows that's not true."But there's a catch. "We may, incidentally, in targeting a bad guy, hit on somebody from a good guy," Alexander continued. "We have requirements from the FISA court and the attorney general to minimize that, which means nobody else can see it unless there's a crime that's been committed… And so from my perspective, the people who would say that we're [targeting Americans] should know better."The last bit from Alexander, who was the first current NSA official ever to speak at DefCon, is an obvious jab at folks like former NSA official William Binney, who's been blowing the whistle on the NSA's privacy violations over the course of the past year or so.Speaking on a panel later in the conference, Binney disputed Alexander's claim that the NSA didn't spy on Americans, calling his keynote a "word game." Binney said that the spying dates back to 2001, when the NSA first asked telecom companies like Qwest, AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth for the calling records of its customers. "Unfortunately, once the software takes in data, it will build profiles on everyone in that data," he said. "You can simply call it up by the attributes of anyone you want and it's in place for people to look at."Inevitably, it's up to Congress to keep an eye on the NSA and the amount of information they are or aren't collecting on Americans. Then again, there's a catch there, too. "All the oversight is totally dependent on what the NSA tells them," Binney said at DefCon. "They have no way of knowing what [the NSA is] really doing unless they're told."
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