How the NSA Ends Up With Information on Americans Without Targeting Them

Other agencies can secure a warrant and ask the NSA for assistance, or the agency can intercept communications with foreigners being monitored.

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During a June 28 show, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson told his viewers that a whistleblower within the U.S. government had warned him that the National Security Agency (NSA) was monitoring his electronic communications and was planning to leak them in an attempt to take his show off the air. This week, a group of House Republicans led by Rep. Louie Gohmert sent a letter to the NSA demanding more information.

Carlson’s accusation prompted the NSA to make a rare public statement denying that Carlson had been personally targeted—but the statement didn’t deny that any of Carlson’s communications had been collected by the agency.

Axios later reported that Carlson was communicating with Kremlin intermediaries in the United States about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin, which potentially could have created a scenario in which the NSA incidentally collected Carlson’s communications.

The NSA’s mission is to support national security and foreign policy by protecting classified national security information and collecting information about foreign adversaries’ secret communications.  It typically carries out its mission through three separate operations: hacking operations, overseas collection, and domestic collection.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    I’m fully willing to believe there are people within the NSA who abuse power but the idea that they’d go after Tucker is a joke. I’d only believe that if someone had a personal grudge against him. Any abuse is more likely to be people snooping on their ex who cheated on them and similar shenanigans.

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  2. Alex DeLarge

    All these legalistic rules and procedure are easily evaded with simple cut-outs and work arounds. For example, if you can't technically spy on an American, just have the Australians or Brits do it as your proxy and tell you what they found. Or back door it through the private tech companies themselves.

    Or easiest of all, just ignore the rules altogether. The best part of being a secret agency is that no one knows what you are doing anyway.

    The IC is obviously engaged in wholesale, non-stop surveillance and disinformation. We know they do it . . . because they can. We also know they are doing it to manipulate domestic politics. But as long as they are intervening on behalf of the Establishment/MSM, those people will never complain.

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    1. Tim Johnson

      Including the word 'obviously' doesn't obscure the fact you're making sweeping 'what-if' accusations with no facts at all to back them up.

      But hey, this is a story about Tucker Carlson, so the pattern fits.

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  3. Avatar photo
    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    As I have said before, my advice to you young singles is if you want a good marriage, find yourself someone who will listen to you as much as the NSA does.

    And as Thomas Berger wrote "God Bless George Washington ya durned fool"! (can't be too safe).

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  4. Avatar photo
    Victor Clairmont

    Sorry, but the FBI with FISA abused their authority constantly in the getting permission area. And I seriously doubt I would trust the NSA to be following the rules to the letter also, Tucker Carlsons claims aside.

    We still have had barely any repercussions for leakers from the previous administration, and trusting unelected protectors from the NSA, FBI, or CIA at this point in domestic issues is a recipe for more disaster.

    The agencies need a good cleaning and new rules about transparency or accountability to someone, and people do need to be fired. The past 5 years has done little to assure Americans that these agencies are neutral and not politically motivated.

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    1. Tim Johnson

      'Constantly' how? Take a single claim instance from Tucker Carlson (the paragon of honesty he) and defame the entire intelligence community.

      as far as the leakers from the previous president, a lot of that is turning to come from his minions - note Meadows 'leaking' information about the president's true health from his Covid hospital stay. Meadows himself insisted on being an anonymous source.

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  5. Zach

    What this article doesn't address is that the NSA leaked the information collected to Journalist in the media. One of the journalist then told Carlson about the information collected. While I understand the process and I am certainly willing to buy that this was a normal part of the process, why is the information leaked to people in the media? That's the real scandal here.

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    1. DJ

      Who did they leak it to? Only Tucker Carlson has made claims about this. No one has written any stories about it except in reaction to his ridiculous statements. Not even Fox journalists have run with the story.

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    2. Eric L

      Doesn't Tucker claim the whistleblower came directly to him? Not through a different journalist?

      As Jonah Goldberg has hypothesized on one of the podcasts, this could have easily been a 'good-faith' notice from an NSA employee to Tucker but Tucker wants it to be a story.

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      1. Tim Johnson

        Correct - Zach's taking the facts and shaping to fit his own worldview. Like, say, Tucker.

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      2. Scott Maynor

        To divert attention from Tucker's leaking to the NYT.

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    Tom Westberg

    Unmasking may be fairly common, but what is a good national security reason to want to know the name of a reporter trying to arrange an interview with a foreign official? And then leaking that to Axios? Carlson's claim may have been overblown (a populist pundit doing such things: I'm shocked!) but the unmasking (and leaking) do not seem defensible. Much like with Michael Flynn.

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      Chris K

      Has any actual evidence been presented that shows the NSA leaked to Axios, above and beyond Carlson's say-so? Note that in the past, Carlson has escaped legal jeopardy by having Fox's lawyers argue that his statements shouldn't be taken as factual (being an opinion fellow, and not an actual journalist in his own right) during the Karen McDougal slander case. (He created the Sydney Powell "no reasonable person could believe this is true" defense before Powell was sued by Dominion.)

      Given his past brushes with "truthiness", some additional corroborating evidence might be in order before taking him at his word.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Tom Westberg

        I certainly understand your skepticism about Carlson’s credibility but the Flynn case is a documented example of unmasking that should not have occurred. That makes it a valid idea with a credible motivation. Aside from “everything Carlson says is a lie” how do you explain the Axios report? They did not say their information was through nsa, true, but is this the “the Russian mediators leaked it to sow chaos” explanation?

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        1. DJ

          "the Flynn case is a documented example of unmasking that should not have occurred"

          What?! It absolutely should have occurred. The Obama administration was trying to figure out why Russia did not respond to new sanctions, and one clue was a call by the Russian ambassador to a cell phone in the Caribbean.

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        2. Avatar photo
          Chris K

          Alternative explanations for the Axios report with as much hard evidence as Carlson's provided (which is to say, little to none):

          1. Carlson's confidential circle of friends isn't as tight and secure as he thinks it is and someone in his circle leaked it. I seriously doubt that Carlson manages all of his incoming and outgoing communications on his own (the volume must be immense), so it may be an intern who filters out the junk mail and cranks who caught wind of this and leaked it.

          2. The Russians with whom he was in contact are not as tight and secure as he thinks it is and leaked it either accidentally or intentionally (to create the scenario we're seeing right now).

          3. Axios contacted Carlson or someone Carlson knows for comment, so Carlson had a good idea that the story was landing and decided to brush it under the NSA rug he had constructed a week or two before.

          4. Recently, Carlson was outed as a gossipy source for a lot of reporting on media figures on the political beat, and one of the folks he squealed on leaked the story as retribution. Carlson started beating the NSA drum AFTER he was outed, so he could cast whatever was leaked in payback under a fake grievance under Biden's administration. (I believe the Dispatch's own Jonah Goldberg advanced this theory first.)

          One other thing to note is that while Carlson's beating this drum, the news side of Fox News is strangely silent on this issue. From the McDougal case, we know that Carlson has a license to make stuff up as an opinion writer - the folks reporting on the actual news (or the lawyers advising them) - who can't use the "take me seriously, not literally" defense - might be staying away from this given an unacceptable risk that Carlson is peddling falsehoods again.

          In the end, all we have right now about whether Carlson was spied upon was Carlson's own less-than-sterling reputation for honesty. I don't have too much to say about Michael Flynn's case, other than if he can show that someone broke the rules/law, then they should be subject to the consequences of their actions.

          Look - I'm more on your side than not when it comes to NSA snooping. I'm just worried that incorporating Carlson's "truthiness" into the circle of evidence weakens the case for others to take it seriously and do something about it, should we find out that Carlson was the Boy Crying Wolf once more for attention, deflection, and ratings.

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          1. Avatar photo
            Tom Westberg

            I don’t think you’re correct on how much we agree, and we’re sort of down to measuring Tucker Carlson’s credibility on the head of a pin. I come from the Nervous about NSA behavior direction, and you may start from the Tucker is first a muckraking populist position and certainly his entire claims (NSA is targeting him to destroy his show) are not credible. The thrust of his claim (ignoring the self-aggrandizement) was that a “whistle-blower” told him his private messages were leaked to other media in a way to discredit him, and that occurred.

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    2. Tom (Inadvertent Obfuscation)

      The procedures for protecting citizens from abuse are only as good as the people implementing them. Every organization has people too weak to follow the rules. The problem here is that secrecy makes accountability difficult.
      Could the NSA ever state that some of their people have been disciplined for abuse? (I seem to remember such a statement for someone spying on a potential girlfriend.)

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