salon | "It's not just the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program,'" agrees Gregory
T. Nojeim from the Center for Democracy and Technology, referring to the
Bush administration's misleading name for the NSA's warrantless
wiretapping program. "We need a broad investigation on the way all the
moving parts fit together. It seems like we're always looking at little
chunks and missing the big picture."
A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the
Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its
domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government
insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores --
without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of
Americans considered to be threats to national security.
According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive
knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current
incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on
Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions
and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other
agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an
emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the
military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the
Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is
derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or
essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced
by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no
direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have
been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say,
may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the
White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General
John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice
officials to resign en masse.
The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for
the surveillance program -- former Deputy Attorney General James B.
Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel
-- testified before Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the
White House. Although they refused to discuss the highly classified
details behind their concerns, the New York Times later reported
that they were objecting to a program that "involved computer searches
through massive electronic databases" containing "records of the phone
calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans."
According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who
left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main
Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the
president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in
government and the private sector, says there are strong indications
that the Bush administration's domestic surveillance operations use Main
Core.
Hamilton's company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement
community for creating a program called the Prosecutors' Management
Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations
through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored
data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to
the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the
insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with
results showing up almost instantly. "It operates just like Google,"
Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.
Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute
over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan
administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that
Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted
the software -- and its outstanding ability to search other databases --
to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions.
Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the
case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and
secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former
White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never
been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he
believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for
searching the Main Core database.
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