NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander denied that his agency spies on Americans' social networks or that it compiles graphs of citizens' online social connections, contrary to recent media reports.
"Is the NSA compiling profiles or dossiers of American people to the use of its intelligence authorities?" Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Alexander and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, at a Wednesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secretive court that authorizes some of the NSA's surveillance programs.
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"Those reports are inaccurate and wrong ," Alexander responded.
Then, when referred directly to The New York Times story that revealed how the NSA allegedly conducts "large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness," according to an NSA memorandum from January 2011 quoted by the paper, Alexander again denied the allegations.
"They are flat out wrong saying we're creating dossiers on Americans," he said.
"Are you going into social networks?" Leahy then asked specifically.
"No," Alexander responded, before later adding: "We aren't doing that and the insinuation that we're doing it is flat out wrong."
This is not the first time Alexander has denied that the NSA is collecting dossiers on Americans. The first time he countermanded such an accusation was at the 2012 hacking conference Def Con.
At the time, Def Con's organizer, Jeff Moss, asked him whether the NSA really keeps a file on everyone, as reported by Wired at the time. Alexander responded: "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."
At Wednesday's hearing, Alexander was later pressed by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct.) about the Times article, asking if there's no social mapping that includes Americans. Alexander again answered in the negative, saying that they collect data on foreign targets, not American citizens.
"Our information is foreign. And all the information that we bring in [that's] foreign that even has U.S. data in it, we do the maximum extent we can to filter out any U.S. data so we wouldn't have that in our repository," Alexander explained. "The fact that people assume that we're out there mapping the social networks of U.S. persons is absolutely wrong . [...] We don't have the Facebook and all that stuff on those people here in the U.S."
Alexander finally promised Blumenthal two written point-by-point responses to the Times article, one classified, and one unclassified.
Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the Cato Institute who focuses on technology and civil liberties, warns that Alexander's words must be carefully interpreted, and that in the online world, you can map Americans' social networks even if you start with foreign data.
"If you're building a social graph starting with a foreigner and you build far enough," he told Mashable, "you're of course also going to be building up the social graphs of Americans."
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