January 23, 2006
What American Intelligence & Especially the NSA Have Been Doing to Defend the Nation
Remarks by General Michael V. Hayden to the National Press Club

Good morning. I'm happy to be here to talk a bit about what American intelligence has
been doing and especially what NSA has been doing to defend the nation.

Now, as Keith points out, I'm here today not only as Ambassador John Negroponte's
deputy in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, I'm also here as the former
director of the National Security Agency, a post I took in March of 1999 and left only last
spring.

Serious issues have been raised in recent weeks, and discussion of serious issues should
be based on facts. There's a lot of information out there right now.

Some of it is, frankly, inaccurate. Much of it is just simply misunderstood. I'm here to tell
the American people what NSA has been doing and why. And perhaps more importantly,
what NSA has not been doing.

Now, admittedly, this is a little hard to do while protecting our country's intelligence
sources and methods. And, frankly, people in my line of work generally don't like to talk
about what they've done until it becomes a subject on the History Channel. But let me
make one thing very clear. As challenging as this morning might be, this is the speech I
want to give. I much prefer being here with you today telling you about the things we have
done when there hasn't been an attack on the homeland. This is a far easier presentation
to make than the ones I had to give four years ago telling audiences like you what we
hadn't done in the days and months leading up to the tragic events of September 11th.
Today's story isn't an easy one to tell in this kind of unclassified environment, but it is by
far the brief I prefer to present.

Now, I know we all have searing memories of the morning of September 11th. I know I do.
Making the decision to evacuate non- essential workers at NSA while the situation was
unclear; seeing the NSA counterterrorism shop in tears while we were tacking up blackout
curtains around their windows; like many of you, making that phone call, asking my wife to
find our kids, and then hanging up the phone on her.

Another memory for me comes two days later -- that's the 13th of September -- when I
addressed the NSA workforce to lay out our mission in a new environment. It was a short
video talk; we beamed it throughout our headquarters at Fort Meade and globally
throughout our global enterprise. Now, most of what I said was what anyone would
expect. I tried to inspire: our work was important; the nation was depending on us. I tried
to comfort: Look on the bright side, I said to them, right now a quarter billion Americans
wish they had your job, being able to go after the enemy.

I ended the talk by trying to give a little perspective. I noted that all free peoples have had
to balance the demands of liberty with the demands of security, and historically,
historically we Americans have been able to plant our flag well down the spectrum toward
liberty. Here was our challenge, I said, and I'm quoting from that presentation: "We are
going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again."

But to start the story with that Thursday, December 13th, is a bit misleading. It's a little bit
like coming in near the end of the first reel of a movie. To understand that moment and
that statement, you would have to know a little bit about what had happened to the
National Security Agency in the preceding years.

Look, NSA intercepts communications, and it does so for only one purpose -- to protect
the lives, the liberties and the well-being of the citizens of the United States from those
who would do us harm. By the late 1990s, that job was becoming increasingly more
difficult. The explosion of modern communications in terms of volume, variety, velocity
threatened to overwhelm us.

The agency took a lot of criticism in those days, I know, criticism that it was going deaf,
that it was ossified in its thinking, that it had not and could not keep up with the changes in
modern communications. And all of that was only reinforced when all of the computer
systems at Fort Meade went dark for three days in January of 2000 and we couldn't
quickly or easily explain why.

Those were really interesting times. As we were being criticized for being incompetent and
going deaf, at the same time others seemed to be claiming that we were omniscient and
we were reading your e- mails. The Washington Post and New Yorker Magazine during
that time -- I'm talking 1999 now of 2000 -- they wrote, incorrectly, that -- and I'm quoting --
"NSA has turned from eavesdropping on the communists to eavesdropping on businesses
and private citizens."

And that -- and I'm quoting again -- "NSA has the ability to extend its eavesdropping
network without limits." We are also referred to as a, quote, "global spying network that
can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail anywhere on the planet."

I used those quotes in a speech I gave at American University in February of 2000. The
great urban legend out there then was something called "Echelon" and the false
accusation that NSA was using its capabilities to advance American corporate interests --
signals intelligence for General Motors, or something like that. You know, with these kinds
of charges, the turf back then feels a bit familiar now. How could we prove a negative --
that we weren't doing certain things -- without revealing the appropriate things we were
doing that kept America safe? You see, NSA had, NSA has an existential problem. In
order to protect American lives and liberties, it has to be two things: powerful in its
capabilities, and secretive in its methods. And we exist in a political culture that distrusts
two things most of all: power and secrecy.

Modern communications didn't make this any easier. Gone were the days when signals of
interest -- that's what NSA calls the things they want to copy -- gone were the days when
signals of interest went along some dedicated microwave link between strategic rocket
forces headquarters in Moscow and some ICBM in western Siberia. By the late '90s, what
NSA calls targeted communications -- things like al Qaeda communications -- coexisted
out there in a great global web with your phone calls and my e-mails. NSA needed the
power to pick out the one, and the discipline to leave the others alone.

So, this question of security and liberty wasn't a new one for us in September of 2001.
We've always had this question: How do we balance the legitimate need for foreign
intelligence with our responsibility to protect individual privacy rights?

It's a question drilled into every employee of NSA from day one, and it shapes every
decision about how NSA operates.

September 11th didn't change that. But it did change some things. This ability to intercept
communication -- we commonly refer to it as Signals Intelligence or SIGINT. SIGINT is a
complex business, with operational and technological and legal imperatives often
intersecting and overlapping. There's routinely some freedom of action -- within the law --
to adjust operations. After the attacks, I exercised some options I've always had that
collectively better prepared us to defend the homeland.

Look, let me talk for a minute about this, okay? Because a big gap in the current
understanding, a big gap in the current debate is what's standard? What is it that NSA
does routinely? Where we set the threshold, for example, for what constitutes inherent
foreign intelligence value? That's what we're directed to collect. That's what we're required
to limit ourselves to -- inherent foreign intelligence value. Where we set that threshold, for
example, in reports involving a U.S. person shapes how we do our job, shapes how we
collect, shapes how we report. The American SIGINT system, in the normal course of
foreign intelligence activities, inevitably captures this kind of information, information to,
from or about what we call a U.S. person. And by the way, "U.S. person" routinely includes
anyone in the United States, citizen or not.

So, for example, because they were in the United States -- and we did not know anything
more -- Mohamed Atta and his fellow 18 hijackers would have been presumed to have
been protected persons, U.S. persons, by NSA prior to 9/11.

Inherent foreign intelligence value is one of the metrics we must use. Let me repeat that:
Inherent foreign intelligence value is one of the metrics we must use to ensure that we
conform to the Fourth Amendment's reasonable standard when it comes to protecting the
privacy of these kinds of people. If the U.S. person information isn't relevant, the data is
suppressed. It's a technical term we use; we call it "minimized." The individual is not even
mentioned. Or if he or she is, he or she is referred to as "U.S. Person Number One" or
"U.S. Person Number Two." Now, inherent intelligence value. If the U.S. person is actually
the named terrorist, well, that could be a different matter. The standard by which we
decided that, the standard of what was relevant and valuable, and therefore, what was
reasonable, would understandably change, I think, as smoke billowed from two American
cities and a Pennsylvania farm field. And we acted accordingly.

To somewhat oversimplify this, this question of inherent intelligence value, just by way of
illustration, to just use an example, we all had a different view of Zacarias Moussaoui's
computer hard drive after the attacks than we did before.

Look, this is not unlike things that happened in other areas. Prior to September 11th,
airline passengers were screened in one way. After September 11th, we changed how we
screen passengers. In the same way, okay, although prior to September 11th certain
communications weren't considered valuable intelligence, it became immediately clear
after September 11th that intercepting and reporting these same communications were in
fact critical to defending the homeland. Now let me make this point. These decisions were
easily within my authorities as the director of NSA under and executive order; known as
Executive Order 12333, that was signed in 1981, an executive order that has governed
NSA for nearly a quarter century.

Now, let me summarize. In the days after 9/11, NSA was using its authorities and its
judgment to appropriately respond to the most catastrophic attack on the homeland in the
history of the nation. That shouldn't be a headline, but as near as I can tell, these actions
on my part have created some of the noise in recent press coverage. Let me be clear on
this point -- except that they involved NSA, these programs were not related -- these
programs were not related -- to the authorization that the president has recently spoken
about. Back then, September 2001, I asked to update the Congress on what NSA had
been doing, and I briefed the entire House Intelligence Committee on the 1st of October
on what we had done under our previously existing authorities.

Now, as another part of our adjustment, we also turned on the spigot of NSA reporting to
FBI in, frankly, an unprecedented way. We found that we were giving them too much data
in too raw form. We recognized it almost immediately, a question of weeks, and we made
all of the appropriate adjustments. Now, this flow of data to the FBI has also become part
of the current background noise, and despite reports in the press of thousands of tips a
month, our reporting has not even approached that kind of pace. You know, I actually find
this a little odd. After all the findings of the 9/11 commission and other bodies about the
failure to share intelligence, I'm up here feeling like I have to explain pushing data to those
who might be able to use it. And of course, it's the nature of intelligence that many tips
lead nowhere, but you have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off.

Now, beyond the authorities that I exercised under the standing executive order, as the
war on terror has moved forward, we have aggressively used FISA warrants. The act and
the court have provided us with important tools, and we make full use of them. Published
numbers show us using the court at record rates, and the results have been outstanding.
But the revolution in telecommunications technology has extended the actual impact of the
FISA regime far beyond what Congress could ever have anticipated in 1978. And I don't
think that anyone can make the claim that the FISA statute is optimized to deal with or
prevent a 9/11 or to deal with a lethal enemy who likely already had combatants inside the
United States.

I testified in open session to the House Intel Committee in April of the year 2000. At the
time, I created some looks of disbelief when I said that if Osama bin Laden crossed the
bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario to Niagara Falls, New York, there were provisions of
U.S. law that would kick in, offer him protections and affect how NSA could now cover
him. At the time, I was just using this as some of sort of stark hypothetical; 17 months
later, this is about life and death.

So now, we come to one additional piece of NSA authorities. These are the activities
whose existence the president confirmed several weeks ago. That authorization was
based on an intelligence community assessment of a serious and continuing threat to the
homeland. The lawfulness of the actual authorization was reviewed by lawyers at the
Department of Justice and the White House and was approved by the attorney general.

Now, you're looking at me up here, and I'm in a military uniform, and frankly, there's a
certain sense of sufficiency here -- authorized by the president, duly ordered, its
lawfulness attested to by the attorney general and its content briefed to the congressional
leadership.

But we all have personal responsibility, and in the end, NSA would have to implement this,
and every operational decision the agency makes is made with the full involvement of its
legal office. NSA professional career lawyers -- and the agency has a bunch of them --
have a well-deserved reputation. They're good, they know the law, and they don't let the
agency take many close pitches.

And so even though I knew the program had been reviewed by the White House and by
DOJ, by the Department of Justice, I asked the three most senior and experienced
lawyers in NSA: Our enemy in the global war on terrorism doesn't divide the United States
from the rest of the world, the global telecommunications system doesn't make that
distinction either, our laws do and should; how did these activities square with these facts?

They reported back to me. They supported the lawfulness of this program. Supported, not
acquiesced. This was very important to me. A veteran NSA lawyer, one of the three I
asked, told me that a correspondent had suggested to him recently that all of the lawyers
connected with this program have been very careful from the outset because they knew
there would be a day of reckoning. The NSA lawyer replied to him that that had not been
the case. NSA had been so careful, he said -- and I'm using his words now here -- NSA
had been so careful because in this very focused, limited program, NSA had to ensure
that it dealt with privacy interests in an appropriate manner.

In other words, our lawyers weren't careful out of fear; they were careful out of a heartfelt,
principled view that NSA operations had to e consistent with bedrock legal protections.

In early October 2001, I gathered key members of the NSA workforce in our conference
room and I introduced our new operational authority to them. With the historic culture of
NSA being what it was and is, I had to do this personally. I told them what we were going
to do and why. I also told them that we were going to carry out this program and not go
one step further. NSA's legal and operational leadership then went into the details of this
new task.

You know, the 9/11 commission criticized our ability to link things happening in the United
States with things that were happening elsewhere. In that light, there are no
communications more important to the safety of this country than those affiliated with al
Qaeda with one end in the United States. The president's authorization allows us to track
this kind of call more comprehensively and more efficiently. The trigger is quicker and a bit
softer than it is for a FISA warrant, but the intrusion into privacy is also limited: only
international calls and only those we have a reasonable basis to believe involve al Qaeda
or one of its affiliates.

The purpose of all this is not to collect reams of intelligence, but to detect and prevent
attacks. The intelligence community has neither the time, the resources nor the legal
authority to read communications that aren't likely to protect us, and NSA has no interest
in doing so. These are communications that we have reason to believe are al Qaeda
communications, a judgment made by American intelligence professionals, not folks like
me or political appointees, a judgment made by the American intelligence professionals
most trained to understand al Qaeda tactics, al Qaeda communications and al Qaeda
aims.

Their work is actively overseen by the most intense oversight regime in the history of the
National Security Agency. The agency's conduct of this program is thoroughly reviewed by
the NSA's general counsel and inspector general. The program has also been reviewed
by the Department of Justice for compliance with the president's authorization. Oversight
also includes an aggressive training program to ensure that all activities are consistent
with the letter and the intent of the authorization and with the preservation of civil liberties.
Let me talk for a few minutes also about what this program is not. It is not a driftnet over
Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont grabbing conversations that we then sort out by
these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called
experts keep talking about.

This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people
in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America
involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda. We bring to bear all the
technology we can to ensure that this is so. And if there were ever an anomaly, and we
discovered that there had been an inadvertent intercept of a domestic-to-domestic call,
that intercept would be destroyed and not reported. But the incident, what we call
inadvertent collection, would be recorded and reported. But that's a normal NSA
procedure. It's been our procedure for the last quarter century. And as always, as we
always do when dealing with U.S. person information, as I said earlier, U.S. identities are
expunged when they're not essential to understanding the intelligence value of any report.
Again, that's a normal NSA procedure.

So let me make this clear. When you're talking to your daughter at state college, this
program cannot intercept your conversations. And when she takes a semester abroad to
complete her Arabic studies, this program will not intercept your communications.

Let me emphasize one more thing that this program is not -- and, look, I know how hard it
is to write a headline that's accurate and short and grabbing. But we really should shoot
for all three -- accurate, short and grabbing. I don't think domestic spying makes it. One
end of any call targeted under this program is always outside the United States. I've flown
a lot in this country, and I've taken literally hundreds of domestic flights. I have never
boarded a domestic flight in the United States of America and landed in Waziristan. In the
same way -- and I'm speaking illustratively here now, this is just an example -- if NSA had
intercepted al Qaeda Ops Chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Karachi talking to Mohamed
Atta in Laurel, Maryland, in say, July of 2001 -- if NSA had done that, and the results had
been made public, I'm convinced that the crawler on all the 7 by 24 news networks would
not have been "NSA domestic spying."

Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would
have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would
have identified them as such.

I've said earlier that this program's been successful. Clearly not every lead pans out from
this or any other source, but this program has given us information that we would not
otherwise had been able to get. It's impossible for me to talk about this any more in a
public way without alerting our enemies to our tactics or what we have learned. I can't give
details without increasing the danger to Americans. On one level, believe me, I wish that I
could. But I can't.

Our enemy has made his intentions clear. He's declared war on us. Since September
11th, al Qaeda and its affiliates have continued to announce their intention, continued to
act on their clearly stated goal of attacking America. They have succeeded against our
friends in London, Madrid, Bali, Amman, Istanbul and elsewhere. They desperately want
to succeed against us.

The 9/11 commission told us -- and I'm quoting them now -- "Bin Laden, and Islamist
terrorists mean exactly what they say. To them, America is the fount of all evil, the head of
the snake, and it must be converted or destroyed." Bin Laden reminded us of this intention
as recently as last Thursday.

The people at NSA, and the rest of the intelligence community, are committed to defend
us against this evil and to do it in a way consistent with our values. We know that we can
only do our job if we have the trust of the American people, and we can only have your
trust if we are careful about how we use our tools and our resources. That sense of care is
part of the fabric of the community I represent. It helps define who we are.

I recently went out to Fort Meade to talk to the workforce involved in this program. They
know what they have contributed, and they know the care with which it has been done.
Even in today's heated environment, the only concern they expressed to me was
continuing their work in the defense of the nation, and continuing to do so in a manner that
honors the law and the Constitution. As I was talking with them -- we were in the office
spaces there, typical office spaces anywhere in the world -- I looked out over their heads -
- and this is the workforce that deals with the program the president discussed several
weeks ago -- I looked out over their heads to see a large sign fixed to one of those pillars
that go up through our operations building that breaks up the office space. That sign is
visible from almost anywhere in this large area. It's yellow with bold black letters on it. The
title is readable from 50 feet: What constitutes a U.S. person? And that title was followed
by a detailed explanation of the criteria. That has always been the fundamental tenet of
privacy for NSA. And here it was in the center of a room guiding the actions of a workforce
determined to prevent another attack on the United States. Security and liberty. The
people at NSA know what their job is. I know what my job is too. I learned a lot from NSA
and its culture during my six years there. But I come from a culture too. I've been a military
officer for nearly 37 years, and from the start, I've taken an oath to protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States. I would never violate that Constitution nor would I abuse
the rights of the American people. As the director, I was the one responsible to ensure that
this program was limited in its scope and disciplined in its application.

American intelligence, and especially American SIGINT, signals intelligence, is the
frontline of defense in dramatically changed circumstances, circumstances in which if we
fail to do our job well and completely, more Americans will almost certainly die. The speed
of operations, the ruthlessness of the enemy, the pace of modern communications have
called on us to do things and to do them in ways never before required. We've worked
hard to find innovative ways to protect the American people and the liberties we hold dear.
And in doing so, we have not forgotten who we are either.

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