It’s happened again.
The Department of Justice on Thursday announced the arrest of 60-year-old Mark Robert Unkenholz of Hanover, Maryland. The National Security Agency employee faces 26 charges related to the willful transmission and retention of national defense information. These are relatively rare charges, and the DOJ has made no mention of espionage. Still, the Unkenholz affair shines a light, yet again, on security lapses at our biggest and best-funded spy agency.
The National Security Agency (NSA) didn’t follow some of its own required procedures meant to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens, a new report by the NSA’s Inspector General revealed Monday.
A report by The Wall Street Journal said that the agency’s probe does not mention Carlson by name, but added that a source familiar with the investigation said it was tied to claims Carlson made last month that the agency had intercepted his emails.
The Carlson controversy cannot be understood outside the context of perennial NSA abuses. The NSA possesses a “repository capable of taking in 20 billion ‘record events’ daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes,” the New York Times reported. The NSA is able to snare and stockpile many orders of magnitude times more information than did East Germany’s Stasi secret police, one of the most odious agencies of the post-war era.
On Monday, June 28th, Fox host Tucker Carlson dropped a bomb mid-show, announcing he’d been approached by a “whistleblower” who told him he was being spied on by the NSA.
“The National Security Agency is monitoring our electronic communications,” he said, “and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”
The reaction was swift, mocking, and ferocious. “Carlson is sounding more and more like InfoWars host and notorious conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones,” chirped CNN media analyst Brian Stelter. Vox ripped Carlson as a “serial fabulist” whose claims were “evidence-free.” The Washington Post quipped that “in a testament to just how far the credibility of Tucker Carlson Tonight has cratered,” even groups like Pen America and the Reporters Committee on the Freedom of the Press were no-commenting the story, while CNN learned from its always-reliable “people familiar with the matter” that even Carlson’s bosses at Fox didn’t believe him.
None of this was surprising. A lot of media people despise Carlson. He may be Exhibit A in the n+2 epithet phenomenon that became standard math in the Trump era, i.e. if you thought he was an “asshole” in 2015 you jumped after Charlottesville straight past racist to white supremacist, and stayed there. He’s spoken of in newsrooms in hushed tones, like a mythical monster. The paranoid rumor that he’s running for president (he’s not) comes almost entirely from a handful of editors and producers who’ve convinced themselves it’s true, half out of anxiety and half subconscious desperation to find a click-generating replacement for Donald Trump.
Seventeen Republicans in the House have written a letter to the NSA demanding all information relating to claims that the spy agency has been monitoring Tucker Carlson’s private communications and leaking details to left-wing journalists.
So, who exactly ordered the NSA to unmask Tucker Carlson’s emails and leak them is unclear but there is at least one common name that did the same thing against General Flynn…Susan Rice… ahhh, but read on.
Wednesday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson slammed the National Security Agency (NSA) for allegedly planning to leak his request to the Russian government for an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to Carlson, the aim of the Biden NSA was to paint him as disloyal and a Russian “stooge.”
Let’s be very clear about what the NSA said in its statement. It denied “targeting” Carlson, but did not deny reading his emails. The NSA also did not deny that it may have accessed Carlson’s communications through “incidental collection.”
These were huge omissions, since incidental collection is a well-known and controversial way the NSA collects vast amounts of Americans’ communications without warrants. This happens when an innocent American communicates with a legitimate NSA target, such as someone believed to be under the control of or to be collaborating with a hostile foreign power.
When this happens, the name of the innocent American is supposed to be “redacted” or masked. There are very strict rules on how incidentally collected communications of U.S citizens can be used.
