Over the weekend, the New York Times published a front-page story (“Spying by NSA Ally Entangled US Law Firm”) by James Risen (a Times reporter) and Laura Poitras (a freelancer who has had the “good fortune” of being a recipient of material stolen from NSA by Edward Snowden). The opening line of the piece is: “The list of those caught up in the global surveillance net cast by the National Security Agency and its overseas partners, from social media users to foreign heads of state, now includes another entry: American lawyers.” A titillating opening to be sure, but not based on what is actually provided in the story itself. If anything, the substance of the story appears to show just how circumspect NSA and its allied SIGINT partners appear to be.
What Snowden leaked to Poitras was a bulletin from the Australian Signals Directorate—Australia’s NSA—in which it is recounted that, in the conduct of its own surveillance of the Indonesian government, it had picked up the content of communications between Indonesian government officials and American trade lawyers. And while, according to the Times, the Aussies offered to share the information, they also had given the NSA liaison team in Canberra the heads-up that “information covered by attorney-client privilege may be included.” The liaison team in turn then asked the NSA general counsel’s office for guidance about the spying.
