By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Another government information pipe burst last week, leaking details of yet more possibly illegal taps on our e-mails and telephone calls.

But even as news broke that a wireless carrier had discovered a security breach traced to Quantico, Va., home to a U.S. Marine Corps base and the FBI Academy, Michael Chertoff was telling me that what the Department of Homeland Security does with such information is none of my business — or his, either, for that matter.

“All we get is product. We may get product that is incorporated in analysis, and we may not know exactly what the source of each is, or it may be generically described,” Chertoff told me and a half dozen other bloggers gathered in a small room at the Ronald Reagan Building on March 3.

“I’m not going to speculate where it comes from,” he added. Nor would he say where it goes or how it’s used.

Did any of the NSA’s intelligence, I asked, come to him from the administration’s warrantless telecommunications intercepts?

“I don’t know,” said Chertoff, a former federal judge and high Justice Department official, who helped write the 2001 anti-terrorism law known as the Patriot Act.

“It’s not safe to assume [it did], because I don’t know,” he said. “It would be a guess.”

But last week’s allegations from Babak Pasdar, chief executive of a security firm who was hired to upgrade security at the unnamed telecommunications company, amounted to another land mine in the administration’s drive to resume its warrantless wiretapping program. Leading Democrats said the new information justified a further delay in legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (PL 95-511), already caught in a lengthy tug-of-war between the House and Senate. (See related story, CQ Today, March 7, 2008.

Less publicized was another document that surfaced March 4 on Wikileaks.org, a purported letter from Cablevision Systems Corp. to the FBI accompanying “documentation you have requested . . . in accordance with the recently adopted Federal legislation — USA Patriot Act.”

Spytalk vs. Spy

A day earlier, Chertoff, 55, looking hawk-lean and in fighting trim, was combative about DHS’s use of wiretap information.

As far as I can tell, it was the first time he had been confronted, either publicly or in closed session in Congress, with questions about his department’s relationship with the NSA.

Here’s how it went:

• Me: I want to clarify this relationship with NSA. So you get in what form do you get NSA-intercept information? Then, where does it go? How do you use it?
  
  Chertoff: If we get intelligence, we get it from all over the intelligence community. It can be in — largely, it’s analytic stuff, that has been analyzed and, you know, viewed by the [National Counterterrorism Center], or something of that sort. And if we’re talking about — let me step back.
  
  Me: I’m talking directly — specifically about NSA.
  
  Chertoff: All right, so let me tell you. In terms of FISA stuff, or things of that sort, we don’t operate FISA. We don’t do FISA wiretaps in our department. So we do not collect any signals information under FISA or under NSA-type authorities.
  
  All we get is product. We may get product that is incorporated in analysis, and we may not know exactly what the source of each is, or it may be generically described. In some circumstances, if it’s relevant, I may get a fragment or an excerpt or a summary — probably a summary — of something that’s intercepted through FISA or through, you know, some other type of capability.
  
  Me: In that case, you would say, OK, this needs to go to Border Patrol.
  
  Chertoff: In that case, depending on what it is, you know, we would say, OK — if it suggested, for example, that there’s going to be an effort to smuggle a bomb in through a container, it would cause us then to make some adjustments at the port in order to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
  
  Me: And then would this information be labeled as coming from NSA?
  
  Chertoff: Not necessarily.
  
  Me: But it could be.
  
  Chertoff: Could be.
  
  Me: And so therefore you would have been a recipient of, and a user of, information collected by NSA without a warrant.
  
  Chertoff : Well, it depends whether it needed a warrant or not. I mean —
  
  Me : I’m talking about, say, with the telecoms.
  
  Chertoff : I’m not going to speculate where it comes from. I can tell you, stuff comes from various intelligence —
  
  Me : Well, you already said it comes from NSA.
  
  Chertoff : Yes, but that doesn’t mean it was done without a warrant. It might have been done with a warrant; it might not have been done with a warrant. It might have required a warrant —
  
  Me : So you don’t know if it was done with a warrant or not?
  
  Chertoff : Right. I would have no visibility into what the legal requirement was, whether a warrant was obtained, whether a warrant was necessary. None of that is visible to me, or revealed to me.
  
  Me : But you are aware —
  
  Chertoff aide : We’re tight on time —
  
  Me : I have to finish this —
  
  Chertoff : I was aware of what?
  
  Me : Were you aware that this program was ongoing with the telecomm companies?
  
  Chertoff : I don’t know what program you’re talking about.
  
  Me : I’m talking about harvesting information —
  
  Chertoff : I’m not — but you see, you’re assuming stuff you’ve read in the paper.
  
  Me : I’m not. I’m asking you for information.
  
  Chertoff : I’m telling you I have received — we get information from the intelligence community. It can be collected from a variety of sources. I don’t know which program it comes under. I don’t know whether it’s got a warrant or doesn’t have a warrant. I don’t know whether it’s collected — I mean, as soon as I can contextually tell where it’s collected or not collected.
  
  So I don’t know if it’s under this program or that program. None of that is known to me. All I know is, incorporated in the massive intelligence we get is all these different streams of intelligence, which help us decide whether we need to do something to protect the country or not.
  
  I can’t verify your assumptions concerning whether something was under this program or that program. I have no basis to accept your characterization of harvesting, which doesn’t strike me as having any legal significance.
  
  So there’s a whole bunch of assumptions I want to be clear I’m not buying into. I’m only telling you we had to try —
  
  Chertoff aide : We’ve got to go to the last question. I’m sorry —
  
  Chertoff : No. Finish the thing.
  
  Me : Well, you’re redefining what I’m saying. I’m not making any assumptions whatsoever.
  
  Chertoff : I’m only telling you, we get —
  
  Me : The administration, as far as I know, has conceded that information was gathered from wiretaps on telephone companies. Otherwise, why would they be asking for immunity for these companies, right?
  
  Chertoff : I would not necessarily know —
  
  Me : So if you have — if you received NSA information — I’m merely asking if you received information during this time period from NSA — like you said, we get a bit of a piece of information and we might give it to, say, border control or port security, whatever.
  
  Therefore, is it safe to assume, whether you knew it or not, that you would have gotten information from this program? Or are you saying, I don’t know, I wouldn’t know?
  
  Chertoff : I don’t know. It’s not safe to assume, because I don’t know. Because I — because it doesn’t come labeled as the particular source. So it would be a guess.

John Rollins, the chief of staff for intelligence for Chertoff’s predecessor, Tom Ridge, took sharp issue with the Homeland Security boss.

Chertoff should ensure that intelligence gleaned from warrantless wiretaps does not get into the hands of state and local police (who would not know its origins).

“Setting aside the fact that the secretary is a former federal court judge who spent a career in the Justice Department, and also has a staff of lawyers conversant in civil liberty and corporate liability issues, it’s pretty damn insincere for him to, at best, claim uncertainty, or at worst, maintain willful ignorance of not knowing how information on U.S. citizens is obtained or where it came from,” Rollins told me by e-mail.

“One can’t be the benefactor of a piece of information while simultaneously claiming it is not my responsibility to figure out how the information landed in my inbox,” he said.

Rollins said intelligence unit chiefs in the state and regional fusion centers also had a responsibility to ask whether the information was collected legally. The administration’s insistence that the disputed wiretaps are constitutional is not likely to be decided for years.

But a Republican congressional source mocked Rollins prescriptions.

“If every policeman had to determine whether a piece of information was legally obtained, the system would come to a standstill . . . screech to a halt,” he said. Suspected terrorists could escape while officials diddled over the origins of an intelligence report.

Rollins countered that “there should be a process in place to deal with an imminent situation.”

Congress on the Sidelines

Congress has been timid about pressing the issue. Communications intelligence is one of the government’s most closely held secrets.

The Senate last month rejected a proposal by Sen. Russ Feingold , D-Wis., that would have allowed the FISA Court to impose restrictions on the use of information about Americans that it later discovered was acquired through illegal procedures,

But in 2006, Rep. Zoe Lofgren , D-Calif., tried to pin down Chertoff’s intelligence chief Charlie Allen on NSA wiretap information.

“We know of no unlawful information” in the hands of DHS, Allen said. She has not been able to elicit any more specifics since.

Rep. Jane Harman , D-Calif., a shrewd analyst of such things from her years as a ranking member of relevant oversight committees, applauded the revamping of U.S. intelligence after 9/11 that facilitated the speedy distribution of intelligence information.

But she said “there is still much to learn about the intelligence activities of this administration.”

“The point of intelligence reform was to force the sharing of actionable intelligence in real time both horizontally across the federal government and vertically with local first responders,” she said in a prepared statement in response to my query.

But “NSA and the rest of the government are required to comply with FISA. Otherwise, they are breaking the law,” she added.

Harman maintains that Congress is conducting “better oversight” of U.S. intelligence, which many would dispute, considering its belated discovery of the NSA’s warrantless spying and the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes.

But in any event, say many observers, we need not worry much about DHS’s role in helping foster a rogue police state.

Fear that fusion centers are awash with illegally obtained information from NSA are vastly overblown, said the Republican congressional source.

“They are a mess,” he said.

Other bloggers in attendance included Andrew Cochran, founder of the influential Counterterrorism Blog, Wired’s Ryan Singel, Jonah Czerwinski of Homeland Security Watch, Townhall.com’s Amanda Carpenter and J.Peter Freire, managing editor of The American Spectator.

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

Our Man in Baghdad: A new book by NBC’s ace investigative reporter Aram Roston on Ahmad Chalabi is sure to set eyes popping in Washington’s national security circles when it lands in stores this week. “The Man Who Pushed America to War” is a fascinating study of how the oleaginous former Iraqi exile leader separated the CIA and the Pentagon from hundreds of millions of dollars and conned credulous officials and reporters into believing that Saddam Hussein was not just armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, but bankrolling al Qaeda. Not to be missed is a fascinating chapter on the secret relationship of Chalabi, the Bush administration’s weapon of mass deception, with Iran, whom he is suspected of warning that the United States was eavesdropping on its communications. But there’s much, much more. Not to be missed.

How’s It Going? The nonpartisan, centrist American Security Project plans to release its report on U.S. progress in the war on terror, the aptly titled “Are We Winning?”on March 12. ASP senior fellow Bernard I. Finel “found a metastasizing jihadist threat, a continuing increase in Islamist terrorist incidents around the world, and a largely tone-deaf U.S. policy response due largely to a preoccupation with the apparent success of the Iraq ‘surge,’” the group says.

The Sky Is Falling: A legal battle to release a secret intelligence report that could free the Libyan man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing will go on despite a judge’s ruling that the U.K. foreign secretary had the right to suppress the document, according to news reports on Friday.

“The ruling from the Lord Justice General, Lord Hamilton, dashes the hopes of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi that he would be quickly released,” reported The Guardian newspaper.

“It emerged last year that two secret documents had been given to the UK by a foreign government in September 1996, four years before al-Megrahi’s trial began, but had never been disclosed to his defense team even though Scottish police and prosecutors had seen them,” the paper said.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com