On Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA) released a statement responding to the allegations that they are spying on Fox News host Tucker Carlson by claiming they were “untrue,” and he was never the “target” of any NSA operations.
“On June 28, 2021, Tucker Carlson alleged that the National Security Agency has been ‘monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air,’” the statement said. “This allegation is untrue. Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air.”
“NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States,” the statement added. “With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting.”
However, the NSA has notoriously violated restrictions it has been given, with a major scandal the last time President Biden was in office during the Obama administration. The Hill reported, “National Security Agency and FBI violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama administration by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts.”
The NSA intercepted “hundreds of thousands of specific phone numbers and email addresses the agencies intercepted through the so-called Section 702 warrantless spying program created by Congress in late 2008.”
In addition, “the NSA also admitted it was slow in some cases to notify fellow intelligence agencies when it wrongly disseminated information about Americans. The law requires notification within five days, but some took as long as 131 business days and the average was 19 days.”
Carlson made the allegations Monday night, claiming that “the NSA captured that information without our knowledge and did it for political reasons. The Biden administration is spying on us.”
Carlson added that they had “filed a FOIA request — Freedom of Information Act request — asking for all information that the NSA and other agencies have gathered about this show. We did it mostly as a formality. We’ve also contacted the press office of both NSA and the FBI.”
