The NSA watches you poop.

BoldW_sl said:

Disagree with you there. Terrorists don't just "want to be left alone".

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WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency's dominant role as the nation's spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say.

Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the security agency's vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say.

Intelligence officials say they have been careful to limit the use of the security agency's troves of data and eavesdropping spyware for fear they could be misused in ways that violate Americans' privacy rights.

The recent disclosures of agency activities by its former contractor Edward J. Snowden have led to widespread criticism that its surveillance operations go too far and have prompted lawmakers in Washington to talk of reining them in. But out of public view, the intelligence community has been agitated in recent years for the opposite reason: frustrated officials outside the security agency say the spy tools are not used widely enough.

"It's a very common complaint about N.S.A.," said Timothy H. Edgar, a former senior intelligence official at the White House and at the office of the director of national intelligence. "They collect all this information, but it's difficult for the other agencies to get access to what they want."

"The other agencies feel they should be bigger players," said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. "They view the N.S.A. - incorrectly, I think - as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of them."

Smaller intelligence units within the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have sometimes been given access to the security agency's surveillance tools for particular cases, intelligence officials say.

But more often, their requests have been rejected because the links to terrorism or foreign intelligence, usually required by law or policy, are considered tenuous. Officials at some agencies see another motive - protecting the security agency's turf - and have grown resentful over what they see as a second-tier status that has undermined their own investigations into security matters.

At the drug agency, for example, officials complained that they were blocked from using the security agency's surveillance tools for several drug-trafficking cases in Latin America, which they said might be connected to financing terrorist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere.

At the Homeland Security Department, officials have repeatedly sought to use the security agency's Internet and telephone databases and other resources to trace cyberattacks on American targets that are believed to have stemmed from China, Russia and Eastern Europe, according to officials. They have often been rebuffed.

Officials at the other agencies, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the tensions, say the National Security Agency's reluctance to allow access to data has been particularly frustrating because of post-Sept. 11 measures that were intended to encourage information-sharing among federal agencies.

In fact, a change made in 2008 in the executive order governing intelligence was intended to make it easier for the security agency to share surveillance information with other agencies if it was considered "relevant" to their own investigations. It has often been left to the national intelligence director's office to referee the frequent disputes over how and when the security agency's spy tools can be used. The director's office declined to comment for this article.

Typically, the agencies request that the N.S.A. target individuals or groups for surveillance, search its databases for information about them, or share raw intelligence, rather than edited summaries, with them. If those under scrutiny are Americans, approval from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is required.

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The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies' internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.

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Apple Inc.'s AAPL +1.27% e-book problem is spilling over into its other media businesses.

After winning last month an e-books antitrust suit against Apple, the Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge to limit Apple's influence in the publishing market and give the government oversight of the iTunes Store and App Store.

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