Notoriously Secretive NSA: We're NOT Spying on Tucker Carlson

On Monday, frozen-foods heir and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson announced to the audience of his nightly Fox News program that the National Security Administration was, according to a whistleblower, spying on him.

"The NSA is monitoring our electronic communications," Carlson said, "and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air." The whistleblower, he claimed, was able to cite information about a story Carlson is working on that could only have been obtained via accessing Carlson's texts or emails.

"The Biden Administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that," he intoned, ominously.

This story seemed destined to go in the closet with such similar Carlson-adjacent mysteries as what was in a package full of "confidential documents" about Hunter Biden that he implied UPS, in coordination with the Deep State, had stolen before it turned up the next day. Last night, though, the agency unaccountably tweeted a statement in response to Carlson's claims:

Why this statement exists, and what the NSA hopes to accomplish with it, is unclear. The NSA is notoriously, infamously secretive; for years the joke was that its nickname stood for "No Such Agency." Even when faced with hard evidence of mass surveillance campaigns in the form of the Snowden leaks, the NSA at first tried to pretend such surveillance didn't exist, and only answered questions about it publicly when forced to do so by Congress. The agency regularly refuses to confirm or deny active surveillance campaigns and essentially does not engage with the public at all. It seems exceedingly dumb and self-defeating to break with this decades-old strategy to issue a public statement about who it is or is not spying on simply because a Fox News host is upset; it's definitely weird.

The most bizarre thing about the statement, though, is that it's not even clear it denies Carlson's claims.

As the NSA has explained tediously and at length while claiming that its mass surveillance of U.S. citizens is in accordance with statutes forbidding it from domestic spying, it vacuums up all sorts of information while spying on foreign intelligence targets. If a German terrorist the agency is monitoring emails your mother, for instance, the NSA collects that information and now has your mother's email, even though she's not an intelligence target. It wouldn't be inconsistent with what Carlson said, then, for him not to be an intelligence target, but rather the subject of "incidental collection." 

Similar parsing can be applied to the rest of the statement. Carlson didn't say that the NSA planned to take his show off the air—something it clearly has no authority to do—but rather that it planned to leak information that would somehow lead to his show being taken off the air. And Carlson didn't say that he had been targeted for collection by the NSA, with or without a court order, but that the agency had his communications, according to a whistleblower—rather a different thing.

It's of course surpassingly unlikely that the NSA is spying on Carlson in any meaningful sense other than that in which it spies on everyone, but it is interesting that an agency that refuses to directly confirm that it uses the office-messaging service Slack—doing so, it claims, would "benefit our adversaries"—would be so open about what it is or isn't doing. Carlson says he's filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for information on the alleged spying, and as has been pointed out, the NSA's public denial raises interesting implications for the traditional means it uses to deny such requests, which include privacy claims and assertions that it can neither confirm nor deny the mere existence of records for national-security reasons. Why it would do so simply to refute a claim even his own Fox colleagues don't seem to believe is a good question; when asked by Motherboard, a spokesperson for the agency said "We have no comment to offer other than the text of the statement itself."

In the meantime, just as Carlson and his crack investigative team should consider using file-sharing services rather than trusting world-shaking documents to UPS, if he doesn't want mysterious figures telling him or his producers about his ongoing reporting, he should perhaps look into encrypted communications.