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N.S.A. Chief Says Surveillance Has Stopped Dozens of Plots

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At a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday, Gen. Keith B. Alexander described how American surveillance programs helped thwart dozens of terror plots.CreditCredit...Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Top national security officials on Tuesday promoted two newly declassified examples of what they portrayed as “potential terrorist events” disrupted by government surveillance. The cases were made public as Congress and the Obama administration stepped up a campaign to explain and defend programs unveiled by recent leaks from a former intelligence contractor.

One case involved a group of men in San Diego convicted of sending money to an extremist group in Somalia. The other was presented as a nascent plan to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, although its participants were not charged with any such plot. Both were described by Sean Joyce, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at a rare public oversight hearing by the House Intelligence Committee.

At the same hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, said that American surveillance had helped prevent “potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11,” including at least 10 “homeland-based threats.” But he said that a vast majority of the others must remain secret.

“In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation,” General Alexander said. “That security is a direct result of the intelligence community’s quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks to occur on 9/11.”

The hearing was aimed at bolstering public support for surveillance programs after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor who was one of about 1,000 systems administrators who ran the agency’s networks. Its title: “How Disclosed N.S.A. Programs Protect Americans, and Why Disclosure Aids Our Adversaries.”

The Republican chairman of the committee, Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, and the top Democrat, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, both defended the surveillance programs revealed by Mr. Snowden and expressed anger over his leaks.

“It is at times like these where our enemies within become almost as damaging as our enemies on the outside,” Mr. Rogers said.

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Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday.Credit...Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

The testimony on Tuesday by General Alexander, Mr. Joyce and three other national security officials focused on two types of surveillance. One was a huge database logging all domestic American phone calls, which Mr. Snowden’s leaks brought to light.

The other was the collection of the contents of certain e-mails and phone calls under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which allows surveillance without individualized warrants if the targets are noncitizens abroad, even if the collection takes place on domestic soil.

As an example of how the domestic calling log database has been used, Mr. Joyce cited the case of several men convicted by a jury in February of raising and sending about $8,500 to Al Shabab, a terrorist group in Somalia. The N.S.A. had flagged the calling activities of one of the men as suspicious, he said.

Representative Mac Thornberry, Republican of Texas, pressed Mr. Joyce to say more, asking, “But there was some connection to suicide bombings that they were talking about, correct?”

Mr. Joyce replied, “Not in the example that I’m citing right here.”

Speaking of the calling log program, the deputy director of the N.S.A., John C. Inglis, said that “only 20 analysts at N.S.A. and their two managers, for a total of 22 people, are authorized to approve numbers that may be used to query this database.” The N.S.A. has said that it searched for links to fewer than 300 numbers in 2012.

Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, pressed General Alexander to explain why the F.B.I. could not simply get the relevant logs of calls linked to a suspicious number without keeping a database of all domestic calls.

General Alexander said he was open to discussing doing it that way, but added, “The concern is speed in crisis.”

As a newly disclosed example of how the FISA Amendments Act surveillance authority has been used, Mr. Joyce described a case in which he said the authorities had discovered and disrupted a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.

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Sean Joyce, a deputy director of the F.B.I., testified before the House Intelligence Committee.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Monitoring a terrorist in Yemen, the N.S.A. discovered that he was talking to a man named Khalid Ouazzani in Kansas City, Mo. After applying for a separate warrant for Mr. Ouazzani’s communications, they identified two additional conspirators and discovered they were “in the very initial stages” of the stock exchange bomb plot, he said.

Mr. Ouazzani pleaded guilty in 2010 to sending money to Al Qaeda but was not charged with any domestic plots. Later on Tuesday, law enforcement officials said Mr. Joyce had been referring to Sabirhan Hasanoff and Wesam El-Hanafi, two Brooklyn men who pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism.

A sentencing memorandum filed by prosecutors contends that in 2008, “at the direction of a senior terrorist leader,” Mr. Hasanoff conducted surveillance of the New York Stock Exchange and sent the leader a one-page report on it.

“The report was rudimentary and of limited use” for any terrorist operation, the memo acknowledges, while nevertheless contending that Mr. Hasanoff’s willingness to conduct such surveillance bolstered the case for giving him a 20-year sentence.

At the hearing, Mr. Thornberry asked Mr. Joyce whether the stock exchange attack was a “serious plot” or just “something that they kind of dreamed about.” Mr. Joyce replied, “I think the jury considered it serious, since they were all convicted.”

However, Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer for Mr. Hasanoff, called Mr. Joyce’s portrayal “astonishing” because none of the defendants was charged with the stock exchange allegation and there was no jury trial in any of the cases. Mr. Joyce also invoked two cases officials have previously linked to surveillance conducted under the FISA Amendments Act — a plot to bomb the New York City subway and the discovery that David Headley, a Chicago man, was working on a plot to bomb a Danish newspaper that published cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, told General Alexander that he was “more troubled” by the domestic calling log program, which he called “historically unprecedented in the extent of the data that is being collected on potentially all American citizens,” than with the gathering of foreign data. He pressed the officials to say how many attacks were stopped by it.

Mr. Joyce replied that it was “an almost impossible question,” but that “I can tell you, every tool is essential and vital. And the tools, as I outlined to you, and the uses today have been valuable to stopping some of those plots.”

Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Surveillance Programs Defended as Officials Cite Thwarted Attacks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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