...Media: Does that mean that because it was a classified operation a lot of documents including the chart could have been destroyed and that's why you can't find it?

Down: There are regulations. At the time how they were interpreted, very strictly pre-9/11, for destruction of information which is embedded, I guess is the way I would say it, that would contain any information on U.S. persons. In a major data mining effort like this you're reaching out to a lot of open sources and within that there could be a lot of information on U.S. persons. We're not allowed to collect that type of information. So there are strict regulations about collection, dissemination, destruction procedures for this type of information. And we know that that did happen in the case of Able Danger documentation.

Media: So it's possible then that this is how the chart cannot be found. Along with other documents, they could have been destroyed and that's why you can't corroborate what these people are saying or say it's wrong.

Down: Correct.

Media: What is the definition for U.S. person?

Down: I wish we had our lawyer here.

Chope: A U.S. citizen or someone who is in the country legally.

Media: So a tourist is a U.S. person.

Chope: Can be.

Media: Under what circumstances?

Chope: For instance on a work visa. I think it's more than just a tourist, on a work visa or something like that...

...Media: Has anything changed about the way that U.S. persons who get sucked up in a data mining operation would be handled today as opposed to how they might have -- completely independent of this. Say if my name gets sucked up into a database tomorrow morning would it be handled differently today than it would have before 9/11?

Down: My understanding is that the same procedures are in place. We may exercise some flexibility, but I have to be careful here because the same procedures, the same regulations, they are still accurate. We have to be very careful of what we protect against U.S. persons...

...Media: All these questions about Able Danger seem to sound like how could you possibly have missed Mohammed Attah did this, but I'm wondering if Mohammed Attah came in under the same circumstances at the same time tomorrow, he would still be of the same class. Wouldn't they get ditched, thrown out? Not that that's what happened with this, but if you were to tag him as a U.S. person wouldn't he automatically be thrown out of the data base tomorrow just as --

Chope: I don't know...

...Media: So the people involved in the project were asked whether there was a way that they could extract intelligence which could be shared from this massive data that they had from this pile you talked about --

Gandy: I think you're confusing the sharing of data -- Data can be shared with anybody. U.S. person data can be shared in a wide variety of situations. We do that every day in the Department of Defense. For instance on the counter-intelligence side of the house which I am responsible for for the Army, our intelligence agents share information every day with the FBI no U.S. persons, and who has primacy in an investigation, and who doesn't. It's all laid out in the protocols surrounding EO-12333 and 5240, our counter-intelligence regulations. Promulgation of those sharing agreements. So we can share data with U.S. persons.

In this case because of the nature in which the data was collected, now we're 5.5 years ago. It was a gobbling up of a lot of data from a lot of sources and put in one pile. You had this commingling of U.S. person data with lots of other data, and there was no way to really pull it out. So the protocols were applied as they stood and really as they stand saying do you have a reason to do this. Like in the counter-intelligence case we have a reason, that we're doing a counter-espionage investigation or we're doing a force protection investigation. In this case there was no perceived imminent threat, imminent crime going to occur, any danger, those kinds of things that say that you can share it. That was not perceived to be the case in these situations and it was destroyed.

Media: So the identification of individuals who were linked to al-Qaida inside the United States was not perceived as an imminent threat after the USS Cole and after the embassy bombings --

Gandy: We don't know that they identified those people in this data.

Media: You say there was no imminent threat, there was no perceived imminent threat.

Gandy: That might be a reason you would keep the data. Those are the kind of reasons we're allowed to keep data about U.S. persons.

Media: And share it, right?

Gandy: Absolutely. It depends on the situation...