US spy agencies complain about limited access to NSA data

The National Security Agency's dominant role as America'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.

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.

"It's a very common complaint about NSA," said Timothy 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."

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.

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.