NSA Searches All Messages To and From US

Jason Ditz: NSA Searches All Messages To and From US ■ When the NSA insists they aren’t targeting Americans with their broad surveillance, the choice of language is deliberate and necessary: the law actually forbids them from doing so, as do the court orders. That doesn’t mean they don’t target us, of course, it just means they need to find a loophole. Today we learned one of those loopholes is to collect literally all emails and other text-based messages that involve a foreigner, figuring that if pressed they can insist the foreigner, not the Americans were the “target.” Stretching the credibility of this argument to the breaking point, the NSA reportedly also collects communication between Americans in which “information linked to foreigners” is cited, arguing that those conversations also technically involve the foreigner since he’s being mentioned.

Thomas Gaist: NSA reading content of Americans international communications ■ Thursday saw yet another revelation in the ongoing exposure of a cluster of unconstitutional surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies of the US government. In a front page article, the New York Times revealed that vast quantities of emails sent and received by Americans communicating with people abroad are swept up, “cloned,” and combed through by NSA analysts, on the basis that the messages contain certain words or phrases deemed suspicious by the government. According to the Times, international data-sweeps target “apparently most” of the email traffic flowing to and from the US. The Times cited congressional testimony last June by NSA Deputy Director John Inglis, who replied to a lawmaker who asked if the agency listened to the phone calls or read the emails of American citizens by saying, “We do not target the content of US person communications without a specific warrant anywhere on the earth.” These words were carefully chosen to conceal a lie. NSA analysts supposedly do not “target” Americans, they just regularly and systematically seize their emails and examine their contents, without a warrant, if they happen to contain any one of an unknown number of “target” words.

The Guardian: NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens' emails and phone calls ■ The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden. ■ The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans". ■ The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs.