[Vision2020] NSA Caught With Pants Down

[Art Deco]

NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ e-mails before court struck down
program

   -
   <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-gathered-thousands-of-americans-e-mails-before-court-struck-down-program/2013/08/21/146ba4b6-0a90-11e3-b87c-476db8ac34cd_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboPN#>

   By Ellen Nakashima<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ellen-nakashima/2011/03/02/ABdt4sM_page.html>,
Wednesday, August 21, 3:07 PM E-mail the
writer<ellen.nakashima at washpost.com?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27NSA%20gathered%20thousands%20of%20Americans%E2%80%99%20e-mails%20before%20court%20struck%20down%20program%27>

The National Security Agency unlawfully gathered as many as tens of
thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans
as part of a now-discontinued collection program, according to a 2011
secret court opinion.

The 86-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials
on Wednesday, explains why the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court at the time ruled the collection method
unconstitutional. The judge, John D. Bates, found that the government had
“advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has
been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led
to believe.”

Intelligence analysts say the newly captured armor and missiles could
offset gains by the Assad regime.

Under the program, the NSA diverted large volumes of international data
passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository
where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and for the
selection of foreign communications, rather than domestic ones. But in
practice the NSA was unable to filter out the communications between
Americans.

A month after the FISA court learned of the program in 2011 and ruled it
unconstitutional, the NSA revised its collection procedures to segregate
the transactions most likely to contain the communications of Americans. In
2012, the agency also purged the domestic communications that it had
collected.

“This was not in any respect an intentional or wholesale breach of privacy
of American persons,” Robert S Litt III, the general counsel for the Office
of the Director of the National Intelligence, said Wednesday.

Officials stressed that it was the NSA that brought the collection method
to the court’s attention as part of its regular reporting process.

The Washington Post reported last
week<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html>that
the court had ruled the program unconstitutional. But the newly
declassified opinion sheds new light on the volume of Americans’
communications that were obtained by the NSA, as well as the FISA court’s
interpretation of the program.

In addition to the October 2011 court order, U.S. intelligence officials on
Wednesday declassified a follow-up order about the NSA’s revised collection
methods.

The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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