Obama’s team ‘asked for NSA secrets on more than 30,000 Americans in 2016 and circulated 6,000 intelligence reports WITHOUT removing their names’
Officials searched for the names of 30,355 Americans in comms metadata
That data includes only information such as email addresses and phone numbers
But they also searched for 5,288 Americans within the communications
Reports were then passed around government depts with their names visible
Legally, NSA gathers only data on foreigners using US infrastructure, it claims
But critics say that it pulls in much more info – including that of US citizens
By JAMES WILKINSON
DAILYMAIL.COM4 May 2017
Barack Obama’s team used NSA technology to examine data gathered on tens of thousands of Americans abroad during the election, it has emerged.
Officials searched both metadata and the actual contents of communications for the names of more than 30,000 US citizens, according to data released by the he Office of the Director of National Intelligence this week.
And more than 3,000 of the resulting intelligence reports were then circulated among government departments without the names of the searched parties being redacted, sources with direct knowledge told Circa.
The data is officially only gathered on non-US-citizens outside America that use US infrastructure such as email servers.
But critics say that the pull of the NSA’s system is so strong that it routinely sweeps up data the agency does not legally have access to.
‘I think it is alarming. There seems to be a universal trend toward more surveillance and more surveillance that impacts Americans’ privacy without obtaining a warrant,’ Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s legislative counsel, said.
‘This data confirms that there is a lack of acknowledgment that information is being specifically and increasingly mined about Americans for investigations that have little or nothing to do with international terrorism.’
In total, officials searched for the names of 30,355 Americans in communications metadata in 2016 – a 27.5 per cent increase on the previous year.
Metadata includes email addresses and phone numbers, but not the content of the actual communications.
But officials also searched the contents of the communications themselves for the names of 5,288 Americans – compared to just 198 in 2013.
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