New Revelations Shed Light On Extent Of NSA Spying Under Obama
By Will Porter
ActivistPost.com
MAY 27, 2017
In the waning years of the Obama administration, the National Security Agency (NSA) swept up and reviewed the communications of Americans to an extent previously unknown, in direct violation of the Constitution and its own revised guidelines, recently unsealed documents reveal.
The NSA is authorized to collect intelligence on foreigners under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). With this type of intelligence collection, it is virtually inevitable that Americans’ communications will be incidentally intercepted; however, there are procedures in place to keep those communications protected and anonymous.
Typically, when an American citizen is swept up in NSA surveillance, they are supposed to be “masked” to protect their identity, but there are large loopholes in place that allow the NSA to spy on Americans without a warrant or any probable cause whatsoever.
When the NSA conducts what is known as “upstream collection” of Internet communications, it is impossible to target a single email, instead sweeping up “packets” of data containing several messages. The NSA is supposed to sift through the data packets and discard all but the targeted email(s).
That alone poses some privacy issues, as before they are discarded the NSA can momentarily see the contents of the communications, but, when coupled with the NSA’s targeting practices, the problem expands to a serious violation of American constitutional rights.
Before the “sift and discard” procedure takes place, upstream collections are stored in databases which the NSA uses when it seeks intelligence on a particular target. To find what it is looking for, the agency enters key terms, known as “selection terms,” usually an email address or phone number related to the target. However, for years American intelligence agencies have not only looked at communications to and from a targeted individual, but any communication related to the target. That means the NSA has a much wider berth to analyze Americans’ communications.
In summary, the NSA incidentally collects and stores intelligence on Americans when conducting surveillance on foreign targets. The information is supposed to either be masked or discarded, but the way the NSA uses its databases allows the agency to get around the rules and essentially spy on American citizens.
But that is only the beginning.
The Rest…HERE
