NSA may have breached Constitution
Print Edition
The National Security Agency may have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 e-mails of Americans per year between 2008 and 2011 in a program that a secret US court subsequently said may have violated US law and the Constitution, according to documents released by US intelligence agencies.
The once-classified documents were released on Wednesday as part of an unprecedented White House effort to smooth the uproar following revelations by former contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of secret government surveillance programs.
US officials say the documents show that intelligence collection programs that inadvertently intrude on Americans’ privacy are found and fixed.
But they also appear to raise new questions about operations by the eavesdropping National Security Agency and its oversight by the secret US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding the NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,” Judge John Bates of the surveillance court wrote in one of the declassified documents.
More specifically, Bates said in an October 2011 ruling that the court had concluded the process that resulted in improper collections of the tens of thousands of e-mails was “in some respects, deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds.”
The e-mails in question represent only a small slice of the electronic communications scooped up around the world by the NSA. It targets about 250 million e-mail communications each year and, under a separate program, has captured and kept records of millions of phone calls by Americans.
According to the documents, only about 9 percent of the e-mails — or less than 25 million — are collected from “upstream” sources, which officials familiar with intelligence operations said are cable links belonging to telecommunications companies.
The rest are acquired by the NSA from Internet service providers at the point where they are sent or received.
A handful of lawmakers, most notably Senator Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had begun complaining months ago that the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans’ communications in ways that were excessive.
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