Safeguards keeping the NSA from spying on Americans were removed by the Obama administration
According to a new report from The Washington Post,
President Obama's administration sought to relax restrictions on
National Security Agency surveillance in 2011, winning permission from a
surveillance court to deliberately search for the intercepted phone
calls and emails of citizens without a warrant. The court also
reportedly extended the length of time that the NSA is permitted to
store intercepted US communications to six years, up from five, and even
longer under "special circumstances."
The 2011 decision overturns a
2008 ban on warrantless searches of the NSA's databases containing email
and phone call records of American citizens and legal residents.
The Post's report comes
as the Obama administration and the US intelligence community have made a
concerted effort to reassure American citizens that surveillance
programs strike the right balance between national security needs and
respect for civil liberties.
As part of that PR effort the Obama administration and the US intelligence community declassified a secret court order
in August, revealing that the NSA regularly collected thousands of
emails and other communications each year belonging to US citizens with
no connection to international terrorism. The Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, author of the declassified opinion, scrutinized the
program and required the NSA to make procedural changes to protect civil
liberties. But the restrictions were related to the agency's "upstream"
collection methods, which pull data directly from internet cables, and
not "downstream" collection from companies like Google and Yahoo, which
the relaxed rules detailed by today's report from the Post concern.
Government officials confirmed to the Post that
the administration had requested the lift on the ban, but would not
acknowledge how many warrantless searches have been performed. According
to the declassified FISA court order released in August, the NSA uses
its PRISM data collection program to "acquire" more than 200 million
"internet communications" each year, which largely come from companies
like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
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