NSA monitors millions of American e-mails

NSA monitors millions of American e-mails  - by Tom Eley

Several current and former agents within the National Security Agency (NSA), speaking on condition of anonymity, have told the New York Times that the spy agency likely monitors millions of e-mail communications and telephone calls made by Americans. The new revelations follow the disclosure in April that the NSA’s monitoring of domestic e-mail traffic broke the law in 2008 and 2009.

Last year, Congress passed legislation providing the NSA greater latitude to spy on the communications of Americans, so long as it resulted inadvertently from the agency’s efforts to spy on foreigners or those it “reasonably believed” to be outside US borders. This authorized the NSA to intercept tens of millions of e-mail and phone communications that pass through American telecommunication “gateways.” The measure was attached to a congressional law granting immunity to telecommunications companies that turned over private phone records to federal authorities.

Among those voting for the bill was then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. In all, 293 members of the House and 69 senators voted to pass the bill.

To launch investigations specifically targeting American “terror suspects,” the legislation requires that the NSA first gain a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). In fact, this is a mere formality. The FISC almost never turns down a government request for a warrant.

Yet the NSA’s activities have gone beyond even this pseudo-legal system specifically constructed in order to allow domestic spying. It is not known how many Americans have been spied upon, but the Times’s sources report that in 8 of 10 warrants issued by the FISC, the NSA “is believed to have gone beyond legal boundaries.” Further, “Because each order could single out hundreds or even thousands of phone numbers or e-mail addresses, the number of individual communications that were improperly collected could number in the millions,” the Times reported.

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