American Spooks Spy More

Although National Security Agency claims it also spies on foreign communications, the latest press reports reveal that the agency has only limited legal authority to spy on American citizens but somehow has built a surveillance network covering over 3/4 of Americans' web use.

Media reports confirmed that the system has the capacity to reach about 75% of all US web traffic. Sometimes, it retains the written content of emails sent between US citizens within the country, along with filtering domestic phone calls made through the web. Actually, all these disclosures have been publically known for many years now. For example, whistleblower Mark Klein revealed a few years ago that the NSA had deals with the major telcos to scoop up a huge amount of web traffic, but people seem to just not worry about that. In the meantime, those deals are code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew, focusing on filtering and collecting data at major telecommunications companies.

Such filtering is done at over a dozen locations at the largest Internet junctions in the United States. In addition, the agency wasn’t exactly truthful when it said that the collected data was just metadata – the matter is that the outfit is able to track almost anything that happens on the Internet, though it does still need a broad court order to do so.

The industry experts also point at NSA doublespeak – for instance, the agency can claim that it isn’t “accessing” all of that traffic just because it asks the telcos to do it instead. However, these actions amount to the same thing. Press reports confirm that while most of the requests are targeted towards foreign communications, sometimes it is clear they are likely to cover domestic communications as well. Partly this is due to a broad interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act, which enables the NSA to snoop on people if the agency “reasonably believes” they are abroad.

Finally, some of the “mistakes” made by the agency when snooping on its own citizens and leading to information being harvested on everyone in Washington were even more deliberate than they seemed. For example, the NSA admitted one of its mistakes which involved information being collected on New York instead of Egypt for 3 months. In reality, it turned out that the agency had 3 years of illegal collections in that case.