Report: NSA Searches and Stores Americans' Emails

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By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2013-08-08 16:15:59 UTC

The NSA has reiterated time and again that it doesn't spy on Americans and only targets foreign individuals, groups or terrorists. But an overlooked "minimization" rule seems to indicate this is not the case.

According to a new report, the NSA routinely searches Americans' online communications if it travels through a fiber optic cable that goes in or out of the United States and contains information related to a legitimate foreign surveillance target like Al Qaeda.

See also: NSA Snooping Matters, Even If You Have 'Nothing to Hide'

Emails that fit this criteria are fair game for the NSA to collect and sift through, even if the exchange is between two American citizens, according to officials queried by the New York Times in the report.

This practice is regulated by the so-called minimization rules that ensure the NSA doesn't collect — or collects the very least amount of — communications between Americans. One paragraph contained in those rules, revealed by The Guardian on June 20, notes the NSA "seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target."

According to the Times' sources, the NSA's computers copy the content of emails that go in or out of the country, then sift through that content searching for keywords and store those emails that match the search. The stored emails are later analyzed by human NSA analysts.

Other emails are quickly deleted, according to one of the sources. They don't conduct "retrospective searches."

Despite these reassurances, some privacy advocates are not pleased with the rule.

The program "involves a breathtaking invasion of millions of people’s privacy," Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director, said in a statement. "The NSA has cast a massive dragnet over Americans’ international communications, collecting and monitoring virtually all of them and retaining some untold number of them in government databases. This is precisely the kind of generalized spying that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit."

On Twitter, Julian Sanchez, a technology and civil liberties research fellow at the Cato Institute, noted that this is nothing new. In fact, as he explained in a 2012 blog post, this process is spelled out in the legal book National Security Investigations and Prosecutions.

"The requirement that surveillance have a foreign 'target' is satisfied if the general purpose of a wiretap program is to gather information about a foreign group like al Qaeda," Sanchez wrote. "It does not mean that the particular phone numbers or e-mail accounts or other 'facilities' targeted for surveillance have to belong to a foreigner: Those could very well belong to an American citizen located within the U.S., and no court or judge is required to approve or review the choice of which individuals to tap."

Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Topics: edward snowden, NSA, prism, privacy, surveillance, U.S., US & World, World