The F.E.A.R. thread

[trichrider]

because looking the other way is chickenshit.


http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/james-clapper-surveillance-group/5208eb2578c90a16a000027c

get on this page...

 

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Snowden leak journalist: NSA spied on emails of Brazil and Mexico presidents

The journalist who first published the contents of classified documents provided by ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, told a Brazilian TV show Sunday that personal emails from the presidents of Brazil and Mexico had been spied on.

Glenn Greenwald told Globo news program "Fantastico" that a document dated June 2012, showed that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's emails were being read one month before he was elected to office.

Greenwald, who writes for the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper but lives in Rio de Janeiro, said the emails included communications from Nieto indicating who he would name in his Cabinet.

He also reported that the NSA collected the data through an undefined association between U.S. and Brazilian telecommunications companies.

The journalist told the Associated Press, in an email, that the document did not contain any specific messages intercepted from Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff.

However, it did reveal which aides she had communicated with, and tracked patterns of how those aides communicated among one another and with third parties.

"It is clear in several ways that her communications were intercepted, including the use of DNI Presenter, which is a program used by NSA to open and read emails and online chats," he told the AP.

Brazilian Justice Minister Eduardo Cardozo told the O Globo newspaper that if the facts of the story were confirmed, they should be considered very serious” and "a clear violation of Brazilian sovereignty.”

“Given these facts, we will require formal explanation to the U.S. government, the Foreign Ministry will summon the U.S. ambassador (Thomas Shannon) to give explanations,” he said, adding the country may take the matter to the U.N..

Mexico's Foreign Ministry said they had no comment.

Greenwald's revelation came days after a British court ruled that authorities in the U.K. could sift through documents seized from his partner, David Miranda, who was detained by authorities at London’s Heathrow airport for nine hours.

Miranda, who was in transit from Berlin to Brazil, was released without charge minus his laptop, phone and memory sticks.

His lawyer has requested an injunction to prevent the authorities from examining any data seized from Miranda and has also started legal action to ask judges to rule that his detention was illegal.

But two judges at Britain's High Court said the authorities could continue to look at the information until August 30, for the defense of national security and for the purposes of investigating whether the claimant is a person who is or has been concerned with the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/...n-emails-of-brazil-and-mexico-presidents?lite

 

[bentom187]

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s


For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.


A New York training site for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which includes federal and local investigators. AT&T employees are embedded in the program in three states.



The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.

But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”

Mr. Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”

He said that the program was paid for by the D.E.A. and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.

Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together D.E.A. and local investigators — two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.

Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia, said he sympathized with the government’s argument that it needs such voluminous data to catch criminals in the era of disposable cellphones.

“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates? No,” said Mr. Richman, who worked as a federal drug prosecutor in Manhattan in the early 1990s. “Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”

But Mr. Richman said the program at least touched on an unresolved Fourth Amendment question: whether mere government possession of huge amounts of private data, rather than its actual use, may trespass on the amendment’s requirement that searches be “reasonable.” Even though the data resides with AT&T, the deep interest and involvement of the government in its storage may raise constitutional issues, he said.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises profound privacy concerns.”

“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” he said.

Mr. Jaffer said that while the database remained in AT&T’s possession, “the integration of government agents into the process means there are serious Fourth Amendment concerns.”

Mr. Hendricks filed the public records requests while assisting other activists who have filed a federal lawsuit saying that a civilian intelligence analyst at an Army base near Tacoma infiltrated and spied on antiwar groups. (Federal officials confirmed that the slides are authentic.)

Mark A. Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, declined to answer more than a dozen detailed questions, including ones about what percentage of phone calls made in the United States were covered by Hemisphere, the size of the Hemisphere database, whether the AT&T employees working on Hemisphere had security clearances and whether the company has conducted any legal review of the program

“While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement,” Mr. Siegel wrote in an e-mail.

Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment on Sunday in response to questions about whether their companies were aware of Hemisphere or participated in that program or similar ones. A federal law enforcement official said that the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.

The PowerPoint slides outline several “success stories” highlighting the program’s achievements and showing that it is used in investigating a range of crimes, not just drug violations. The slides emphasize the program’s value in tracing suspects who use replacement phones, sometimes called “burner” phones, who switch phone numbers or who are otherwise difficult to locate or identify.

In March 2013, for instance, Hemisphere found the new phone number and location of a man who impersonated a general at a San Diego Navy base and then ran over a Navy intelligence agent. A month earlier the program helped catch a South Carolina woman who had made a series of bomb threats.

And in Seattle in 2011, the document says, Hemisphere tracked drug dealers who were rotating prepaid phones, leading to the seizure of 136 kilos of cocaine and $2.2 million

 

[Max Headroom]

F.E.A.R. - False Evidence Appearing Real

 

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CALEA

The Perils of Wiretapping the Internet

EFF and a coalition of public interest industry and academic groups filed suit in 2005 challenging the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) unjustified expansion of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). By forcing broadband Internet and interconnected voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to become wiretap-friendly the FCC ignored CALEA's plain language and threatened privacy security and innovation.

Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994 to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap digital telephone networks. CALEA forced telephone companies to redesign their network architectures to make wiretapping easier. It expressly did not regulate data traveling over the Internet.

But now federal law enforcement agencies want to change that. On March 10 2004 the Department of Justice (DOJ) the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) filed a joint petition with the FCC. The petition requested that CALEA's reach be expanded to cover communications that travel over the Internet. Thus Broadband providers would be required to rebuild their networks to make it easier for law enforcement to tap Internet "phone calls" that use VOIP applications such as Vonage as well as online "conversations" using various kinds of instant messaging (IM) programs like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

EFF objected to a number of the requests in the joint petition in conjunction with numerous other organizations.

On August 9 2004 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in response to the Law Enforcement joint petition. Applying dubious legal reasoning it greatly expands the reach of CALEA by redefining what constitutes a "substantial replacement" of the telephone service tentatively concluding that broadband Internet access providers and managed VoIP systems substantially replace local exchanges and therefore are subject to the requirements of CALEA. (See CALEA Summary.)

On August 5 2005 the FCC announced a Final Rule expanding CALEA to Internet broadband providers and certain Voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers.

The FCC ruling has been challenged in court by EFF and others and may end up before the Supreme Court. After the DC Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling the coalition of challengers filed for en banc review.

Meanwhile the DOJ—apparently tired of our lawsuits and hoping to avoid such suits in the future—has now proposed draft legislation to codify and expand the FCC ruling.

Wiretapping Is Already Easy Enough

Law enforcement agencies convinced the FCC that CALEA needed to be expanded in order to maintain the status quo. Because wiretapping has gotten so much more complex in the Internet age they argued it's just too hard for them to intercept all the communications that they need. Without structural changes to the Internet they won't be able to conduct the same quality of investigations that they did ten years ago.

It is crucial to remember that the issue here is not whether law enforcement can tap new technologies like VoIP but whether they can tap it easily. Existing laws already permit law enforcement to place Internet users under surveillance regardless of what programs or protocols they are using to communicate. Industry already cooperates with law enforcement to give it all the information requested and this will continue to happen with or without a new FCC rule interpreting CALEA.

Ironically most kinds of surveillance have gotten much easier in the digital age. Agents can tap mobile phones gain access to reams of electronic communications such as email conduct DNA identification tests and track people's locations using cell phone signals. Surely the greater ease of surveillance in these arenas and others more than makes up for the negligible difficulty of capturing a few VoIP calls and IM conversations. We would be maintaining the status quo without expanding CALEA.

Just Because It Can Be Tapped Doesn't Mean It Should

The FBI used the "tappability principle" to justify the demands in its petition. This principle holds that if something is legally searchable sometimes it should be physically searchable all the time. But there is a vast difference between a computer network switch created precisely to be tappable and one that can be tapped with the right tools under the right circumstances. If we applied the FBI's logic to the phone system it would state that every individual phone should be designed with built-in bugs. Consumers would simply have to trust law enforcement or the phone companies not to activate those bugs without just cause.

The Cost of CALEA Will Be Passed on to Consumers

The NPRM's proposed expansion of CALEA would also punish broadband providers and consumers concluding that carriers should forced to spend millions of dollars on CALEA compliance. The FCC explores a mechanism by which these costs will pass to their customers including a Commission mandated flat monthly charge. Quite literally then consumers would be subsidizing the surveillance state.

Furthermore this proposal completely restructures market incentives in the technology industry. Privacy-friendly technologies which protect the personal information of consumers would be pushed out of the marketplace. Instead companies would be forced to design and manufacture surveillance-friendly technologies. The needs of government not consumers would guide the marketplace.

Innovation Will Suffer

When special interests like law enforcement commandeer the marketplace innovation suffers. The NPRM suggests that all devices that provide broadband connectivity will have to be CALEA-compliant which would severely limit the scope of high-tech research and development. Today's VoIP systems — revolutionary software tools that allow people to make phone calls over the Internet — would likely never have been developed in an environment where all products had to go through a CALEA-compliance test before making it to market. While the NPRM does not extend CALEA to providers of peer-to-peer VoIP email and Instant Messaging it seeks comment on whether other laws might give the FCC power over a wider array of technologies.

If the FBI gets its way the NPRM's tentative regulations will only be the tip of the iceberg. Soon software companies under threat of an expansive definition of CALEA's requirements will face economic incentives to create email and IM programs that are surveillance-ready. Many computer game consoles that people can use to play over the Internet such as the Xbox allow gamers to chat with each other while they play. If any communication program running on the Internet has to be CALEA-compliant before being bought and sold what would stop law enforcement from pushing for a tappable Xbox?

CALEA means that innovators will always be forced to think inside the box of surveillance. Their designs and ideas will be limited by a government mandate that requires them to build technology for the purpose of spying rather than playing games talking to colleagues or collaboratively making art over the Internet. This will stifle creativity and result in a non-competitive technology market. The only creativity will exist off-shore where developers outside the U.S. will develop technologies to circumvent U.S. law enforcement capability.

The Internet Is Not Like the Phone System

The NPRM suggests that rules applied to the phone system should also be applied to the Internet. But crucial differences between the two systems mean that what is healthy for one in terms of marketplace incentives and technological development is unhealthy for the other. What makes the Internet powerful are its edges: computers and other innovative technologies are located at the ends of the network wires. The phone system works the opposite way. Telephones are dumb inflexible machines. Whereas the usefulness of the phone system comes from the telecommunications network itself the Internet's usefulness comes from its endpoints.

In addition the phone network is a closed insulated system while the Internet is open and ever-changing. End users cannot change the nature of the phone network on a whim. But on the Internet people can deploy new services and new devices at will — they can invent new protocols for sending data or connect a new kind of widget to the network. This is integral to making the Internet a vital source of technological and scientific innovation.

EFF believes that federal agencies should not force the broadband Internet access or voice over IP industries and by extension their consumers to bear the considerable costs of purchasing and implementing surveillance-ready network technologies simply because it suits the government's needs.

CALEA Could Make the Internet Less Secure

While law enforcement's efforts to hijack the tech market are disturbing EFF is also concerned that making the Internet CALEA-compliant might backfire: many of the technologies currently used to create wiretap-friendly computer networks make the people on those networks more pregnable to attackers who want to steal their data or personal information.

When broadband service providers are forced to make their networks or applications tappable this introduces more points of vulnerability into the system. Users have to place blind trust in companies and services they may not realize they are signing up for.

The FCC's proposes to allow third parties to manage government surveillance requests: a private company would analyze all the data from a telecommunications carrier extract information relevant to the court order and send it to law enforcement.

Currently several large corporations are already offering CALEA services that might result in a loss of privacy for consumers. For example VeriSign offers a legal intercept service to ISPs which requires the providers to pipe all their data to VeriSign. Then the company's employees analyze the data extract information relevant to the court order and send it to law enforcement. This transaction leaves personal data potentially vulnerable when it travels from the service provider's network to VeriSign's. It also places the personal data of innocent people in the hands of a third party without customer consent. If CALEA is applied to the Internet it is likely that many more services like VeriSign's will spring up introducing still more uncertainty into the system.

Services like these support and expand what the ACLU has called the Surveillance-Industrial Complex. Since compliance with surveillance requests is a significant cost for carriers telecommunications companies have acted as a check on government power lobbying against excessive proposals. Now private entities that profit from surveillance will have an incentive to lobby for more government surveillance powers.

Ultimately all of these problems can be traced back to a single root cause: CALEA was drafted specifically to regulate phone networks which are designed to be closed systems. The Internet is an open global system that handles countless forms of data-transfer and accommodates an ever-changing array of smart edge-devices. If CALEA is misapplied to the Internet the results will be disastrous. The privacy of innocent people is likely to be violated innovation will certainly be stifled and the current and future functionality of the Internet will be crippled.

https://www.eff.org/issues/calea

 

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How the NSA's Domestic Spying Program Works


The NSA’s domestic spying program, known in official government documents as the “President’s Surveillance Program,” ("The Program") was implemented by President George W. Bush shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The US Government still considers the Program officially classified, but a tremendous amount of information has been exposed by various whistleblowers, admitted to by government officials during Congressional hearings and with public statements, and reported on in investigations by major newspaper across the country.

Our NSA Domestic Spying Timeline has a full list of important dates, events, and reports, but we also want to explain—to the extent we understand it—the full scope of the Program and how the government has implemented it.

In the weeks after 9/11, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct a range of surveillance activities inside the United States, which had been barred by law and agency policy for decades. When the NSA’s spying program was first exposed by the New York Times in 2005, President Bush admitted to a small aspect of the program—what the administration labeled the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”—in which the NSA monitored, without warrants, the communications of between 500-1000 people inside the US with suspected connections to Al Qaeda.

But other aspects of the Program were aimed not just at targeted individuals, but perhaps millions of innocent Americans never suspected of a crime.

Details of Every American’s Call History

First, the government convinced the major telecommunications companies in the US, including AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, to hand over the “call-detail records” of their customers. According to an investigation by USA Today, this included “customers' names, street addresses, and other personal information.” In addition, the government received “detailed records of calls they made—across town or across the country—to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.”

A person familiar with the matter told USA Today that the agency's goal was "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders. All of this was done without a warrant or any judicial oversight.

Real Time Access to Phone and Internet Traffic

Second, the same telecommunications companies also allowed the NSA to install sophisticated communications surveillance equipment in secret rooms at key telecommunications facilities around the country. This equipment gave the NSA unfettered access to large streams of domestic and international communications in real time—what amounted to at least 1.7 billion emails a day, according to the Washington Post. The NSA could then data mine and analyze this traffic for suspicious key words, patterns and connections. Again, all of this was done without a warrant in violation of federal law and the Constitution.

The Technology That Made It Possible

But how did the government accomplish this task and how do we know? In addition to investigative reports by the New York Times and others, AT&T technician turned whistleblower Mark Klein provided EFF with eyewitness testimony and documents describing one such secret room located at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, California.

It works like this: when you send an email or otherwise use the internet, the data travels from your computer, through telecommunication companies' wires and fiber optics networks, to your intended recipient. To intercept these communications, the government installed devices known as “fiber-optic splitters” in many of the main telecommunication junction points in the United States (like the AT&T facility in San Francisco). These splitters make exact copies of the data passing through them: then, one stream is directed to the government, while the other stream is directed to the intended recipients.

The Klein documents reveal the specific equipment installed at the AT&T facility and the processing power of the equipment within the secret rooms. One type of machine installed is a Narus Semantic Traffic Analyzer, a powerful tool for deep packet inspection. Narus has continually refined their capabilities and—as of the mid-2000s—each Narus machine was capable of analyzing 10 gigabits of IP packets, and 2.5 gigabits of web traffic or email, per second. It is likely even more powerful today. The Narus machine can then reconstruct the information transmitted through the network and forward the communications to a central location for storage and analysis.

In a declaration in our lawsuit, thirty-year NSA veteran William Binney estimates that “NSA installed no few than ten and possibly in excess of twenty intercept centers within the United States.” Binney also estimates NSA has collected “between 15 and 20 trillion” transactions over the past 11 years.

In April 2012, long-time national security author James Bamford reported NSA is spending $2 billion to construct a data center in a remote part of Utah to house the information it has been collecting for the past decade. “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases,” Bamford wrote, “will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”

The Utah data center will be fully operational in September 2013.

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/how-it-works

entensive links...

 

[trichrider]

An Illustration of How the NSA Misleads the Public Without Technically Lying







The Wall Street Journal published an important investigation last week, reporting that the National Security Agency (NSA) has direct access to many key telecommunications switches around the country and “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans.” Notably, NSA officials repeatedly refused to talk about this story on their conference call with reporters the next day. Instead the Director of National Intelligence and the NSA released a statement about the story later that evening.

If you read the statement quickly, it seems like the NSA is disputing the WSJ story. But on careful reading, they actually do not deny any of it. As we’ve shown before, often you have to carefully parse NSA statements to root out deception and misinformation, and this statement is no different. They’ve tried to deflect an accurate story with their same old word games. Here’s a breakdown:


The NSA does not sift through and have unfettered access to 75% of United States online communications...The report leaves readers with the impression that the NSA is sifting through as much as 75% of the United States online communications, which is simply not true.

Of course, the Wall Street Journal never says the NSA “sifts through” 75% of US communications. They reported the NSA’s system “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic.” The NSA's new term “sift” is undefined, but regardless of what the NSA is doing or not doing to 75% of Americans’ emails, they do have the technical capacity to search through it for key words—which they do not deny.


In its foreign intelligence mission, and using all its authorities, NSA “touches” about 1.6%, and analysts look at 0.00004% of the world’s Internet traffic.

See what they did there? The Wall Street Journal was talking about US-only communications traffic, not the world’s total Internet traffic. The vast majority of the world’s Internet traffic is video—streaming and downloads. According to a study done by Cisco, video made up more than half of all web traffic in 2012—and that does not include peer-to-peer sharing. By 2017, they predict 90% of all Internet traffic will be video.

As Jeff Jarvis aptly documented, the NSA can vacuum up an extraordinary percentage of the world’s (and American) communications while only touching 1.6% of total Internet traffic.

Oh, and that 0.00004%? That math may be wrong too. The Atlantic Wire double-checked the NSA’s numbers when they first used that stat and determined the NSA’s math was off by an order of magnitude – it actually searches ten times more than they say they do.1


The assistance from the providers, which is compelled by the law, is the same activity that has been previously revealed as part of Section 702 collection and PRISM.

First, notice that they are conflating PRISM—which involves collection from Internet companies like Facebook—with the “upstream” collection the Wall Street Journal reports on: telecommunications companies like AT&T that give the NSA direct access to the fiber optic cables that all Internet traffic travels over. Here’s the NSA’s own leaked graphic explaining the difference:



Second, siphoning off large portions of Internet traffic directly from the Internet backbone is not “compelled by law.” In fact, as EFF argued in court for years, the telecoms’ participation in this program with the NSA was both illegal and unconstitutional. Obviously, they knew it, because that’s why Congress passed retroactive immunity for companies like AT&T in 2008. But that immunity only extended to the telecom, and EFF’s case against the ongoing illegal surveillance continues.


Section 702 specifically prohibits the intentional acquisition of any communications when all parties are known to be inside the US.

Yes, Section 702 prohibits the intentional acquisition of US communications, but once US communications are in an NSA database—which happens often—the NSA can search them without a warrant, as documents recently published by the Guardian revealed. Unknown or anonymous people are assumed to be foreign, meaning many US people will be caught up in the dragnet.


The law specifically prohibits targeting a US citizen without an individual court order based on a showing of probable cause.

We’ve previously dissected the NSA’s warped definition of “target”, where they only have to be 51% sure the person they’re spying on is foreign. Additionally, a host of loopholes exist that allow the NSA to keep US communications if they’re encrypted, if there’s evidence of a crime, and more.

And as the New York Times reported on its front page two weeks ago, officials admit the NSA is “searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country” under the guise of looking for information about targets, not just communications to targets.


If that communications involves a US person, NSA must follow Attorney General and FISA court approved "minimization procedures" to ensure the Agency protects the privacy of US persons.

Those “minimization procedures” do not ensure that the NSA protects privacy. Rather, they are woefully inadequate, primarily concerned with minimizing the amount of data to be removed from the database, and expanding on the circumstances under which the NSA can keep the data and share it with other agencies.

So there you have it: how the NSA pretends to deny a media report without denying it at all. We are still awaiting an honest account of the NSA’s capabilities. Tell your representative to demand an independent investigation today.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/illustration-how-nsa-misleads-public-without-actually-lying