NSA snooped on millions of Americans
The US National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records of Americans’ phone calls last year even after the Congress limited its ability to collect bulk phone records, according to an annual report issued on Tuesday by the top US intelligence officer.
The report from the office of director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was the first measure of the effects of the 2015 USA Freedom Act.
The act limited the NSA to collecting the phone records of only the people that were suspected of having ties with terrorism by intelligence agencies.
It found that the NSA had collected the 151 million records even though it had warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court to spy on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, in addition to a handful identified the previous year.
The NSA has been gathering a vast quantity of telephone “metadata,” records of callers’ and recipients’ phone numbers and the times and durations of the calls, but not their content, since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The report came as the Congress faced a dilemma on whether to reauthorise section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which permits the NSA to collect foreign intelligence information on non-U.S. persons outside the United States, and is scheduled to expire at the end of this year.
Privacy advocates have argued that section 702 permits the NSA to spy on Internet and telephone communications of Americans without warrants from the secret foreign intelligence surveillance court, and that foreign intelligence could be used for domestic law enforcement purposes in a way that evades traditional legal requirements.
The report said that on one occasion in 2016, the FBI obtained information about an American in response to a search of section 702 data intended to produce evidence of a crime not related to foreign intelligence. The report did not address how frequently the FBI obtained information about Americans while investigating a foreign intelligence matter.
On Friday, the NSA said it had “stopped a form of surveillance” that allowed it to collect the digital communications “of Americans who mentioned a foreign intelligence target in their messages without a warrant”.
The new report also came amid allegations, recently repeated by US President Donald Trump, that former President Barack Obama had ordered warrant-less surveillance of his communications, and that former National Security adviser Susan Rice had asked the NSA to unmask the names of US persons caught in the surveillance. Both Republican and Democratic members of the intelligence committees have said so far they have found no evidence to support either allegation.