NSA halts collection of certain messages

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has halted one of the most disputed practices of its warrantless wiretapping program: collecting Americans’ emails and texts to and from people overseas that mention foreigners targeted for surveillance, according to officials familiar with the matter.

National security officials have argued that such surveillance is lawful and helpful in identifying people who might have links to terrorism, espionage or otherwise are targeted for intelligence-gathering. The fact that the sender of such a message would know an email address or phone number associated with a surveillance target is grounds for suspicion, these officials argued.

The decision is a major development in U.S. surveillance policy. It brings to an end a once-secret form of wiretapping that privacy advocates have argued overstepped the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches — even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court upheld it as lawful — because the government was intercepting communications based on what they say, rather than who sent or received them.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has long been a critic of NSA surveillance, said that he would introduce legislation codifying the new limit.

The law that authorizes the program, the FISA Amendments Act, is up for renewal at the end of 2017.

“This change ends a practice that allowed Americans’ communications to be collected without a warrant merely for mentioning a foreign target,” Wyden said. “This transparency should be commended.”

The existence of this socalled “about the target” collection was first reported by The New York Times in 2013.

The NSA made the change to resolve problems it was having complying with special rules imposed by the surveillance court in 2011 to protect Americans’ privacy. For technical reasons, the agency ended up collecting messages sent and received domestically as a byproduct of such surveillance, the officials said.