NSA to halt some email collection

The National Security Agency has ended a controversial surveillance practice of collecting email traffic merely because it contains the email address or phone number of a foreign target, a procedure that greatly increased the chances that purely domestic communications would be gathered.

The agency agreed to end the “about the target” collection to win approval from a federal court to continue a major surveillance program known colloquially as “Section 702” of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That’s a reference to part of a statute — the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 — that allows the NSA to gather from U.S. telecommunications and Internet providers the emails, phone calls, text messages and other electronic communications that could contain foreign intelligence.

The “about” collection came to public light as one of a series of disclosures in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Those revelations sparked months of national and international debate about the proper scope of government surveillance.

The “about” surveillance was the most problematic part of the “upstream” collection portion of Section 702, in which the agency gathers emails and text messages from telecom companies that own the infrastructure making up the “backbone” of the Internet.

Upstream collection is a comparatively small part of overall 702 collection.

One estimate by the surveillance court in 2011 put it at about 9 percent. Even so, it could result in “a large overall number of purely domestic” communications, a privacy oversight board concluded in 2014.