NSA surveillance program still raises privacy concerns years after exposure, member of privacy watchdog says

An extensive surveillance program first revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 continues to operate with no judicial and limited congressional oversight despite its potential to capture Americans’ communications, a member of a privacy watchdog agency said in a statement released Tuesday.

The National Security Agency’s XKeyscore program was the subject of a five-year investigation by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent government privacy watchdog, that wrapped up in December.

According to documents leaked by Snowden, the program has existed for more than a decade. It allows analysts to use a Google-like search function across vast databases of Internet traffic captured from sites worldwide to pluck out the emails, Web browsing histories and social media activity of specific people.

The program relies heavily on the “autonomous collection of massive data sets,” and analysis driven by artificial intelligence, Travis LeBlanc, a Democratic board member appointed by President Donald Trump, said in a statement. His partly redacted statement was released after it went through a declassification process. LeBlanc was alone among the board’s five members to vote against approving the panel’s classified report on XKeyscore in December, saying that the board “failed to adequately investigate or evaluate” the NSA’s collection activities.

“What most concerned me was that we have a very powerful surveillance program that eight years or so after exposure, still has no judicial oversight, and what I consider to be inadequate legal analysis and serious compliance infractions,” LeBlanc said. The board sent copies of the report to Congress, the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in March.

NSA officials pushed back against LeBlanc’s assertions, saying the agency conducted appropriate legal reviews of the use of XKeyscore. They also said the agency has protections to safeguard Americans’ privacy. They pointed to a document issued in January that outlines the rules.

Former board chairman Adam Klein, a Trump appointee who stepped down from the board this month, defended its work: “The board produced a detailed, comprehensive report and recommendations on a very complex program. The clarity of description will enable Congress and other appropriate actors in the executive branch to ask hard questions as needed about this program.”

The program operates under a broad framework laid out by a presidential directive known as Executive Order 12333, which governs most surveillance taking place outside the United States and some surveillance taking place inside the United States. When collection activities occur under 12333, they are not subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

According to a 2009 slide released by Snowden and published in the Intercept in 2015, many of the sites that XKeyscore relies on for data were either in the United States or linked to sites in the United States. The NSA declined to discuss the location of the collection.