The Obama administration has conducted warrantless
searches of Americans’ communications as part of the National Security
Agency’s surveillance operations that target foreigners located outside
of the U.S., the administration’s top intelligence official confirmed in
a letter to Congress disclosed on Tuesday.
These
searches were authorised by a secret surveillance court in 2011, but it
was unclear until Tuesday whether any such searches on Americans had
been conducted.
The recent acknowledgement of
warrantless searches on Americans offers more insight into U.S.
government surveillance operations put in place after the terror attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001. The government has broadly interpreted these laws to
allow for the collection of communications of innocent Americans,
practices the Obama administration maintains are legal. But US President
Barack Obama has promised to review some of these programmes to
determine whether the government should be conducting this type of
surveillance at all.
“Senior officials have
sometimes suggested that government agencies do not deliberately read
Americans’ emails, monitor their online activity or listen to their
phone calls without a warrant,” Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Mark
Udall said in a joint statement. “However, the facts show that those
suggestions were misleading, and that intelligence agencies have indeed
conducted warrantless searches for Americans’ communications.”
Sen.
Wyden has pressed the administration on whether these searches on
Americans have occurred. In a March 28 letter to Sen. Wyden, James
Clapper, the government’s top intelligence official, said the NSA has
searched for Americans’ communications within information it collected
when it targeted foreigners located outside the U.S. In his letter, Mr.
Clapper also pointed to a declassified document released last August
that also acknowledged the use of such searches and stated that these
searches were reviewed, and there was no finding of wrongdoing. It was
unclear how often these searches are conducted.
Documents
disclosed last year by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden showed
that the government collects mass amounts of data from major Internet
companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook through one of
its programmes designed to target communications of foreigners located
outside the U.S. The government is not allowed to use this authority to
collect Americans’ communications, but conversations of innocent
Americans are collected inadvertently. When this happens, the NSA is
required to take certain measures to hide the communications of
Americans that have nothing to do with foreign intelligence.
In
2011, the government sought and received approval from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court to search for Americans within the
communications it already possessed through its collection of
conversations of foreigners outside the U.S. Such searches would only be
permissible if there were a foreign intelligence purpose.
Former
NSA deputy director Chris Inglis said this authority might be used to
search for the target of a terrorist attack. As an example, Inglis said
if the government was concerned that terrorists were plotting to attack
the New York Stock Exchange, the NSA could search for the term “New York
Stock Exchange” among the conversations it collected in its targeting
of foreigners overseas.
Se. Wyden, Sen. Udall and
other civil liberties advocates call this type of search a back-door
loophole in the law that governs surveillance of Americans.
“If
a government agency thinks that a particular American is engaged in
terrorism or espionage, the Fourth Amendment requires that the
government secure a warrant or emergency authorization before monitoring
his or her communications,” Sen. Wyden and Sen. Udall said.
The Obama administration contends the searches are legal because they are searching information they lawfully obtained.
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