NSA collection of emails about foreign targets screeches to a halt

The NSA will continue to follow the phone numbers and email addresses involved when Americans are in direct communication with a target. What the NSA will no longer do is collect communications between an American and someone outside of the country, who isn’t him/herself a foreign intelligence target, but have a conversation related to a person of interest.

According to the Times, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 found the NSA to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment, protecting against unreasonable search and seizures, after Internet companies sometimes transmitted bundles of emails, in which perhaps a target’s email address was mentioned only once. The agency then proposed, and the court accepted, a new repository for these bundles.

Officials told the Times that last year the NSA found and reported that analysts digging through this repository were violating the procedure agreed to by the court. The court then halted the agency’s surveillance program until it canceled its “about” email communication collection.

The NSA, and other members have been conducting these warrantless searches, dependent on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, since 2008. But it wasn’t until 2013 that it came to light when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret information on the NSA’s surveillance program.

Snowden, currently in Russia, where he has been granted asylum, tweeted Friday “The truth changed everything.” He also pointed to where in the NSA press release it says while the surveillance court was considering the government’s annual application to renew the Section 702 certifications that the “NSA reported several earlier, inadvertent compliance incidents related to queries involving U.S. person information in 702 ‘upstream’ internet collection.”

This, Snowden said, showed the U.S. broke the law and forced the NSA to cancel this part of its spy program. “Blood in the water,” he tweeted.

The NSA’s surveillance program has been the subject of serious debate in Congress, especially now that law that authorizes the program, the FISA Amendments Act, requires renewal this year.

Some lawmakers, like Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have been critical of the spy program’s warrantless data collection and its threat to the Fourth Amendment. He applauded the NSA’s decision to halt the part of its program that sweeps up communications only about foreign targets.

“This change ends a practice that could result in Americans’ communications being collected without a warrant merely for mentioning a foreign target,” Wyden said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner. “For years, I’ve repeatedly raised concerns that this amounted to an end-run around the Fourth Amendment. This transparency should be commended. To permanently protect Americans’ rights, I intend to introduce legislation banning this kind of collection in the future.”

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff credited the end of Section 702 surveillance to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency within the executive branch, which works to the government’s fight against terrorism is balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties.​

Snowden called this a “bizarre statement” that shouldn’t be trusted, claiming that PCLOB opposed ending “about collection.”