14 DAY TRIAL // The latest news about the NSA comes from the agency itself and not from a leaked document. James Clapper admitted in a letter sent to Senator Ron Wyden that the intelligence agency had in fact been forgoing warrants to search through Americans’ communications.
This has been suspected for a while, but it’s the first time that an agency official admits to it. “There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter he sent to Wyden.
The Guardian notes that he adds that these queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the FISA court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.
Basically, the director of National Intelligence has admitted to performing warrantless searches on communications belonging to American citizens.
Senator Wyden has accused the NSA of creating a backdoor search loophole for itself through this legal authority it obtained to perform searches.
In fact, most of the NSA’s data collection programs are operating thanks to this loophole, including PRISM (which is used to collect data from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and others) and the Upstream program (which involves a network of Internet cable taps).
The number of warrantless searches performed by the agency has not been revealed and it probably never will be. The fact that Clapper has admitted to this puts a new spin on the entire problem, basically crumbling the agency’s defenses. Even the US president stated a while back that the telephony metadata program wasn’t about looking into people’s conversations without warrants.
“What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content,” Barack Obama said a few months back, referring to the data collected on American citizens.
Wyden and Mark Udall, two senators that have been quite critical of the NSA mass surveillance efforts, saying that the Constitutional rights of Americans were being threatened, believe that the warrantless searches of US citizens’ emails and phone calls should be concerning to all.
“This is unacceptable. It raises serious constitutional questions, and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding 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. This fact should be beyond dispute,” the two senators said.