14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since the NSA scandal began, US authorities have been saying that the media has it wrong and that no US citizen’s data is willingly being collected through the various programs run by the intelligence agency.
However, another set of data from the leaked documents of Edward Snowden indicate exactly the opposite.
More specifically, the NSA uses a loophole in its own rules to carry out searches for US citizens’ email and phone call details without the need of a warrant, The Guardian reports.
According to Senator Ron Wyden, the law provides the NSA a loophole on allowing warrantless searches for data from Americans.
The document brought in discussion by The Guardian, is Section 702 of a secret glossary provided to operatives in the NSA’s Special Source Operation division. The wording, as with all legal documents, it particularly important and this one gives the NSA room to bend the rules.
“Section 702 was intended to give the government new authorities to collect the communications of individuals believed to be foreigners outside the US, but the intelligence community has been unable to tell Congress how many Americans have had their communications swept up in that collection," Wyden said.
The new information falls in line with what Wyden has been saying for weeks, namely that even now the NSA director and the White House are being misleading when talking about the programs run by the intelligence agency.
In a letter sent a few weeks ago, Wyden, along with Mark Udall, another member of the intelligence committee, mention the exact same Section 702 which states that any communication of or concerning a US citizen must be destroyed if it’s not relevant to an authorized purpose or evidence of a crime.
"We believe that this statement is somewhat misleading, in that it implied the NSA has the ability to determine how many American communications it has collected under Section 702, or that the law does not allow the NSA to deliberately search for the records of particular Americans,” the letter sent to the NSA director says.