14 DAY TRIAL // The NSA has been quite busy in recent years, spying left and right on innocent people and guilty ones all the same. The intelligence agency has revealed that a bulk collection program collected information about online communications, but it was retired because it grabbed too much data and shared it too freely.
According to the official IC On The Record Tumblr page, recently declassified court documents show that the program collected metadata from communications, including the “to,” “from,” and “cc” lines of emails, along with the time and date they were sent. The sweeping collection program was previously approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, much like all other programs the NSA uses to spy on people. The content of the emails was not collected.
What’s interesting is that this program, too, was subject to some restrictions by the FISC. For instance, the information could only be used for counterterrorism purposes and had to be stored in secure databases. These databases could be queried using an identifier, such as an email address, only when an analyst had a reasonable and articulate suspicion that the person behind it was associated with a terrorist organization.
The rules also indicated that the NSA had to destroy the bulk metadata after a set period of time. The intelligence agency could, until then, share information about US persons data was collected about with other agencies “upon determination by a designated NSA official that it is related to counterterrorism and is necessary to understand the counterterrorism information or to asses its importance.”
This program that was shut down seems to be very familiar with the ongoing metadata collection program that’s become the center of attention of the debate over the NSA programs within the United States.
The defunct program was shut down because the NSA had managed to exceed its authority in its operation of the program through the way it was accessing metadata, the way it shared the information with other agencies and the way it overcollected information that it shouldn’t have had.
The court also revealed that NSA analysts who were not authorized to access the database full of communications metadata did manage to receive “unminimized query results” nonetheless.
Furthermore, the NSA admitted to placing query results into a database that was made available to other agencies’ personnel without the determination that it was related to counterterrorism information, as it was mandatory for information on US persons.
As for the NSA’s tendency to overstep its boundaries, it seems that virtually all Internet metadata records collected “included some data that had not been authorized for collection,” although there’s no example on such an instance.
The governmental agency provided no details about how the overcollection occurred or why it let things continue even when it knew that it was doing something that it shouldn’t have been doing.
All in all, it seems that the NSA does what it does better – collect all information, even when there was no reason, stepped over the lines and didn’t comply with the imposed restrictions. Under these circumstances, there’s only one question – why was the NSA allowed to take on another metadata collection program after the FISC knew its tendencies to do whatever it wanted, regardless of the rules?