The saga of the National Security Administration (NSA) surveillance on Americans continued this week after declassified documents showed that Washington has been monitoring and unlawfully reading thousands of emails each year, going a step farther than the collection of “metadata” revealed earlier this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Earlier leaks showed that authorities have been monitoring and storing call locations, phone numbers and the duration of calls, known as “metadata,” for millions of Americans, but stopped short of listening in on actual conversations.
Civil liberties groups and some members of Congress now say that this latest announcement shows that the Obama administration has crossed a clear legal line by reading thousands of emails each year, in many cases without the permission of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
This also marks the third time in less than three years that the Obama administration has disclosed a misrepresentation of its intelligence gathering operations.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the latest information comes from a redacted 85-page opinion, declassified by U.S. intelligence officials, stating that, based on NSA estimates, the spy agency may have been collecting as many as “56,000 wholly domestic” communications each year.
This announcement expands upon previous leaks from Edward Snowden, a former Booz Allen Hamilton NSA contractor who showed earlier this year that intelligence agencies had been collecting and storing telephone metadata. By monitoring call times, call locations and telephone numbers from millions of Americans, the Obama administration claims that this type of surveillance, while objectionable to many, was still within the limits of the law.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, tasked with overseeing intelligence gathering, claimed that back in 2011 it too had been misled or kept in the dark.
“For the first time, the government has now advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” wrote John D. Bates, then the surveillance court’s chief judge, in his recently declassified Oct. 3, 2011, opinion.
After the declassified documents were made public, Senator Ron Wyden (R-Ore.) publicly condemned the email surveillance, claiming that it constitutes a violation of Fourth Amendment rights, which bars citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures, even under the auspices of anti-terrorism intelligence gathering.
“While the NSA eventually made changes to its minimization procedures in response to this ruling, the very collection it describes was a serious violation of the Fourth Amendment and demonstrates even more clearly the need to close the backdoor searches loophole that allows for the communications of Americans to be searched without a warrant if they are swept up under procedures that were intended to target foreigners,” Wyden said.
Politico reports that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the leader of the chamber’s Judiciary Committee, has promised a hearing on the issue in the coming weeks.
Outside of Capitol Hill, civil liberties groups responded with similar condemnation, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which issued the following statement:
“The main defense that the administration has on these programs — not that we buy it — is, don’t worry there’s secret court and congressional oversight to make sure there aren’t problems. Last week’s leak about compliance, coupled with this and the courts being misled, this sort of destroys the last refuge of the program’s defenders.”