The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agencys use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.
In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban at the governments request on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.
...
The court decision allowed the NSA to query the vast majority of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Batess opinion.
The queries must be reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information. And the results are subject to the NSAs privacy rules.
The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the governments request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities, he said.
But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, we did ask the court to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. We wanted to be able to do it, he said, referring to the searching of Americans communications without a warrant.
Facebook
Twitter