Surprise! All that sucking up of domestic electronic communications by the NSA revealed by Edward Snowden that was "just" metadata? It wasn't just metadata, but also content. That's according to a
new report from the
Wall Street Journal, based on interviews with current and former government and intelligence officials as well as people familiar with the system through their industry connections. The new reporting also reveals that the NSA has built an intelligence collecting infrastructure much larger than previously known, with "the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic." The system reaches deep into the internet backbone to more than a dozen junctions, beyond the key points where data enters the country from overseas as was previously understood.
The NSA is focused on collecting foreign intelligence, but the streams of data it monitors include both foreign and domestic communications. Inevitably, officials say, some U.S. Internet communications are scanned and intercepted, including both "metadata" about communications, such as the "to" and "from" lines in an email, and the contents of the communications themselves. [...]
The systems operate like this: The NSA asks telecom companies to send it various streams of Internet traffic it believes most likely to contain foreign intelligence. This is the first cut of the data.
These requests don’t ask for all Internet traffic. Rather, they focus on certain areas of interest, according to a person familiar with the legal process. “It’s still a large amount of data, but not everything in the world,” this person says.
The second cut is done by NSA. It briefly copies the traffic and decides which communications to keep based on what it calls “strong selectors”—say, an email address, or a large block of computer addresses that correspond to an organization it is interested in. In making these decisions, the NSA can look at content of communications as well as information about who is sending the data.
More on the
WSJ report below the fold.
The WSJ report also reveals more details about the one collection program that the FISA Court found unconstitutional and put the kibosh on. Intelligence officials told the WSJ that program began with an "unintentional mistake" in 2008 "when it set filters on programs like these that monitor Internet traffic." The mistake wasn't discovered and reported by NSA until 2011, when the FISA court stopped it.
And here's a fun tidbit.
For the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, officials say, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and NSA arranged with Qwest Communications International Inc. to use intercept equipment for a period of less than six months around the time of the event. It monitored the content of all email and text communications in the Salt Lake City area.
Qwest, you might remember, was the lone hold-out in the early days of the warrantless wiretapping program, and it was through Qwest, and its then-CEO Joseph Nacchio (now in jail for insider trading) that
we learned the NSA under the Bush administration began the program before Sept. 11. Nacchio was first approached in February 2001, and refused to comply with the program because the agency didn't provide a court order. When Qwest pushed for that court order, a blockbuster
USA Today story reported, "'They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,' one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events."
Obviously the NSA takes the FISA court's jurisdiction very seriously. Which takes us back the three-year long unconstitutional data collection program the NSA was conducting between 2008-2011, and whether the NSA really didn't discover that they were sucking up huge more amounts of data then they "intended." Marcy Wheeler notes that the beginning of the program coincides with the passage of the FISA Amendments Act when telecom companies got legal immunity for warrantless wiretapping, the same time the "overly broad filters" were put in place. Coincidence? As Marcy says, we might be "getting closer and closer to the iceberg Ron Wyden and Mark Udall warned us about."
Let's try to start some transparency. Sign our petition urging Congress to declassify the FISA Court’s rulings.