The better to spy on bad guys who might be talking to American co-conspirators. But nobody else. The most open and transparent administration, eh?The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's 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.
Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA's authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration's assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term "target" that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government's approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans' privacy later.
Depending on what sort of people they are and the kind of privacy they deserve.
The court's expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released, but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators, Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a "back-door search loophole" that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans. They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules from disclosing the court's authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.
Nobody else thought this was questionable? Nobody wanted to leak this little tidbit? Maybe the only way to be a whistle-blower is like Snowden?
"The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrant-less searches of individual Americans' communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners," Wyden said in a statement to The WaPo. "Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant."
Excuse me, the what requires a warrant?