Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years
Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on
Americans for years
by John Solomon and Sara Carter May 23, 2017
The National Security Agency under former President
Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring
through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems
until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall,
according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious
constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.
More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches
seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section
702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to
follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.
The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a
closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
that set off alarm. Trump was elected less than two weeks later.
The normally supportive court censured administration
officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier
amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches
constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently
unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.
The admitted violations undercut one of the primary
defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in
recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about
Americans.
Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase
in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S.
person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy
rules in 2011.
Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan
Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization
rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly
monitored to avoid abuses.
The intelligence court and the NSA’s own internal
watchdog found that not to be true.
“Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have
prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream
Internet collections under Section 702,” the unsealed court ruling declared.
“The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been
conducting such queries inviolation of that prohibition, with much greater
frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”
The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly
disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and
strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police
itself and safeguard American’s privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s
Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.
“I think what this emphasizes is the shocking lack of
oversight of these programs,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s legislative
counsel in Washington.
“You have these problems going on for years that only
come to the attention of the court late in the game and then it takes
additional years to change its practices.
“I think it does call into question all those defenses
that we kept hearing, that we always have a robust oversight structure and we
have culture of adherence to privacy standards,” she added. “And the headline
now is they actually haven’t been in compliacne for years and the FISA court
itself says in its opinion is that the NSA suffers from a culture of a lack of
candor.”
The NSA acknowledged it self-disclosed the mass violations
to the court last fall and that in April it took the extraordinary step of
suspending the type of searches that were violating the rules, even deleting
prior collected data on Americans to avoid any further violations.
“NSA will no longer collect certain internet
communications that merely mention a foreign intelligence target,” the agency
said in the statement that was dated April 28 and placed on its Web site
without capturing much media or congressional attention.
In question is the collection of what is known as
upstream “about data” about an American that is collected even though they were
not directly in contact with a foreigner that the NSA was legally allowed to
intercept.
The NSA said it doesn't have the ability to stop
collecting ‘about’ information on Americans, “without losing some other
important data. ” It, however, said it would stop the practice to “reduce the
chance that it would acquire communication of U.S. persons or others who are
not in direct contact with a foreign intelligence target.”
The NSA said it also plans to “delete the vast majority
of its upstream internet data to further protect the privacy of U.S. person
communications.”
Agency officials called the violations “inadvertent
compliance lapses.” But the court and IG documents suggest the NSA had not
developed a technological way to comply with the rules they had submitted to
the court in 2011.
Officials "explained that NSA query compliance is
largely maintained through a series of manual checks" and had not
"included the proper limiters" to prevent unlawful searches, the NSA
internal watchdog reported in a top secret report in January that was just
declassified. A new system is being developed now, officials said.
The NSA conducts thousand of searches a year on data
involving Americans and the actual numbers of violations were redacted from the
documents Circa reviewed.
But a chart in the report showed there three types of
violations, the most frequent being
The IG report spared few words for the NSA’s efforts
before the disclosure to ensure it was complying with practices, some that date
to rules issued in 2008 in the final days of the Bush administration and others
that Obama put into effect in 2011.
“We found that the Agency controls for monitoring query
compliance have not been completely developed,” the inspector general reported,
citing problems ranging from missing requirements for documentation to the
failure to complete controls that would ensure “query compliance.”
The NSA’s Signal Intelligence Directorate, the nation’s
main foreign surveillance arm, wrote a letter back to the IG saying it agreed
with the findings and that “corrective action plans” are in the works.
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