Domestic communications are perused by NSA "on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant

Snowden: NSA snoops on U.S. phone calls without warrants

Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden says Americans' domestic communications are perused by National Security Agency "on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant."

by Declan McCullagh
June 17, 2013 1:35 PM PDT

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One question in the Guardian chat asked Snowden: "Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?" He replied:

NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of reasons... The reality is that due to (a 2008 federal law known as FAA 702), Americans' communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications... If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time -- and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants."

On Sunday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a carefully-worded statement in response to a CNET article and other reports questioning when intelligence analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. Clapper said: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress."

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The New York Times disclosed in 2009 that a secret NSA database, code-named PINWALE, archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages that analysts could search through "without warrants" as long as Americans' correspondence did not amount to more than 30 percent of any database search. The newspaper said an "analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton," which seems unlikely to have happened if a court order was required to surveil Americans, Opsahl said. A Washington Post article this month disclosed that NSA analysts are supposed to use search terms "designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target's 'foreignness.'"

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Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.

Documents that came to light in a different EFF lawsuit provide some insight into how the spy agency vacuums up data from telecommunications companies. Mark Klein, who worked as an AT&T technician for over 22 years, disclosed in 2006 (PDF) that he witnessed domestic voice and Internet traffic being surreptitiously "diverted" through a "splitter cabinet" to secure room 641A in one of the company's San Francisco facilities. The room was accessible only to NSA-cleared technicians.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589672-38/snowden-nsa-snoops-on-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/