In April the US National Security Agency (NSA) disclosed that its warrantless wiretaps instituted at the behest of the George W. Bush administration—including domestic email—have exceeded any legal limit since late 2008. According to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, reporting for the New York Times, a former NSA analyst “described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.” Email messages were collected in a secret database, codenamed Pinwale, that could be queried freely so long as no more than 30 percent of the total database was searched in a single command.
At the same time, the Obama administration claimed it had taken the necessary steps to bring the NSA into legal compliance. Under the law, the NSA can surveil only those Americans suspected of having links to international terrorism and only then after obtaining permission from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The NSA, in Congressional testimony, steadfastly maintains that any “overcollection was inadvertant.” Representative Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), chair of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, told Risen and Lichtblau that he disputes that position and that “the people making the policy don’t understand the technicalities.”
Risen and Lichtblau report that the NSA is believed to have overstepped its legal bounds in 8-10 cases. But in each of those cases, potentially thousands of email addresses were illegally surveilled. “Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the N.S.A. also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation,” a senior intelligence official told the reporters.
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