Five years ago, the US Congress supposedly killed what was then known as the Total Information Awareness program, an enormous database maintained by the Pentagon that could be searched for suspicious behavior by US citizens. If it ever was killed, it’s back from the dead and in the hands of the National Security Agency (NSA), according to Siobhan Gorman’s report earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal.
It’s unknown what role the NSA plays in domestic intelligence gathering and surveillance but the agency’s role has historically been confined solely to foreign surveillance. Michael Hayden, then head of the NSA, expanded the NSA’s activities shortly after the 9/11 attacks under a 1981 executive order. An additional executive order issued by President Bush shortly after the attacks presumably expands the NSA’s reach even further, but remains classified. What is known, according Gorman, is that the NSA can—without a warrant—look at email subject lines, time sent, and recipient and sender addresses; websites visited; searches conducted; incoming and outgoing cellphone and landline numbers, locations, and call lengths; bank account information and wire transfers; credit card usage information; and airline passenger information.
The NSA’s surveillance clearinghouse includes information from its own Terrorist Surveillance Program, which monitors telephone calls and email traffic between the US and overseas; the FBI’s Carnivore, now known as the Digital Collection System, which monitors domestic telecommunications data; and an arrangement with the world’s main international banking clearinghouse to track the movement of money around the globe; along with “an ad-hoc collection of so-called ‘black programs’ whose existence is undisclosed.”
Gorman’s report serves to reinforce Seymour Hersch’s 2006 New Yorker story about how the NSA analyzes all of this data.
The legality of these databases which store “transactional” information—information about a telephone call, for example, but not the actual content of the telephone call—is based in a 1979 US Supreme Court ruling that allows this information to be collected without a warrant. Multiple laws require a warrant for similar information gathered related to electronic communications but the USA Patriot Act lowered the standard in some cases to national security letters instead of an actual court-signed warrant.
An expansion to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expired in February and Congress has been debating whether or not US corporations, including telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, should be given immunity from legal liability.
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