STE WILLIAMS

The NSA has stopped snooping on communications between US citizens and foreigners, it was claimed today.

Government officials whispered to the New York Times that the spy agency is halting surveillance conducted under the legal fig leaf provided by the 2008 FISA Amendments Act – which allows snoops to rifle through American citizens’ private emails, phone calls, and other communications, so long as one of the parties is a foreigner. These spying powers were renewed by Congress for five years in 2012, and are thus up for renewal at the end of 2017.

So it seems the NSA has pulled the plug early before it could be ordered to stop by Congress. That’s assuming a shut down was likely. Perhaps, instead, there was some other reason behind the snoops backing off monitoring Americans talking to foreigners.

In 2011, prior to the latest renewal, the FISA rules were challenged in court, leading to the NSA modifying its procedures slightly: it would gather up private communications as usual but hold them in a special silo before agency analysts could examine them. That was supposed to encourage staffers to hunt for specific stuff rather than pore over a firehose of Americans’ personal and sensitive messages. Don’t forget, the NSA is not supposed to spy on its own citizens.

However, the agency has persistently stonewalled efforts to find out how many Americans have had their conversations swept up in the surveillance dragnet.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has been trying for years to get clarification on this point out of the intelligence agencies, with a notable lack of success. He and others in Congress have been looking forward to the FISA renewal debates and committee sessions, but it appears the NSA may have preempted that chance.

“This change ends a practice that could result in Americans’ communications being collected without a warrant merely for mentioning a foreign target,” Wyden said on Friday in an email to The Register.

“For years, I’ve repeatedly raised concerns that this amounted to an end run around the Fourth Amendment. This transparency should be commended. To permanently protect Americans’ rights, I intend to introduce legislation banning this kind of collection in the future.”

That’s certainly convenient for the agency, but it’s going to have the conspiracy theorists all aflutter, since there is serious interest in certain prominent Americans and their links to foreigners who might influence. Expect spittle-flecked ranting from Alex Jones and his ilk on this one.

Technological factors might also have played a part. With more and more telcos and service providers using encrypted network connections and adopting strong end-to-end encryption – in part due to revelations from Edward Snowden on how deeply NSA signal taps had been set up on their data linkages – it may be that this has made large portions of slurped data useless.

But the NSA being what it is, you can bet that the agency has found other ways to get the information it wants. There’s plenty of post-9/11 legislation out there that’s full of legal loopholes that the Maryland data miners can exploit. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/nsa_may_stop_overseas_fisa_spying/