The director of national intelligence on Monday night released what appeared to be the original court document authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct sweeping collections of Americans’ communications records for counterterrorism purposes.
The order, signed by the then-chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, was among nearly 1,000 pages of documents being released by James R. Clapper Jr. in response to lawsuits and a directive by President Obama. The documents also describe the NSA’s failure to abide by court-imposed rules to protect Americans’ privacy, and show that the agency was more interested in collecting cell site location data than it had previously acknowledged.
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The opinion signed by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly permitted the NSA to gather in bulk information about e-mail and other forms of Internet communication such as e-mail addresses, but not the content. Its true scope, however, was unclear. Three pages describing the categories of “metadata” that the NSA proposed to collect were redacted.
Although the date was blacked out, the opinion appeared to be the order that placed the NSA’s Internet metadata program under court supervision in July 2004, according to an NSA inspector general report leaked this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Prior to that date, the NSA had been collecting the e-mail records without court or congressional approval as part of a secret terrorist surveillance program authorized by President George W. Bush in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
The 87-page order lays out what was apparently the initial, albeit by-now familiar, argument for bulk collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the court’s reasons for accepting it. Kollar-Kotelly found that a relatively low standard of “relevance” to collect the information was necessary “to permit, as is the case in criminal investigations, the use of this very valuable investigative tool at the critical early stages of foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.”
She acknowledged that the volume of data collected would be “enormous,” though the amount estimated by the NSA was redacted. And she said the NSA asserted that it needed such massive amounts of data to identify unknown people who may be in contact with terrorists’ whose e-mail addresses would be used to search the database. “Analysts know that terrorists’ e-mails are located somewhere in the billions of data bits; what they cannot know ahead of time is exactly where,” the judge wrote.
The judge said the NSA could use two methods to search the data. One is “contact-chaining,” or using computer algorithms to identify all e-mail accounts that have been in contact with the suspect’s e-mail account, as well as all accounts that have been in contact with an account in that first tier of results. The second method was redacted.
Kollar-Kotelly said Americans do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the metadata they generate, citing Supreme Court cases, including a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland .
The order, signed by the then-chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, was among nearly 1,000 pages of documents being released by James R. Clapper Jr. in response to lawsuits and a directive by President Obama. The documents also describe the NSA’s failure to abide by court-imposed rules to protect Americans’ privacy, and show that the agency was more interested in collecting cell site location data than it had previously acknowledged.
Graphic
How the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court works
Latest from National Security
Anne Gearan and Karen DeYoung Top U.S. diplomat voices confidence though no nation has agreed to host the destruction of the stockpiles.
Sari Horwitz Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is not under indictment, officials say, but organization says it’s skeptical.
Karen DeYoung, Anne Gearan and Ernesto Londoño The agreement gives the U.S. exclusive legal jurisdiction over its military and civilian defense workers.
Full coverage of the revelations and debate surrounding National Security Agency surveillance programs.The opinion signed by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly permitted the NSA to gather in bulk information about e-mail and other forms of Internet communication such as e-mail addresses, but not the content. Its true scope, however, was unclear. Three pages describing the categories of “metadata” that the NSA proposed to collect were redacted.
Although the date was blacked out, the opinion appeared to be the order that placed the NSA’s Internet metadata program under court supervision in July 2004, according to an NSA inspector general report leaked this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Prior to that date, the NSA had been collecting the e-mail records without court or congressional approval as part of a secret terrorist surveillance program authorized by President George W. Bush in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
The 87-page order lays out what was apparently the initial, albeit by-now familiar, argument for bulk collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the court’s reasons for accepting it. Kollar-Kotelly found that a relatively low standard of “relevance” to collect the information was necessary “to permit, as is the case in criminal investigations, the use of this very valuable investigative tool at the critical early stages of foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.”
She acknowledged that the volume of data collected would be “enormous,” though the amount estimated by the NSA was redacted. And she said the NSA asserted that it needed such massive amounts of data to identify unknown people who may be in contact with terrorists’ whose e-mail addresses would be used to search the database. “Analysts know that terrorists’ e-mails are located somewhere in the billions of data bits; what they cannot know ahead of time is exactly where,” the judge wrote.
The judge said the NSA could use two methods to search the data. One is “contact-chaining,” or using computer algorithms to identify all e-mail accounts that have been in contact with the suspect’s e-mail account, as well as all accounts that have been in contact with an account in that first tier of results. The second method was redacted.
Kollar-Kotelly said Americans do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the metadata they generate, citing Supreme Court cases, including a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland .