The NSA has cracked that code.
You know how you might say "Oh! Hi, NSA!" as a joke in an email to a friend or family?
Well ...
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.
The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.
While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching—without warrants—through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations. [emphasis added]
But it's all okay, because, as intelligence officials have been assuring us since Edward Snowden released detailed information about the NSA's dragnet surveillance of Americans, "they do not 'target' Americans for surveillance without warrants." No, Americans are the innocent bystanders who just get caught up in the dragnet, all of our phone call metadata captured, along with what we write in emails and texts. But, hey, don't worry because we're not the "targets." And the NSA would never ever suck up and
search the content of our communications without a warrant. Unless we happen be talking "about" someone who might be a target, which they wouldn't know unless they sucked up all our email and text communications and searched them.
That means that whenever they are looking at the content of your communications, they have to make sure that there's a foreign person outside of the United States that's being talked "about" so that "the surveillance is technically directed at the foreign end." Oh, and the FISA Amendments Act says it's all legal, according to how the secret FISA court decided to secretly interpret the Act, once again creating it's own secret Fourth Amendment law.
Richard Lyon has more in this diary.
Sign our petition urging Congress to declassify the FISA Court’s rulings so we can find out what else the court has decided about the Fourth Amendment.