Photo: Charles Dharapak 
 
 In response to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the government has tried to calm Americans by declaring that when it comes to online communications, “only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted.” The rest of the world still found that information pretty unsettling, and now the New York Times reports that it’s not exactly true for Americans anyway. The NSA is sifting through most e-mail and text communications in and out of the country, and their search isn’t limited to Americans who deal directly with foreign targets. According to a document leaked by Snowden, the NSA is also looking for “communications about the target that are not to or from the target.” If you mention a terrorist’s e-mail address or phone number to a friend overseas, the NSA intends to find out. 
 
 The line was included in a list of rules about how the NSA can apply a 2008 law in which Congress approved warrantless eavesdropping, as long as the “target” was a foreigner abroad, and it was the only rule marked “top secret.” The document was posted online in June, but the line was mostly overlooked at the time. 
 
 The Times reports that the NSA conducts surveillance on communications that cross the border by temporarily copying the data, then having a computer search for keywords that flag content for humans to examine. One senior intelligence officer argued that the process doesn’t amount to bulk data collection, since the search process takes seconds and the data isn’t stored. The official wouldn’t comment on how much data is processed, but computer scientists said that due to the way the messages are transmitted, the government would have to collect and reconstruct nearly all information crossing the border to make sense of it. 
 
 Timothy Edgar, a former intelligence official in the Bush and Obama administrations, said there’s also “an ambiguity in the law about what it means to ‘target’ someone.” The government isn’t allowed to target Americans, but the conversation is fair game as long as one of the participants is a noncitizen outside the U.S. Even if the agency is examining communication from the American, technically the foreigner is the target. And thus, the president feels more comfortable declaring, “We don’t have domestic spying,” on the Tonight Show. ||||| The Obama administration's top intelligence official has confirmed that the National Security Agency intentionally spied on the communications of Americans under a law intended to apply only to foreigners. 
 
 Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed the surveillance in a letter responding to questioning from Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. The agency spied on the actual contents of communications without a warrant—not just "metadata" such as call times and phone numbers. 
 
 "This is unacceptable. It raises serious constitutional questions, and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans," Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, said in a statement. 
 
 "If a government agency thinks that a particular American is engaged in terrorism or espionage, the Fourth Amendment requires that the government secure a warrant or emergency authorization before monitoring his or her communications," the senators said. "This fact should be beyond dispute." 
 
 Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives the NSA broad power to listen in on phone calls and access emails. But the law covers only non-Americans located outside of the United States. 
 
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 The agency sometimes collects Americans' information as it scoops up vast amounts of data on foreigners. In his letter to Wyden, Clapper revealed that the NSA has searched through that database specifically looking for Americans' communications. 
 
 "There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States," Clapper wrote. 
 
 The statement confirms that the NSA has been taking advantage of a secret rule change first revealed by The Guardian in August, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. 
 
 It's unclear how many Americans have been affected by the surveillance, though the program is presumably much smaller than the NSA's bulk collection of millions of phone records. But unlike that bulk data collection, Section 702 allows the NSA to listen to calls and read emails. 
 
 In their statement, Wyden and Udall said the confirmation from Clapper shows that Congress must ensure it closes the "loophole" in Section 702 to require that the NSA has to show probable cause of wrongdoing before targeting individual Americans. 
 
 The Democrats also made a veiled swipe at President Obama, who reassured Americans that "nobody is listening to your telephone calls." 
 
 "Senior officials have sometimes suggested that government agencies do not deliberately read Americans' emails, monitor their online activity or listen to their phone calls without a warrant," the senators said. "However, the facts show that those suggestions were misleading, and that intelligence agencies have indeed conducted warrantless searches for Americans' communications." 
 
 Jeff Anchukaitis, a spokesman for Clapper, said the director's office already declassified documents related to the surveillance of people within the U.S. under Section 702 in August. 
 
 He emphasized that the "authority is subject to strict oversight by the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to ensure compliance with the minimization procedures, and that there were no intentional violations of those procedures." 
 
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 This article appears in the April 2, 2014 edition of NJ Daily. ||||| 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. 
 
 It also adds another element to the unfolding debate, provoked by the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, about whether the agency has infringed on Americans’ privacy as it scoops up e-mails and phone data in its quest to ferret out foreign intelligence. 
 
 Government officials say the cross-border surveillance was authorized by a 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, in which Congress approved eavesdropping on domestic soil without warrants as long as the “target” was a noncitizen abroad. Voice communications are not included in that surveillance, the senior official said. 
 
 Asked to comment, Judith A. Emmel, an N.S.A. spokeswoman, did not directly address surveillance of cross-border communications. But she said the agency’s activities were lawful and intended to gather intelligence not about Americans but about “foreign powers and their agents, foreign organizations, foreign persons or international terrorists.” 
 
 “In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, N.S.A. collects only what it is explicitly authorized to collect,” she said. “Moreover, the agency’s activities are deployed only in response to requirements for information to protect the country and its interests.” 
 
 Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules, leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency “seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target.” The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20, but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked “Top Secret” amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures. 
 
 To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them. 
 
 Computer scientists said that it would be difficult to systematically search the contents of the communications without first gathering nearly all cross-border text-based data; fiber-optic networks work by breaking messages into tiny packets that flow at the speed of light over different pathways to their shared destination, so they would need to be captured and reassembled. 
 
 The official said that a computer searches the data for the identifying keywords or other “selectors” and stores those that match so that human analysts could later examine them. The remaining communications, the official said, are deleted; the entire process takes “a small number of seconds,” and the system has no ability to perform “retrospective searching.” 
 
 The official said the keyword and other terms were “very precise” to minimize the number of innocent American communications that were flagged by the program. At the same time, the official acknowledged that there had been times when changes by telecommunications providers or in the technology had led to inadvertent overcollection. The N.S.A. monitors for these problems, fixes them and reports such incidents to its overseers in the government, the official said. 
 
 The disclosure sheds additional light on statements intelligence officials have made recently, reassuring the public that they do not “target” Americans for surveillance without warrants.
– The NSA is poring over pretty much all emails and texts sent across the border by Americans to look for information that might raise red flags, the New York Times reports. The revelation means that the NSA's surveillance of Americans is broader than was previously known: It's not just direct communication between an American and foreign targets that will be intercepted; it's any email or text about a such a target. As New York puts it, "If you mention a terrorist's email address or phone number to a friend overseas, the NSA intends to find out." The NSA temporarily copies most cross-border communications, the Times notes, and scans them. The expanded surveillance was mentioned, but largely overlooked, in information released by Edward Snowden in June. The ACLU calls it "dragnet surveillance" that will cause ordinary people to hesitate before discussing sensitive topics or visiting controversial websites for fear they will be monitored. “Individually, these hesitations might appear to be inconsequential, but the accumulation of them over time will change citizens’ relationship to one another and to the government.” A former NSA general counsel cites an example of how it could be useful: Say intel officials knew al-Qaeda was using a particular phone number for a specific plot. “If someone is sending that number out, chances are they are on the inside of the plot, and I want to find the people who are on the inside of the plot."