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. The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases. Now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed the use of this legal authority to search for data related to “US persons”. “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 in the letter, which has been obtained by the Guardian. Confirmation that the NSA has searched for Americans’ communications in its phone call and email databases complicates President Barack Obama’s initial defenses of the broad surveillance in June. The Democrats also made a veiled swipe at President Obama, who reassured Americans that "nobody is listening to your telephone calls." They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.” 
 
 Obama was referring specifically to the bulk collection of US phone records, but his answer misleadingly suggested that the NSA could not examine Americans’ phone calls and emails. The board is scheduled to deliver a report on the legal authority under which the communications are collected, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), passed in 2008. “The Department of Justice and the intelligence community reaffirmed that any queries made of Section 702 data will be conducted in strict compliance with applicable guidelines and procedures, and do not provide a means to circumvent the general requirement to obtain a court order before targeting a US person under Fisa.” 
 
 Clapper referred to that debate in his letter to Wyden, which came in response to the senator’s request in January for a public answer on whether the NSA had in fact conducted such searches. But unlike that bulk data collection, Section 702 allows the NSA to listen to calls and read emails. The ruling appears to give the agency free access to search for information relating to US people within its vast databases, though not to specifically collect information against US citizens in the first place. On Tuesday, Wyden and Udall said the NSA’s warrantless searches of Americans’ emails and phone calls “should be concerning to all.” 
 
 “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,” the two senators said in a joint statement. They continued: “Today’s admission by the Director of National Intelligence is further proof that meaningful surveillance reform must include closing the back-door searches loophole and requiring the intelligence community to show probable cause before deliberately searching through data collected under section 702 to find the communications of individual Americans." It was further amended on 2 April to make it clear that in August 2013, the US government declassified documents that first confirmed the searches of US persons' data under Section 702 of Fisa.
– It took a few months, but Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon finally got his answer from national intelligence chief James Clapper. Yes, Clapper wrote in a letter, the NSA does indeed spy on Americans' emails and phone calls—without a warrant—thanks to a revision in a law originally intended to apply only to foreigners, reports the National Journal. The existence of what Wyden has called a "back door" in the law first surfaced in August, courtesy of Edward Snowden, but Clapper didn't respond to Wyden's questions about it in January until the letter dated March 28. "This is unacceptable. It raises serious constitutional questions, and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans," wrote Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall. "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," they wrote. "This fact should be beyond dispute." The loophole stems from the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which gives the government the right to intercept phone calls and emails on domestic soil, without a warrant, as long as the target lives abroad and isn't a citizen, explains the New York Times. In 2011, the government got permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to use the database to search for Americans' details, too. It's this "back door" that has led to most of the NSA's most controversial information-gathering programs, including PRISM, notes the Guardian.