Nine out of 10 people in Edward Snowden's NSA intercepts were not targets

[Luminous Animal]

http://www.smh.com.au/world/nine-out-of-10-people-in-edward-snowdens-nsa-intercepts-were-not-targets-20140706-zsxv0.html#ixzz36fON3FZr

Washington: Ordinary internet users far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from US digital networks.

Nine out of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided to The Washington Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to US citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or "minimised", more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans' privacy, but nearly 900 additional email addresses were found unmasked in the files, which could be strongly linked to US citizens or residents.

There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages – but also collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

[Luminous Animal]

1. Ordinary internet users far outnumber legally targeted foreigners

[Luminous Animal]

2. Kick.

[Luminous Animal]

3. Kick again.

[n2doc]

4. Another take on it

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/07/nsa-said-edward-snowden-had-no-access-surveillance-intercepts-they-lied

The NSA Said Edward Snowden Had No Access to Surveillance Intercepts. They Lied.

[riderinthestorm]

8. That's a great article. Thanks n2doc

Oh, and another kick!

[riderinthestorm]

5. This thread is mighty quiet eh? Kick! nt

[Luminous Animal]

6. Keerickets.

[Puzzledtraveller]

7. Hobby Lobby

Snowden had boxes in his garage.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Are we safe yet? K&R

[Luminous Animal]

10. The original WaPo article

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html

If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

(snip)

In the interview, Snowden said he did not need to circumvent those controls, because his final position as a contractor for Booz Allen at the NSA’s Hawaii operations center gave him “unusually broad, unescorted access to raw SIGINT under a special ‘Dual Authorities’ role,” a reference to Section 702 for domestic collection and Executive Order 12333 for collection overseas. Those credentials, he said, allowed him to search stored content — and “task” new collection — without prior approval of his search terms.


“If I had wanted to pull a copy of a judge’s or a senator’s e-mail, all I had to do was enter that selector into XKEYSCORE,” one of the NSA’s main query systems, he said.

(snip)

In an ordinary FISA surveillance application, the judge grants a warrant and requires a fresh review of probable cause — and the content of collected surveillance — every 90 days. When renewal fails, NSA and allied analysts sometimes switch to the more lenient standards of PRISM and Upstream.

[ljm2002]

11. Another important bit from the article...

...is this one:

As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.

(...)

“They didn’t touch the FISA data,” Alexander replied. He added, “That database, he didn’t have access to.”

(...)

The NSA has released an e-mail exchange acknowledging that Snowden took the required training classes for access to those systems.

The article is worth reading in its entirety. Here we have another case where Alexander clearly lied, and where Snowden appears to be telling the truth -- he took the required training, so it's plausible that he was authorized to access those records, as he has claimed. Anyway, the Washington Post obtained the information for this article from Snowden, demonstrating that he did, in fact, have access to it.

[bobduca]

12. Kick