N.S..A. latest: the secret history of domestic surveillance

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/nsa-latest-the-secret-history-of-domestic-surveillance.html



On a day when President Obama said “I’m not going to be scrambling any jets to get a twenty-nine-year-old hacker”—thank goodness for that—the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman have published another set of N.S.A. documents that detail how the Agency’s domestic-surveillance programs have evolved over the past decade or so. The documents presumably came from Edward Snowden, although the Guardian reports don’t say so explicitly.

The headline news is that, for two years of the Obama Administration—from 2009 to 2011—the N.S.A. continued a previously undisclosed Bush-era program that enabled the Agency to sweep up vast amounts of information about American citizens’ Internet use. This included whom they were e-mailing with and which computers they were using. The program, which went under the code name “Stellar Wind,” was ended in 2011, and hasn’t been restarted, a senior Administration official told the newspaper.

For those of us who are concerned about this stuff, it’s depressing to think that the Administration, in addition to allowing the N.S.A. to collect vast amounts of metadata about Americans’ personal phone calls, also preserved a program to track U.S. citizens’ Internet usage. (In the case of an e-mail, metadata includes the names of the sender and all of the recipients, plus the I.S.P. address of the device used to access the Internet. The subject line and what the e-mail says are considered “content,” and under operation Stellar Wind, at least, they weren’t collected.) On the other hand, the online metadata-collection program was ended in 2011, although exactly why that happened isn’t clear. Shawn Turner, the Obama Administration’s director of communications for national intelligence, told the Guardian that operation Stellar Wind was stopped for “operational and resource reasons,” but he didn’t specify what these were.

In a separate story, Greenwald and Ackerman reported that the new documents confirm that the N.S.A., in targeting suspects overseas and those they communicate with, still mines vast amounts of online data from American citizens. Thanks to the previous revelations about Operation Prism, we sort of knew this. But the new documents add some telling details about the scale of the online snooping. For example, by the end of last year, one particular N.S.A. Internet tracking program called ShellTrumpet (there appear to have been many others) had already processed a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) metadata records.