NSA still reading your e-mails

Geopoliticalmonitor.com

Summary

In a brazen example of the self-maximizing nature of government power, it appears that the NSA is still engaged in the collection, reading, and archiving of large amounts of American e-mails.

Analysis

During the Bush years, any whisper of information concerning NSA domestic spying programs was met with public apprehension and a sense of anxiety that, in spite of the government’s assurances otherwise, centered around the potential for individual abuses in a spying program devoid of judicial oversight. All it took was a few years for these reservations to be vindicated.

A recent article in the New York Times has revealed that the NSA has been reading e-mails en masse, both foreign and domestic, and then archiving them in a system codenamed ‘Pinwale.’ Far from being restricted to individuals with suspected connections to terrorism, the NSA has been collecting heaps of ordinary American people’s private e-mails. The number of innocent e-mails nabbed by Pinwale meta-filters could amount to over a million. These compromised messages purportedly include Bill Clinton’s private e-mails, as well as those of NSA agents’ wives and girlfriends.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation of all is that even as the Obama administration tries to wash its hands of Bush-era policies, there are indications that the NSA Pinwale program is still in full swing. According to James Risen, author of the New York Times article, Democrat Representative and chairman of an intelligence oversight committee Rush Holt is not convinced that the NSA has stopped spying on American e-mails. Moreover, Risen claims that two intelligence officials have confirmed that the program was still in operation. Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent refusal to employ the word ‘illegal’ in his description of the NSA e-mail spying program has further fuelled speculation that the program persists.

Widespread abuses surrounding the Pinwale program serve as a reminder of how government agencies will fill power vacuums left by legal loopholes. According to Holt, lawmakers in Congress don’t fully comprehend the technical complexities involved in NSA spying programs, and thus they cannot properly regulate it.

Last year, the Congress passed a law aimed at clarifying the NSA’s legal jurisdiction over spying on domestic e-mails. The law acquiesced to the NSA’s reading of American e-mails, but only if it occurred as a byproduct of the investigation of individuals “reasonably believed” to be overseas. In other words, in the absence of judicial oversight and a requirement for warrants, individual intelligence agents are tasked with interpreting what the threshold of ‘reasonable belief’ is.

Given the shocking evidence that the NSA e-mail mining program is still active during the Obama era, it is anyone’s guess as to what the true extent of NSA domestic spying is, and what’s more, when it will end.

We now know of four different and overlapping NSA domestic spying programs: the warrantless telephone wiretaps, the “Stellar Wind” meta-data mining program, the monitoring of information flows through telecom hubs within the U.S, and finally the Pinwale e-mail archiving program.  It seems that the post-9/11 surveillance framework will be harder to disassemble than previously thought.

Zachary Fillingham is a contributor to Geopoliticalmonitor.com

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