"a secret FISA court order that amounts to a gift certificate for one year of warrant-free spying"
How Many Americans Does the N.S.A. Spy On? A Lot of Them
If you are writing an e-mail, and hope to make it clear to any National Security Agency analysts who might be reading it that you are an American, it won’t help to mention that you were just at a Shake Shack or recently bought a Rawlings baseball glove, or to cite anything that you learned in a middle-school history class. According to documents published by the Guardian and the Washington Post, the N.S.A.’s “minimization procedures”—which are supposed to keep it from spying on Americans—include the note, “A reference to a product by brand name, or manufacturer’s name or the use of a name in a descriptive sense, e.g. ‘Monroe Doctrine,’ is not an identification of a United States person.”
But what is? Maybe American name brands aren’t enough—there is a Shake Shack in Dubai, as it happens—but reading the new documents, which include a secret FISA court order that amounts to a gift certificate for one year of warrant-free spying, it becomes clear that many more “United States persons” have their communications monitored, and on much vaguer grounds, than the Obama Administration has acknowledged.
“What I can say unequivocally is that, if you are a U.S. person, the N.S.A. cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the N.S.A. cannot target your e-mails,” the President said earlier this week. A 2009 memorandum signed by Eric Holder establishes a broader criteria, referring to people “reasonably believed” to be located abroad. That reasonable belief, as it turns out, can be quite shaky.
Among the information that the N.S.A. is told to use includes having had a phone or e-mail connection with a person “associated with a foreign power or foreign territory,” or being in the “‘buddy list’ or address book” of such a person. It won’t be lost on anyone that Americans whose families include recent immigrants will be disproportionately vulnerable to such intrusions. (So, incidentally, will journalists.) The defaults in the analysis are telling: a person whose location is unknown, will not be treated as a United States person unless such person can be positively identified as such, or the nature or circumstances of the person’s give rise to a reasonable belief that such person is a United States person.
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The criteria also show the interaction of various N.S.A. programs: the Administration has defended the collection of telephony metadata by saying that if it ever produces an interesting match, investigators would have to go to court to get a proper warrant to look more closely.
But metadata is mentioned in these documents as a basis for picking a target for the surveillance under what appears to be a blanket FISA order—not an individualized one.
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/06/how-many-americans-does-the-nsa-spy-on-a-lot-of-them.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true
No, I'm not comfortable saying the President lied. Is there a more polite word? Prevaricate perhaps? Equivocate?
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