According to a new report
from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, US spy
agencies now access the freely collected communications of Americans
more than twice as frequently as just two years ago, without a warrant
or any real oversight save the report itself. And while the the
ever-growing database of searchable communications is supposed to be
filled with national security-relevant material only, searches of that database can be done to investigate regular domestic crimes — or just about anything else.
The
FBI’s recent attempts to get through encryption might not be necessary,
if they have other ways of accessing our information.
The startling new figures arise from the NSA’s
mandate in Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Act, which says that
it may target the communications of non-US persons outside of the US.
The problem is the so-called “incidental” collection of Americans’
communications, which puts them in the NSA’s vast “702 database.” Once a
US person’s personal information is in the database, it’s as searchable
as anything else that was collected legitimately. Its the use of search
terms specific to US persons that has more than doubled.
However, searches for metadata have also
increased dramatically, associating a particular communication with a
sender, receiver, and more.
All this leads to the question of just how
much of an incentive there is in the security world to actually fix the
collection algorithms, when they seem to be collecting information that
is of such ballooning interest. This report shows that right now, the
NSA and others in the security world are benefiting from their
oft-proclaimed inability to filter domestic targets out of their data.
Perhaps the body creating and maintaining these tools should be separate
from the body that most directly benefits from their primitive level of
sophistication.
It’s worth pointing out that, if you’re going
to go after foreign terrorists with ambitions to attack the US, your
investigations will almost certainly lead within US borders at some
point. When that happens, the process of acquiring the necessary
warrants to continue investigating should be efficient and available,
with a bias toward protecting national security — putting a piece of
paperwork and judicial oversight between investigators and the domestic
leg of each case simply is not a very big or debilitating ask. The spy
world has essentially devolved to arguing, “Whoops! We slipped and read
your email!”
The Section 702 mandate applies to any non-US
person outside the US “who possesses, or who is likely to communicate or
receive, foreign intelligence information.” Do you know anyone who
might be “likely” to receive foreign intelligence information? Know
someone working as an intern at the Grecian finance ministry? Anyone you
know abroad have a direct relative who’s active in national politics?
Know a guy in China who once worked in a Huawei factory?
This alarming uptick in use shows that the
real worry isn’t how these powers are being used now, but how they will
be used in the future. If there’s one thing that’s certain about the
security world, it’s that if you give them an inch, they take a mile —
and play all the way to the edge of it.
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