NSA and CIA Double Their Warrantless Searches on Americans in Two Years

The searches for terms “concerning a known U.S. person” were conducted on a massive NSA database ostensibly collected for foreign intelligence purposes.

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA collects hundreds of millions of digital communications at rest and in transit from the major internet backbones running in and out of the U.S., as well as from Google, Facebook, YouTube, and other companies, involving “targets” overseas.

Americans’ communications are constitutionally protected from warrantless searches, but when those communications are swept up by the NSA “incidentally” to its main goal, those protections have been essentially ignored.