NSA fact sheet

Referring to what he said were incorrect press reports about the NSA programs, Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a speech last week, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on." The Post's Miller notes that on the very same day, "the NSA quietly removed from its Web site a fact sheet about its collection activities because it contained inaccuracies discovered by lawmakers." The four-page fact sheet described how Americans' information is protected from surveillance in the NSA program PRISM. It said PRISM "allows only the targeting... of communications of foreign persons who are located abroad." But that's not very exact. Analysts only have to be 51 percent sure the person is outside the U.S.

How the NSA handles American emails

On June 17, Obama said, "What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails." No, the NSA can't target Americans. But! Lots of American emails are scooped up while the NSA is monitoring foreign people. "The law allows the NSA to examine such messages and share them with other agencies if it determines that the information contained is evidence of a crime, conveys a serious threat or is necessary to understand foreign intelligence," the Post says.

The documents Snowden leaked show that in 2009, the Obama administration got the FISA court to approve holding onto data for up to five years because it couldn't process all the informaiton it was vacuuming up. An anonymous expert who sometimes advises the NSA told the Times to think of the Internet as the ocean. "[I]f you can’t desalinate all the seawater at once, you get to hold on to the ocean until you figure it out."

Transparency and court oversight

President Obama describes the court process that oversees the NSA programs as "transparent," the Post notes, even though it's secret. Though the NSA's programs for collecting phone call and Internet metadata got major attention for the first time with Snowden's leak, they were reported before. One of the most fascinating things Snowden's leaks have revealed is the legal process that has been set up to approve the surveillance. Obama administration officials might claim the system was created to protect citizens. But it was also created to protect companies like Verizon and Google from lawsuits, and bureaucracies from outrage.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only started overseeing the bulk collection of data in 2006. The PRISM slideshow Snowden gave to The Guardian and The Washington Post show, The New York Times explains, that as the years passed after 9/11, phone and Internet companies began "fearing that customers might be angry to find out their records were shared with the government." Increasingly, their lawyers "insisted on legal orders to compel them to comply." Two years ago, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that, "Beginning in late 2009, certain electronic communications service providers no longer honored [national security letters] to obtain" electronic communication transaction records. At the time, NBC News' Michael Isikoff explains, the telecoms were being sued for cooperating with government surveillance requests. So the government switched to requesting them under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.