NSA Given More Ability to Share Raw Intelligence Data

President Obama has changed the rules regarding raw intelligence, allowing the NSA to share raw data with the US’s other 16 intelligence agencies.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches. The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

Here are the new procedures.

This rule change has been in the works for a while. Here are two blog posts from April discussing the then-proposed changes.

From a privacy perspective, this feels like a really bad idea to me.

Posted on January 12, 2017 at 12:07 PM • 29 Comments