NSA Spying: Overview

Introduction

In June 2013, computer security specialist Edward Snowden leaked a number of classified documents that revealed the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been operating widespread surveillance programs to collect information on international leaders and citizens across the globe. While working as an NSA contractor, Snowden gathered hundreds of classified documents detailing the NSA's activities over a period of several years. Snowden had become increasingly alarmed by what he believed were significant rights violations and felt the public had a right to know this information about their government's clandestine operations. To share his knowledge, he enlisted two journalists with experience reporting on matters of privacy and security, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Over the period of several months, Greenwald published information about the NSA's extensive surveillance operations through a series of articles published in the Guardian and other global news outlets around the world. Poitras documented the process by filming interviews with Snowden, Greenwald, and others and coordinated the secure transmission of documents and correspondence between the three. The US government charged Snowden with espionage, and he fled to Russia.

Public knowledge of the NSA's bulk collection of data from citizens, corporations, and foreign governments led to swift backlash within the United States and around the world. Many Americans demanded a thorough investigation of the full extent of the NSA's surveillance operations. While many individuals support the use of government surveillance to monitor and prevent potential terrorist activity, others have expressed concern that the NSA surveillance operations exceed what is necessary to ensure national security. The debate touches on major issues such as the right to privacy, government transparency, and protection versus freedom.

Understanding the Discussion

Asylum: Legal protection from arrest and extradition granted to individuals by another country's government to protect them from prosecution or retribution in their home country (sometimes called "political asylum").

Encryption: A method for transmitting messages, including e-mails, so they cannot be read by anyone other than their intended recipient.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): A US government body that is responsible for intelligence gathering and surveillance.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA): A US federal law that established procedures for physical and electronic surveillance within the United States. It allows government surveillance of foreign agents within the United States for up to one year without a court order, so long as such surveillance does not acquire the contents of a US citizen's communications.

National Security Agency (NSA): A US government body that conducts communications surveillance and processes signals intelligence data.

USA Patriot Act of 2001 (Patriot Act): Signed into law by President George W. Bush in October 2001, an amendment to portions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 that eased restrictions on government surveillance for counterterrorism efforts.

History

The National Security Agency (NSA) originated as a code decryption unit during World War I and underwent several organizational changes during World War II and the outset of the Cold War. To improve coordination and information sharing between multiple government agencies, President Harry S. Truman officially established the National Security Agency in 1952, although the agency's operations remained secret. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in October 2001, the NSA was granted broad discretion in its domestic surveillance and counterterrorism initiatives.

In 2005, the NSA was accused of conducting warrantless wiretapping in violation of FISA provisions and the US Constitution. President George W. Bush was further accused of explicitly ordering NSA agents to conduct surveillance without obtaining judicial approval. Debate over the Bush administration’s surveillance program extended into 2006, with legislators calling for an investigation. In February 2006, the Senate voted not to conduct an investigation into the NSA’s activities, but a federal judge ordered the Bush administration to produce confidential documents regarding the scope of the NSA’s activities.

In August 2006, a US District Court judge ruled on a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the NSA. The court ruled that the terrorist surveillance program was unconstitutional, and called for the program’s termination. However, in July 2007, the decision was overturned by a circuit court, and in February 2008, the Supreme Court declined to review the case. Also in 2008, the US Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act, loosening the legal requirements for the NSA to obtain search warrants for electronic surveillance in cases where there is no individualized target.

In 2013, computer intelligence worker Edward Snowden leaked a number of classified documents revealing the extent of the NSA's surveillance operations. The information he revealed brought more public attention than ever before to the NSA. Importantly, his leaks raised concerns that the agency's vast surveillance initiatives were in violation of the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which prohibits the US government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures without a search warrant.

Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, and grew up in North Carolina. He did not complete high school; instead, he took computer courses at a local community college and later received his GED. In 2003, he enlisted in the US Army Reserve, but he never completed his training after breaking both legs during a training accident. Following his discharge, he first took a job as a security specialist in an NSA facility at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language before joining the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a systems administrator and telecommunications systems officer in 2006. Despite his lack of formal education, the CIA highly valued his advanced computer skills, and by 2007 he was stationed in Geneva, Switzerland, where he oversaw computer network security. In 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA and entered the private sector as a contractor for Dell at an NSA facility on a US military base in Japan.

In later interviews, Snowden expressed his growing concern with the US government and its extensive surveillance operations. He learned about questionable information-gathering tactics early in his employment and became convinced that the surveillance activities were too broad to be legal and fair. While working at the NSA and CIA, Snowden had access to many classified government documents describing these activities; he began copying top-secret records regarding what he believed were significant civil rights violations. By late 2012, he had amassed a collection of tens of thousands of classified government documents. In early 2013, Snowden took a job as an NSA contractor for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. He later revealed that he took the position at Booz Allen Hamilton specifically to gather more information on the NSA's surveillance operations.

Snowden first made contact with documentary writer Laura Poitras in January 2013. Poitras had spent several years working on a documentary about surveillance, privacy, and whistle-blowers, so Snowden trusted that she would understand the gravity of his accusations and the necessity of secure communication. After several months of careful scrutiny, Snowden convinced Poitras that he was a legitimate and credible source. Snowden also reached out to journalist Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian; Greenwald initially declined the contact, but after he and Poitras met up in April 2013, the two joined forces to receive and sort through Snowden's documents.

In the spring of 2013, Snowden was living in Hawaii, where he was working at an NSA facility for Booz Allen Hamilton. That May, he took a leave of absence under the guise of seeking treatment for epilepsy; instead, he boarded a plane for Hong Kong, fleeing the United States to avoid the prosecution he expected once the documents were made public. After the US government contacted authorities in Hong Kong to extradite him to the United States, Snowden fled to Moscow, Russia, where he was granted temporary asylum.

The documents leaked by Snowden revealed the vast data collection initiatives by several different government surveillance programs. For example, one NSA document leaked by Snowden and published by the Guardian was a secret four-page court order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that required a subsidiary of the telecom company Verizon to turn over the telephone metadata of millions of US customers to the NSA and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on a daily basis; this metadata included the phone numbers of all outgoing and incoming calls, the serial numbers of the phones involved in the calls, the time and duration of each phone call, and location information of the nearest cell tower for each call. The Guardian and the Washington Post published articles outlining the NSA's ability to access and collect information from the servers of some of the most widely used tech companies, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Other documents listed potential targets for cyberattacks initiated by the US government and plans to make Skype video calls accessible to intelligence agencies.

Documents also revealed NSA operations that collected phone and internet records from citizens in other countries, including Brazil and Germany. There were even reports that the NSA had directly targeted the personal communications of German chancellor Angela Merkel, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, and Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. Following the release of this information, President Barack Obama gave assurances that the collected data helped to avert terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad, but at least one study (conducted by the New America Foundation) would question the validity of that assertion. Other documents revealed that the NSA hacked several civilian computer networks in Hong Kong and China, including two major universities, and had been monitoring the text messages of ordinary Chinese citizens.

Despite the risks to himself and his family, Snowden explained to Poitras that he chose to reveal his identity because he expected to be found out eventually, and he did not want anyone else to be unfairly targeted for the leak. He expressed that he wanted to share information that he felt the public had a right to know, so they could have a fair say in how they were governed. He also said he carefully selected which documents to reveal, limiting the exposure to only what he believed was vital for public knowledge and refusing to publish any documents that could undermine national security.

Revelations about the NSA's extensive surveillance operations led many Americans to demand a full review of the agency's activities by an organization other than the secret court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In December 2013, US district judge Richard J. Leon ruled that the NSA's bulk collection of American's phone records violated the privacy rights of the five plaintiffs who filed the suit, but he limited his ruling to only those plaintiffs. The US Supreme Court then refused to hear an appeal of the decision, so no broad precedential ruling was established.

In hopes of uncovering the full extent of the surveillance, the US Congress included in its federal funding bill a measure that would require the NSA to provide Congress with public reports describing how it collects and uses telephone, internet, and other electronic communication data. By early 2014, at least fourteen state legislatures had also proposed bills designed to protect citizens from untargeted surveillance activities. For example, lawmakers in Colorado proposed a bill that would limit the retention of images from license plate readers; Oregon lawmakers proposed a bill that would require "urgent circumstances" to obtain mobile phone location data; and Delaware had plans to increase privacy protection for text messages.

Following Snowden's initial groundbreaking leaks, various further incidents kept the issue of NSA spying in the public eye. In July 2015, the website WikiLeaks posted documents suggesting that the NSA had covertly intercepted conversations between Japanese government officials. The reports, sourced from between 2007 and 2009, included Japanese positions on climate change and international trade. The following month, President Obama spoke with Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, on the phone and apologized for the spying allegations; Abe asked for the US government to further investigate the claims and warned that such indiscretions could strain relations between the two countries.

Also in August 2015, the New York Times exposed new Snowden documents that most likely pinpointed the telecommunications giant AT&T as the company that had been in a partnership with the NSA and its spying efforts for several years. According to the New York Times, the documents reveal that AT&T began supplying the NSA with Internet metadata as early as 2001, and testimony received from former AT&T technicians over the years has confirmed that the company began building secure, secret rooms in some of its major facilities for the purpose of installing NSA equipment and providing the agency with access to data stored on its routers. In 2011, AT&T gave the NSA 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records.

NSA Spying Today

The NSA was forced to halt its program of phone spying by June 1, 2015, after the provisions of the Patriot Act that allowed for the program had expired and the Senate failed to extend them. The USA Freedom Act passed the next day reestablished some elements of the Patriot Act, but also imposed limits on the harvesting of telecommunications metadata by the NSA (and other intelligence agencies). However, critics of the agency’s data collection efforts argued that loopholes would allow the NSA to continue gathering the same type of information through other means. The agency's operations in general have remained controversial, with ongoing debate over the balance between surveillance that benefits national security and that which potentially infringes on people's rights. The domestic surveillance programs known as PRISM and Upstream (which focused on internet communications) drew particular opposition from human rights watchdog groups.

As for Snowden himself, he continued to live in Russia, with his asylum claim extended repeatedly. US officials continued to seek his return to the United States, where he would likely face prosecution for espionage and theft of government property. In January 2014, two Norwegian politicians nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. They stated that, while they did not condone all of his actions, Snowden's whistle-blowing sparked public debate and policy changes that have "contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order." Snowden's appeals for clemency from the United States were unsuccessful, as was a widespread campaign to have him pardoned that was launched in 2016 by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He faced further pressure from the administration of US president Donald Trump, who suggested Snowden should be executed. Snowden published the memoir Permanent Record in 2019, and in October 2020 Russia granted him permanent residency status.

The fallout of the Snowden leaks continued for years as various lawsuits related to NSA spying played out. In late 2019 a US Court of Appeals ruled that the US government was allowed to collect data on US citizens without a warrant if the data was incidentally obtained as part of legal surveillance of non-citizens in other countries. While this was considered a victory for supporters of NSA national security operations, the court decision also noted that closer examination of detailed NSA databases could potentially violate the Fourth Amendment.

Another notable development came in September 2020, when another US Court of Appeals ruled that the agency's collection of domestic telephone records with a warrant had been unlawful. The decision stated that intelligence officials who had defended the program had lied, and recognized Snowden as instrumental in exposing the program. Meanwhile, in 2020 Congress also negotiated reauthorization of the USA Freedom Act, with advocates on both sides of the debate closely watching changes that could further curb or extend NSA powers. In 2024, Congress extended FISA while simultaneously rejecting amendments to the act that would authorize stricter rules around the NSA's incidental collection of US citizens' data without a warrant.

These essays and any opinions, information, or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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