In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency, first revealed an extensive surveillance program operating from within the agency that was and is beholden to no judicial and limited congressional oversight. The program can capture Americans' communications, a member of a privacy watchdog agency said in a statement released Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
The NSA's XKeyscore program was the subject of a five-year investigation conducted by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), a watchdog group independent of the government, which finished its investigation in December.
According to Snowden, documents indicate that the program has existed for more than a decade. The program functions by allowing analysts to perform a Google-like search function across vast databases of Internet traffic captured from sites worldwide, plucking out the emails, Web browsing histories, and people's social media activity.
The program is driven by artificial intelligence, which is responsible for the "autonomous collection of massive data sets," Travis LeBlanc, a Democratic board member appointed by former President Donald Trump, indicated.
"What most concerned me was that we have a very powerful surveillance program that eight years or so after exposure, still has no judicial oversight, and what I consider to be inadequate legal analysis and serious compliance infractions," LeBlanc said.
LeBlanc was one of five board members who voted against approving the panel's classified report on XKeyscore in December. LeBlanc reasoned that the board "failed to adequately investigate or evaluate" the NSA's collection activities.
But NSA officials fired back at LeBlanc, citing that the agency conducted appropriate legal reviews of XKeyscore use. They further added, pointing to a document, that the agency has protections to safeguard Americans' privacy.
The program operates under a presidential directive known as Executive Order 12333. When collection activities operate under 12333, they are not subject to oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
"I continue to be concerned that Americans still know far too little about the government's surveillance activities under EO 12333 and how it threatens their privacy," said Oregon Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the Intelligence Committee. "I've been pressing for multiple PCLOB reports about EO 12333 to be declassified, which will shed light on these secret authorities that govern the collection and use of Americans' personal information."
According to slides disclosed by Snowden and obtained by Intercept in 2015, the program enabled an analyst to review communications indiscriminately as long as they were not tagged as belonging to an American, suggesting that the analyst could inadvertently be viewing an American's information without penalty, Ashkan Soltani, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Institute for Technology Law and Policy, said.
Because the processing of data is done mainly by artificial intelligence, "the realities of the Internet today means the likelihood that the NSA might accidentally be processing an American's communications is quite high," Soltani added.
The board, Leblanc stated, "failed the public" by not using its investigation powers to "delve into important technological and modern electronic surveillance issues" raised by XKeyscore.
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