According to the latest analysis, the NSA has secret means of “diverting parts of Internet traffic that move on global communications cables,” which allows it to neglect protections put into place by Congress to limit domestic surveillance on Americans.
TheNewFindings, published Thursday, supports a 2014 paper by researchers Axel Arnbak and Sharon Goldberg, published on News, which speculated that the NSA, whose mission it is to produce data from overseas targets, was using a “traffic shaping” technique to map US internet data abroad so that it could be incidentally obtained under the authority of a largely unknown executive order.
US citizens are allowed constitutional protections against surveillance or hunts of their personal data. Anytime the administration wants to access an American’s data, they must obey the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, a Washington DC-based court that approves the government’s surveillance programs.
But if that related data is collected outside the US, the bulk of the NSA’s authority derives from a presidential decree dating back more than 30 Years.
The so-called Administrative Order 12333, signed into legislation by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, went on to convert the bulk of the NSA’s authority, expanding the agency’s collection abilities to both foreign and domestic targets. The system is far more agreeable than the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as passed by Congress, as it falls solely under the watch of the administrative branch and is not reviewed by the courts.
A former NSA official turned whistleblower Bill Binney once called the executive order as a “blank check” for the intelligence agencies to carry surveillance when other laws fail or don’t reach far enough.
Although the current research notes that the agency’s expertise to carry out the traffic shaping technique is concealed due to the highly classified nature of any surveillance program, the NSA can use its legal powers to “sidestep constitutional restrictions imposed by Congress and the surveillance courts,” said Goldberg, who authored the report.
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