Targeted Surveillance? NSA Says It Can’t Distinguish American Emails From Foreign Missives.

How carefully targeted is National Security Agency (NSA)
surveillance of email and other electronic communications?
According to an internal NSA memo, “it is not possible to determine
what communications are to or from U.S. persons nearly as readily
as is the case with telephony, and often is not possible at
all.”

The revelation comes in documents
pried from the governments’ sticky fingers by the American Civil
Liberties Union in the course of its efforts to plumb the
parameters of Executive Order 12333, a secretive directive that
lies behind much of the federal government’s electronic
surveillance. The executive order is intended to authorize efforts
against foreign actors but, as the memo reveals, the snoopers are
pretty much reduced to gathering everthing up and then separating
out the material on which they’re not supposed to be spying after
the fact.

But there may be some problems with asking snoops to respect
your privacy after they’ve gathered your communications.
For one thing, they have a record of not doing that. An internal
NSA legal memo also collected by the ACLU frets that signals
intelligence personnel are engaged in the unauthorized “sharing of
voice cuts and/or similar material compiled in the course of SIGINT
collection with other SIGINT personnel.” The memo goes on to
suggest that the Inspector General “assess whether the SIGINT
personnel involved were spending their work time engaged in
non-productive activity.”

The ACLU’s Ashley Gorski points out that this almost certainly
refers to the sharing of sexy best-of out-takes, as alleged in 2008
by a former NSA military intercept operator.

So when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
initially denied that government snoops were scooping up Americans’
data, then described that answer as “the least untruthful”
response he could give to questioning before finally conceding that
his words were “clearly erroneous,” he wasn’t just blowing hot air.
In the age of nude selfies, smartphone sex videos, and erotic
texts, he was probably loath to lose out on some fine
entertainment.