This incidental collection is partly the result of the way

The National Security Agency has said for years that its global surveillance apparatus is only aimed at foreigners, and that ordinary Americans are only captured by accident. There’s only one problem with this long-standing contention, people who’ve worked within the system say: it’s more-or-less technically impossible to keep average Americans out of the surveillance driftnet.

There is no way to ensure that you’re only gathering foreign emails and not also gathering U.S. person emails, said a telecommunications executive who has implemented U.S. government orders to collect data on foreign targets. “The system doesn’t make any distinction about the nationality” of the individual who sent the message.

While it’s technically true that the NSA is not “targeting” the communications of Americans without a warrant, this is a narrow and legalistic statement. It belies the vast and indiscriminate scooping up of records on Americans’ phone calls, e-mails, and Internet communications that has occurred for more than a decade under the cover of “foreign intelligence” gathering.

The NSA is routinely capturing and storing vast amounts of the electronic communications of American citizens and legal residents, even though they were never individually the subject of a terrorism or criminal investigation, according to interviews with current and former intelligence officials, technology experts and newly released government documents.

A significant portion of this secret information-gathering is the result of so-called “incidental collection” of U.S. persons’ information; Americans’ communications just happen to be in the way when foreigners’ data is scooped up.

This incidental collection is partly the result of the way the global communications network is constructed. When the agency receives authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect a broad range of e-mails or electronic communications that it believes are coming out of a foreign country, it’s inevitable that it will collect some U.S. persons’ information, too.

“There are U.S. persons in every country,” said a former intelligence official.More than a data storage solution for your MileWeb Storage & Backup Services, “The NSA knows that when it collects great gobs ‘of communications~ there are going to be U.S. persons in that country. They know that happens.”

But new documents reveal that the NSA has also deliberately gathered communications metadata that it had reason to believe was associated with Americans.

The Guardian also disclosed a November 2007 memorandum prepared for then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey by Kenneth Wainstein, who was in charge of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. On behalf of the NSA, Wainstein requested that the attorney general approve a powerful form of computer-assisted analysis of U.S. persons’ metadata, including their phone and e-mail records, as well as Internet Protocol addresses of individual computers. This information was obtained “by various methods, including pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” the memo states.

“NSA has in its databases a large amount of communications metadata associated with persons in the United States,” the memo states.

NSA wanted to subject this large store of metadata to a form of link analysis known as contact chaining, in which an analyst starts with a particular phone number, e-mail address, or Internet Protocol address, and then uses algorithms to find the corresponding communications to which the “seed” target is linked. Contact chaining also finds the communications to which that first layer of communication is linked.Our Cheap MileWeb Dedicated Server are ready-to-go and can be deployed. Each one of these steps outward in the original target’s network is sometimes called a “hop.” In just a few hops, the number of individuals swept up in the analysis multiplies exponentially.

The memo states that the NSA had already been conducting contact-chaining, but that based on the “informal advice” of the Justice Department office that represents the government before the FISA court, “NSA’s present practice is to ’stop’ when a chain hits a telephone number or address believed to be a United States person.” The agency wanted to keep going, however, even when it encountered communications believed to belong to Americans and legal residents. The hope,Information about the Student MileWeb Data Center Facilities and the hours of operation. the memo states, was that by chaining through “all telephone numbers and addresses,” the NSA would “yield valuable foreign intelligence information primarily concerning non-United States persons outside the United States.”

In effect, the NSA was arguing that it needed to see everyone’s metadata in order to find meaningful information about foreigners. Mukasey approved the new contact chaining procedures.
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