Free Republic

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections. The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches. The change means that far more officials will be searching through...

US officials claim that the government's massive data collection has protected the country from terrorist attacks. After The Guardian's first revelations about the National Security Agency's digital surveillance programs, Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Representative Mike Rogers, head of the House Intelligence Committee, jumped to the NSA's defense by pointing to two terrorist plots supposedly foiled by the organization's digital surveillance programs. Lawyers and policemen involved in these cases disputed these claims, but this did not keep NSA chief Keith Alexander from taking it up a notch by raising the number of foiled attacks to...

The NSA has been widely monitoring international banking and credit card transactions, a new report says referencing Edward Snowden’s leak. The agency targeted VISA customers and global financial service SWIFT and created its own money flows database. Referring to information leaked by Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and NSA contractor, German Der Spiegel reports that the surveillance was carried out by a branch called "Follow the Money" (FTM). After the information on transactions was obtained, it was redirected to the NSA's own financial database, called "Tracfin". According to the leaked documents, in 2011 the database contained 180 million records,...

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had improperly collected thousands of emails from Americans with no ties to terrorism over three years before a special court ruled it unconstitutional, according to court opinions declassified by intelligence officials on Wednesday. The release of three secret U.S. court opinions came amid escalating public debates over the intelligence community's surveillance programs, which were first revealed by former defense contractor Edward Snowden in June. Under the program targeting foreign Internet traffic, the NSA collected as many as 56,000 emails and other communications by Americans starting from 2008, but failed to effectively filter out all...

The former head of the National Security Agency said Sunday that not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years. Former NSA chief Michael Hayden told television host Bob Schieffer of CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend that the current program that collects the metadata of millions of American phone customers on a regular basis for the United States government could in the future perhaps be used to soak up even more statistics about US citizens. In early June, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden...