The Obama administration permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and Internet usage of Americans for more than two years, new documents reveal.
According to two leaked NSA documents published by The Guardian on Thursday, a secretive surveillance program that put email and Internet metadata into the hands of the United States government was authorized after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama through 2011.
Since then, claims The Guardian, the NSA has initiated new systems that collect and analyze the records of email communications sent in and out of the United States.
The leaked evidence comes three weeks to the day after The Guardian first began publishing classified NSA documents attributed to Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old former intelligence analyst from the US who is now wanted there for espionage. He is reportedly in Moscow and has sought asylum from at least two foreign countries.
On June 6, journalist Glenn Greenwald detailed how telephony metadata — basic information about the phone habits of millions of Americans — was being regularly supplied to Washington under a secretive orders authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In this week’s article, Greenwald and co-author Spencer Ackerman say the latest revelation involves the collection of metadata involving emails that may have been sent or received by Americans.
One of the two papers published this week, a 2009 working draft from the NSA’s Office of the Inspector General, explains how the agency initiated the "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States.” That document is marked as “top secret.”........................................
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