NSA spy ring studied American victims’ social networking habits

The graphing, or contact chaining, is conducted using details about phone calls and e-mails, known as “metadata,” but does not involve the communications’ content, according to the documents cited by the Times. It is supposed to be done for foreign intelligence purposes only, the documents state, but that category is extremely broad and may include everything from data about terrorism and drug smuggling to foreign diplomats and economic talks.

The revelation is the latest in a string of disclosures that began in June, when The Washington Post and the British newspaper the Guardian broke stories, based on Snowden’s documents about the NSA’s PRISM program, which collects digital communications from U.S. Internet companies, and about the collection of call-detail records from U.S. phone companies.

Snowden’s disclosures and the subsequent declassification of records by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and the nation’s secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have sparked widespread concern over the scope of the NSA’s surveillance and whether it appropriately balances Americans’ privacy rights with national security.

In response to the story, an NSA spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement that the NSA is a foreign intelligence agency and its activities are conducted according to procedures approved by the attorney general and defense secretary — and, where applicable, the surveillance court — to protect Americans’ privacy interests.

“We know there is a false perception out there that NSA listens to the phone calls and reads the e-mail of everyday Americans, aiming to unlawfully monitor or profile U.S. citizens,” the statement said. “It’s just not the case. NSA’s activities are directed against foreign intelligence targets in response to requirements from U.S. leaders in order to protect the nation and its interests from threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

“This report confirms what whistleblowers have been saying for years: The NSA has been monitoring virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives — their communications, their associations, even their locations,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Senior government officials, including the NSA’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, have repeatedly asserted that the NSA’s surveillance programs are lawful and have been authorized by the surveillance court, Congress or both.

But according to the Times, the decision to lift the restriction on analyzing Americans’ communications was made in secret, without review by the intelligence court, which oversees the government’s wiretap applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” links between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, the 2011 memo said.

According to documents the Times cited, the NSA can augment the data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, Facebook profiles, airline passenger manifests and GPS location information.

NSA officials declined to tell the Times how many Americans have been caught up in the data mining, and the documents do not reveal that.

Because of concerns about intruding on Americans’ privacy, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners, the Times reported.

But as of 2010, the NSA was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the 2011 memo stated.

The social graphs do not make use of the huge database of collected phone call records that Snowden revealed in June, the “bulk records” program, the Times reported.

The newspaper said the documents do not specify which databases were being mined.

An NSA spokeswoman told the Times that the legal justification for the policy was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans had no legitimate expectation of privacy in numbers dialed because that information is conveyed to a third party — the phone company. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon in 2008 decided it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ metadata, such as phone numbers dialed, the Times reported.

The ACLU’s Jaffer called the government’s reasoning “outlandish,” saying that the 1979 ruling involved “surveillance of one person rather than everyone.”

William Binney, a former NSA technical director turned whistleblower, has long warned of the NSA’s mining of data to create social graphs. He alleged that it started in the second week of October 2001, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and that it took place on a massive scale.

NSA spy ring studied American victims’ social networking habits

NSA said to be studying some Americans’ social connections using e-mail, call data

By Ellen Nakashima, E-mail the writer