A Guide to What We Now Know About the NSA's Dragnet Searches of Your Communications

According to the slides released by The Guardian and Greenwald's reporting, XKeyScore allows analysts to search the metadata and content residing on any XKeyScore server by different selectors — name, email address, telephone number, IP address, keywords, and even language or type of Internet browser — "without prior authorization." Searches might either turn up content — which analysts can then view or listen to — or help an analyst identify an anonymous user who is, for example, searching for "suspicious stuff" or speaking a language "out of place" for a given region. Some slides also suggest that the XKeyScore searches can also query data stored in other NSA databases. And Ambinder insinuates that anything targeted through XKeyScore can be directed into one of the government's more permanent metadata and content databases, some of which the Post's Barton Gellman described in June.

In an online video shortly after the revelations began, Snowden claimed that "sitting at [his] desk," he could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if [he] had a personal email." The government's reaction was both harsh and emphatic. Gen. Alexander went so far as to testify to the Senate Appropriations Committee not only that Snowden's claim was "false," but that "I know of no way to do that."

The Guardian slides give us good reason to believe that Snowden was telling the truth, and that Alexander was being coy. Greenwald reports that Snowden has stated that supervisors often find ways to circumvent the very targeting procedures that are meant to confine the NSA's searches: "It's very rare to be questioned on our searches," he said, "and even when we are, it's usually along the lines of: ‘let's bulk up the justification.'" As far back as 2009, members of Congress were raising alarms about the NSA's collection under the FAA, including Rep. Rush Holt's ominous warning that "[s]ome actions are so flagrant that they can't be accidental."

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We'll have to wait for additional revelations — or, preferably, official disclosures by the government — to fully understand how XKeyScore, and the government's other FAA surveillance capabilities, actually work, and how much power NSA analysts have to circumvent the agency's own procedures. But what we already do know gives us plenty of important reasons to reject it as a model for surveillance that is compatible with the Constitution.