Yet Another NSA Program Raises Questions About Obama's Statements to Charlie Rose

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42. ACLU: Calls and Emails can't be "targeted" under FISA, but certainly collected

But all of these defenses ignore a simple, basic point: Communication is a two-way street. And if an American is communicating (however innocently) with a foreign "target" under the FAA, the law allows the government to collect, inspect, and keep the content of that communication. As Glenn Greenwald clarified on Tuesday, under the FAA, "no individualized warrant is needed to listen in on the calls or read the emails of Americans when they communicate with a foreign national whom the NSA has targeted for surveillance."

And what it does it take for the NSA to "target" a foreigner for surveillance? Not much. The target need not be a suspected terrorist or even suspected of any kind of wrongdoing. The FAA allows the government to target any foreigner when it wants to collect "foreign intelligence," which includes information about "foreign affairs." In other words, the statute allows the government to sweep up essentially every foreigner's communications, including those with Americans.

In fact, it's likely much worse than that. While official defenses have flatly stated that targets under the FAA must be both foreign and abroad, the statute only requires that the government "reasonably believe" those things to be true. And The Washington Post's report on PRISM—one government content-surveillance program authorized by the FAA—indicates that the government's "reasonable belief" need only be made to "51 percent confidence." (As The Daily Show's John Oliver put it, the rigor of that constraint amounts to the surveillance equivalent of "flipping a coin, plus one percent.&quot The Post also reported that the government not only collects the communications of a foreign target, but of "contacts two ‘hops' out from their target, which increases ‘incidental collection'" of Americans' communications "exponentially."

Read more:

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/under-fisa-amendments-act-your-calls-and-emails-cant-be-targeted-they-can