Spying Together: U.S. Intelligence Out of Control
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עברית (Hebrew)
The FBI and CIA can also query the content of U.S. residents’ electronic communications that the National Security Agency inadvertently collects when targeting foreign terrorism suspects, an intelligence official said.
While privacy advocates have objected to a so-called “backdoor search loophole” allowing the NSA access to electronic communications by U.S. residents, it was unclear until now whether other agencies also had access to those emails, phone calls and other communications.
The information came out in a letter sent by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.
iHLS – Israel Homeland Security
While the CIA and NSA conducted thousands of searches targeting U.S. communications in 2013, the FBI does not track number of searches it does, according to the ODNI’s letter. But in any case both the CIA and FBI have access to communications accessed by the NSA, the letter said.
The CIA and FBI are allowed to search that information for “foreign intelligence information,” and the FBI also to search it to “find and extract evidence of a crime,” Deirdre Walsh, ODNI’s director of legislative affairs, wrote in the letter.
The letter was sent in response to a question Wyden had asked, during a June 5 hearing, about the number of U.S. searches the NSA was conducting through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law designed to allow surveillance of foreign suspects.
