Second NSA domestic surveillance scheme revealed: data mining from nine U.S. ISPs

general and director of national intelligence to open their service to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which acts as a liaison between the companies and the NSA.

The Guardian reports that the briefing presentation claims PRISM was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as the shortcomings of FISA warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. The presentation noted that the United States has a “home-field advantage” due to housing much of the Internet’s architecture. The presentation claimed, however, that “FISA constraints restricted our home-field advantage” because FISA required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the United States.

“FISA was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them,” the presentation said. “It took a FISA court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek FISAs for all.”

The NSA hails the PRISM program as “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA.”

In December 2012 the Bush-era FISA was slightly amended, and the administration rushed the FISA Amendment Act (FAA) through Congress. Some senators were uncomfortable with the FAA, and warned about the scale and scope of surveillance the law might enable, and shortcomings in the safeguards it introduces.

Senator Christopher Coons (D-Delaware) pointedly warned that the secrecy surrounding the various surveillance programs enabled by the FAA meant there was no way to know whether safeguards within the act were working.

“The problem is: we here in the Senate and the citizens we represent don’t know how well any of these safeguards actually work,” he said.

“The law doesn’t forbid purely domestic information from being collected. We know that at least one Fisa court has ruled that the surveillance program violated the law. Why? Those who know can’t say and average Americans can’t know.”

The New York Times notes that on two successive days, Wednesday and Thursday, two major disclosures about U.S. domestic surveillance were made to the press: on Wednesday, the Guardian reported about the NSA’s collection of metadata on millions of U.S. customers of Verizon. On Thursday, both the Guardian and the Post reported about the NSA’s PRISM program to harvest Internet communication information. The Times writes:

The extraordinary revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, while the Washington Post, relying upon the same presentation, simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government overreach.