Snowden details how NSA can search e-mails, calls without warrant

The National Security Agency (NSA) has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' e-mail and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the London-based The Guardian newspaper by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA's authorities provided loopholes that allowed "warrantless searches for the phone calls or e-mails of law-abiding Americans".

The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.

The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as "incidental collection" in surveillance parlance.

Secret minimisation procedures dating from 2009, published in June by The Guardian, revealed that the NSA could make use of any "inadvertently acquired" information on US persons under a defined range of circumstances, including if they held usable intelligence, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity.

At that stage, however, the rules did not appear to allow for searches of collected data relating to specific US persons.

Der Spiegel, citing documents leaked by Snowden, reported yesterday that China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea were the top surveillance targets of US authorities.