US board defends NSA’s foreign spying

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has defended the US National Security Agency’s mass-surveillance of foreign nationals’ data as largely legal and finds ‘no trace’ of illegitimate activity.

The PCLOB said in a preliminary report on “backdoor” spying authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that foreign cyber-espionage operations are in line with the US constitution.

“The protections contained in the Section 702 minimization procedures are reasonably designed and implemented to ward against the exploitation of information acquired under the program for illegitimate purposes. The Board has seen no trace of any such illegitimate activity associated with the program, or any attempt to intentionally circumvent legal limits,” the PCLOB wrote in an unofficial version of its report.

Section 702 spying is supposed to only target foreigners outside the United States, but the government admits that it sometimes goes through foreign data searching for the communications of Americans — a method known as “backdoor” spying, the National Journal reported Tuesday.

“At this point, it’s clear that the US government is doing a substantial amount of surveillance related to US persons using this Section 702 authority that’s supposed to be directed outside of the country,” said Kevin Bankston, the policy director for the Open Technology Institute.

The watchdog has also been among the fierce critics of the spy agency’s domestic surveillance operations. But in the draft report, it sidestepped the issue of extending US privacy protection laws to non-US individuals.

US intelligence agencies have used their foreign surveillance authorities to search for information about Americans thousands of times, according to new disclosures from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

The ODNI revealed that the NSA spied on nearly 90,000 “targets” in 2013 under Section 702 of FISA.

Lawmakers and reform advocates have criticized the NSA’s use of “selectors,” or search terms, about Americans when searching through data collected under the Section 702 authority.