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The US' National Security Agency is facing scrutiny over the breadth of its domestic surveillance program. According to critics in Congress, its recent penetrations of private telephone calls and emails are broader than previously stated, The New York Times reports.
A new law, enacted by Congress in 2008, gave the NSA greater freedom to collect American's private messages as long as such collections were an incidental byproduct of investigating people "reasonably believed" to be overseas. But it is difficult to distinguish between email being sent by ordinary Americans and being sent from foreign countries — a gray area that's driven some lawmakers to question whether the privacy of Americans in general is being adequately protected.
In April it became clear that intercepts of certain private communications went beyond legal limits. Since then, Congress has begun to probe the process, which has sparked concern about the NSA's ability to both collect and read domestic email messages on a wide scale.
At least one former NSA analyst admitted to being trained in 2005 for a program where large volumes of American emails were examined, routinely and without court warrants. Intelligence officials with the agency today confirm that the program is still in effect.
Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) and chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel oversaw the incidents and expressed concern over how the NSA manages domestic communications. He also took issue with recent claims by national security officials that the overcollection of this data was accidental.
"Some actions are so flagrant that they can't be accidental," said Holt.
"For the Hill, the issue is a sense of scale, about how much domestic e-mail collection is acceptable," stated a former intelligence official said, speaking anonymously.
"It's a question of how many mistakes they can allow."
And while the degree of Congressional concern about the NSA remains murky to the public, addressing these matters swiftly and effectively is part of what the Obama administration has inherited from the Bush days — which also includes "the use of brutal interrogation tactics, the fate of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and whether to block the release of photographs and documents that show abuse of detainees," The New York Times observes.
Earlier this month, the Obama Administration announced plans to launch a Cyber Security department, whose objective will be to protect American computer networks from malicious outside attacks.
In addition to guarding major programs, such as stock exchanges and government data storage networks, the President also expressed interest in protecting the information and activity of ordinary internet users.
