U.S. Government agency rules government spying on you is legal

A U.S. National Security Agency surveillance program targeting foreign terrorism suspects does what Congress intended it to do, members of a government privacy oversight board said Wednesday, defending their report that finds the spying legal and effective.

The NSA’s surveillance program, focused on collecting electronic communications related to foreign terrorism and other intelligence, works as described in the FISA Amendments Act, a law that was debated in public, the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) said in its report, released late Tuesday.

The surveillance program’s “inadvertent” collection of some U.S. communications means the agency must consider the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the country’s residents against unreasonable searches by the government, but the Fourth Amendment does not protect foreigners, PCLOB members noted.

Although some privacy advocates have criticized the report, the FISA Amendments Act, “as originally written,” doesn’t give the same privacy protections to foreigners as it does to U.S. residents, said PCLOB member Patricia Wald, a retired federal judge. “It’s oriented toward getting foreign intelligence information.”

The FISA surveillance program provides some privacy protections, added David Medine, the PCLOB’s chairman. The law requires the NSA to target its surveillance at specific people or groups, with the agency focusing on 90,000 targets in 2013, he noted.

“While that’s not an insignificant number, it’s tiny, compared to the billions of people around the world,” he said.

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