We’ve Learned About The US Government’s Other Spying Authority: Executive Order 12333

A Washington Post article reveals that the National Security Agency has been siphoning off data from the links between Yahoo and Google data centers, which include the fiber optic connections between company servers at various points around the world. While the user may have an encrypted connection to the website, the internal data flows were not encrypted and allowed the NSA to obtain millions of records each month, including both metadata and content like audio, video and text. This is not part of the PRISM collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act or the business records program under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, but a separate program called MUSCULAR under what appears to be Executive Order 12333 (“12333″).

News Articles Reveal Use of Executive Order to Spy

The new article comes off of another recent Washington Post report on another piece of data the NSA collects about innocent Americans: contacts from their address books and buddy lists. The information is in addition to Americans’ calling records, phone calls, emails, and any other information publicly available on the Internet. And it’s yet another sign that the NSA will stop at nothing to collect innocent Americans’ information—all in the name of protecting us from foreign threats.

The details from the Washington Post reveal the NSA’s collection is “likely to be in the millions or tens of millions” of Americans’ contacts. The NSA is helped, in a way, because your contacts aren’t always encrypted when you sync them from your laptop or mobile devices to your online account. The Post‘s articles provide a vital supplement to a recent New York Times story, which revealed NSA using Americans metadata collected under its spying programs to map social networks.

What’s most unnerving about these collections is that the NSA is using Executive Order 12333, which lays out guidelines for spying outside the authority granted by Congress in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The order was created in the 1980s, is publicly available, and has been updated several times since then.

But Executive Order 12333 relies on Executive oversight. And we all know how well that works. When it comes to Congress, Senator Diane Feinstein, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—the committee that’s supposed to oversee the intelligence community—ruled 12333 collection as “not fall[ing] within the focus of the committee.” General Keith Alexander, Director of the NSA, agrees. At a Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, he couldn’t even confirm that the oversight committees of Congress were informed of 12333 collection. 

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