The NSA's spying program is still vast, but it's now a touch more restricted.
The agency has long collected texts and emails sent to and by Americans if those electronic communications contained the names of folks whom the NSA was conducting surveillance on, but that's no longer the case.
This, as the New York Times reported Friday, is a significant rollback of a surveillance program that privacy advocates have railed against since a series of NSA spying programs and mechanisms were revealed in 2013.
The main issue many privacy advocates had: The spying didn't require a warrant and was based on the content of the message rather than the people having the digital conversation.
The NSA often collected emails and texts with little (if any) relevance to their surveillance operations. Companies from which it requested messages often grouped the irrelevant ones with the allegedly relevant ones and sent them over to the agency. According to the formerly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, doing so was a violation of the fourth amendment. The NSA has reportedly tried to fix this aspect of its spying for years in order to comply with the Constitution, but failed to do so.
The news is a clear win for privacy advocates, but a win that is neither total nor irreversible.
“While the NSA’s policy change will curb some of the most egregious abuses under the statute, it is at best a partial fix," Neema Singh Guliani, a legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an emailed statement. "Congress should take steps to ensure such practices are never resurrected and end policies that permit broad, warrantless surveillance ...”
