While the NSA has publicly acknowledged collecting and searching the contents of Americans’ digital communications without a warrant, it was previously understood that only conversations between Americans and targeted foreign nationals were collected and searched. Now, reports The New York Times, the documents released by Edward Snowden reveal that any communication that crosses the border and even mentions a piece of information connected to a suspect is being collected and searched. The NSA says this practice is legal under the 2008 FISA law. An anonymous senior intelligence official told The Times the NSA “makes ‘a clone of selected communication links’” to gather the information. NSA officials have publicly denied this practice in the past. The ACLU and other organizations are calling this “precisely the kind of generalized spying that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.” (Registration may be required to access this story.)
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