The U.S. intelligence community is once again asking Congress to permanently reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows electronic surveillance of non U.S. citizens for intelligence purposes.
While the reauthorization will probably be granted, intelligence officials still don’t have an answer to a question that Congress members have been asking since Edward Snowden’s revelations: How many Americans accidentally get swept up in 702 surveillance collection?
Section 702 is supposed to target non-citizens only, but a 2014 Washington Post analysis of National Security Agency documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that “nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations … were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.”
So, how many Americans are being “caught in a net” like this every year? We don’t know, and the intelligence community is resisting pleas by Congress to tell us. Last year, then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that his office was “looking at several options” for producing an estimate of how many Americans have been subjected to collection under 702, “none of which are optimal.” But today during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to consider reauthorizing 702, the lawyers for the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that providing even an estimate would be technically impossible.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) grilled intelligence community lawyers, saying: “How are we supposed to believe that transparency is really the guiding principle, and that we have such great data collection, if you can’t even identify for us how many Americans have been innocently swept up into this effort?”
