Mass surveillance in the United States

At the request of the U.S. Army, those who protested against the Vietnam War were put on the NSA's "watch list".[16]

1947: The National Security Act was signed by President Truman, establishing a National Security Council.[25]

1949: The Armed Forces Security Agency was established to coordinate signal operations between military branches.[26]

1952: The National Security Agency (NSA) was officially established by President Truman by way of a National Security Council Intelligence Directive 9, dated Oct. 24, while the NSA officially came into existence days later on Nov. 4.[11] According to The New York Times, the NSA was created in "absolute secrecy" by President Truman,[27] whose surveillance-minded administration ordered, only six weeks after President Truman took office, wiretaps on the telephones of Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, a close advisor of Franklin D. Roosevelt.[28] The recorded conversations are currently kept at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, along with other documents considered sensitive (≈233,600 pages).

Institutional domestic surveillance was founded in 1896 with the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, which evolved by 1908 into the Bureau of Investigation, operated under the authority of the Department of Justice. In 1935, the FBI had grown into an independent agency under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover whose staff, through the use of wire taps, cable taps, mail tampering, garbage filtering and infiltrators, prepared secret FBI Index Lists on more than 10 million people by 1939.[29]

Purported to be chasing 'communists' and other alleged subversives, the FBI used public and private pressure to destroy the lives of those it targeted during McCarthyism, including those lives of the Hollywood 10 with the Hollywood blacklist. The FBI's surveillance and investigation roles expanded in the 1950s while using the collected information to facilitate political assassinations, including the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969. The FBI is also directly connected to the bombings, assassinations, and deaths of other people including Malcolm X in 1963, Viola Liuzzo in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash in 1976, and Judi Bari in 1990.

As the extent of the FBI's domestic surveillance continued to grow, many celebrities were also secretly investigated by the bureau, including:

• First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt – A vocal critic of Hoover who likened the FBI to an 'American Gestapo' for its Index lists.[30] Roosevelt also spoke out against anti-Japanese prejudice during the second world war, and was later a delegate to the United Nations and instrumental in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 3,000-page FBI dossier on Eleanor Roosevelt reveals Hoover's close monitoring of her activities and writings, and contains retaliatory charges against her for suspected Communist activities.[31][32]
• Frank Sinatra – His 1,300 page FBI dossier, dating from 1943, contains allegations about Sinatra's possible ties to the American Communist Party. The FBI spent several decades tracking Sinatra and his associates.[33][34]
• Marilyn Monroe – Her FBI dossier begins in 1955 and continues up until the months before her death. It focuses mostly on her travels and associations, searching for signs of leftist views and possible ties to communism.[35] Her ex-husband, Arthur Miller, was also monitored. Monroe's FBI dossier is "heavily censored", but a "reprocessed" version has been released by the FBI to the public.[35]
• John Lennon – In 1971, shortly after Lennon arrived in the United States on a visa to meet up with anti-war activists, the FBI placed Lennon under surveillance, and the U.S. government tried to deport him from the country.[36] At that time, opposition to the Vietnam War had reached a peak and Lennon often showed up at political rallies to sing his anti-war anthem "Give Peace a Chance".[36] The U.S. government argued that Lennon's 300 page FBI dossier was particularly sensitive because its release may "lead to foreign diplomatic, economic and military retaliation against the United States",[37] and therefore only approved a "heavily censored" version.[38]
• The Beatles, of which John Lennon was a member, had a separate FBI dossier.

Some of the greatest historical figures of the 20th century, including several U.S. citizens, were placed under warrantless surveillance for the purpose of character assassination – a process that aims to destroy the credibility and reputation of a person, institution, or nation.

Left: Albert Einstein, who supported the anti-war movement and opposed nuclear proliferation, was a member of numerous civil rights groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (See Albert Einstein's political views). As a result of his political views, Einstein was subjected to telephone tapping, and his mail was searched by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of a secret government campaign that aimed to link him with a Soviet espionage ring in order to first discredit him, and then deport him (unsuccessfully) from the United States.[39][40][41]

Center: Martin Luther King Jr., a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights activist.[42] A FBI memo recognized King to be the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.",[43] and the agency wanted to discredit him by collecting evidence to (unsuccessfully) prove that he had been influenced by communism.[43]

Right: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, experienced one of the most spectacular episodes of government surveillance and character assassination. The White House tried to steal his medical records and other possibly detrimental information by sending a special unit to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.[44][45] These activities were later uncovered during the course of investigation as the Watergate scandal slowly unfolded, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.[46]

See also: The FBI kept a dossier on Albert Einstein (≈1,500 pages) and Martin Luther King Jr. (≈17,000 pages). Due to a court order, however, some information has been removed and many other pages will not be released until the year 2027.[47]

1967–73: The now-defunct Project MINARET was created to spy on U.S. citizens. At the request of the U.S. Army, those who protested against the Vietnam War were put on the NSA's "watch list".[16]

The Church Committee of the United States Senate published the final report on "Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans" in 1976 (PDF, 26.54 MB)

From 1940 until his death in 1966, the American business magnate Walt Disney served as a "S.A.C. Contact" (trusted informant) for the U.S. government to weed out communists and dissidents from the entertainment industry, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.[48]
See also: Hollywood blacklist

1975: The Church Committee of the United States Senate was set up to investigate widespread intelligence abuses by the NSA, CIA and FBI.[11] Domestic surveillance, authorized by the highest executive branch of the federal government, spanned from the FDR Administration to the Presidency of Richard Nixon. The following examples were reported by the Church Committee:

• President Roosevelt asked the FBI to put in its files the names of citizens sending telegrams to the White House opposing his "national defense" policy and supporting Col. Charles Lindbergh.[49]
• President Truman received inside information on a former Roosevelt aide's efforts to influence his appointments, labor union negotiating plans, and the publishing plans of journalists.[49]
• President Eisenhower received reports on purely political and social contacts with foreign officials by Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.[49]
• The Kennedy administration ordered the FBI to wiretap a congressional staff member, three executive officials, a lobbyist, and a Washington law firm. US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy received data from a FBI wire tap on Martin Luther King Jr. and an electronic listening device targeting a congressman, both of which yielded information of a political nature.[49]
• President Johnson asked the FBI to conduct "name checks" of his critics and members of the staff of his 1964 opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater. He also requested purely political intelligence on his critics in the Senate, and received extensive intelligence reports on political activity at the 1964 Democratic Convention from FBI electronic surveillance.[49]
• President Nixon authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security, including information about a Supreme Court justice.[49]

The Final Report (Book II) of the Church Committee revealed the following statistics:

• Over 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency".[49]
• Over 500,000 domestic intelligence files were kept at the FBI headquarters, of which 65,000 of were opened in 1972 alone.[49]
• At least 130,000 first class letters were opened and photographed by the FBI from 1940 to 1966.[49]
• A quarter of a million first class letters were opened and photographed by the CIA from 1953 to 1973.[49]
• Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the United States were obtained by the National Security Agency (NSA), under a secret arrangement with U.S. telegraph companies, from 1947 to 1975.[49]
• Over 100,000 Americans have been indexed in U.S. Army intelligence files.[49]
• About 300,000 individuals were indexed in a CIA computer system during the course of Operation CHAOS.[49]
• Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), with tax investigations "done on the basis of political rather than tax criteria".[49]

In response to the committee's findings, the United States Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, which led to the establishment of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was authorised to issue surveillance warrants.[50]

Several decades later in 2013, the presiding judge of the FISA Court, Reggie Walton, told The Washington Post that the court only has a limited ability to supervise the government's surveillance, and is therefore "forced" to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided by federal agents.[51]

On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church stated on NBC's "Meet the Press" without mentioning the name of the NSA about this agency:

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything — telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.[52][53][54]

In 1988 an article titled "Somebody's listening" by Duncan Campbell in the New Statesman described the signals-intelligence gathering activities of a program code-named "ECHELON".[55] The program was engaged by English-speaking World War II Allied countries – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States (collectively known as AUSCANNZUKUS). It was created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and of its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s.[56]

By the 1990s the ECHELON system could intercept satellite transmissions, public switched telephone network (PSTN) communications (including most Internet traffic), and transmissions carried by microwave. The New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager provided a detailed description of ECHELON in his 1996 book Secret Power.[57] While some member governments denied the existence of ECHELON, a report by a committee of the European Parliament in 2001 confirmed the program's use and warned Europeans about its reach and effects.[58] The European Parliament stated in its report that the term "ECHELON" occurred in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicated it was a signals-intelligence collection system capable of interception and content-inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data-traffic globally.[56]

James Bamford further described the capabilities of ECHELON in Body of Secrets (2002) about the National Security Agency.[59] Intelligence monitoring of citizens, and their communications, in the area covered by the AUSCANNZUKUS security agreement have, over the years, caused considerable public concern.[60][61]

We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act and to find them before they strike.

— President Bush speaking in Congress on September 20, 2001[62]

The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon led to major reforms of U.S. intelligence agencies, and paved the way for the establishment of the Director of National Intelligence position

On 1 January 2006, days after The New York Times wrote that "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,[63] the President emphasized that "This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America. And I repeat, limited."[64]

In the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, bulk domestic spying in the United States increased dramatically. The desire to prevent future attacks of this scale led to the passage of the Patriot Act. Later acts include the Protect America Act (which removes the warrant requirement for government surveillance of foreign targets)[65] and the FISA Amendments Act (which relaxed some of the original FISA court requirements).

In 2002, "Total Information Awareness" was established by the U.S. government in order to "revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists".[66]

In 2005, a report about President Bush's President's Surveillance Program appeared in the New York Times. According to reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, the actual publication of their report was delayed for a year because "The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article".[63]

Also in 2005, the existence of STELLARWIND was revealed by Thomas Tamm. In 2006, Mark Klein revealed the existence of Room 641A that he had wired back in 2003.[67] In 2008, Babak Pasdar, a computer security expert, and CEO of Bat Blue publicly revealed the existence of the "Quantico circuit", that he and his team found in 2003. He described it as a back door to the federal government in the systems of an unnamed wireless provider; the company was later independently identified as Verizon.[68]

The NSA's database of American's phone calls was made public in 2006 by USA Today journalist Leslie Cauley in an article titled, "NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls."[69] The article cites anonymous sources that described the program's reach on American citizens:

... it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others. The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.[69]

The report failed to generate discussion of privacy rights in the media and was not referenced by Greenwald or the Washington Post in any of their subsequent reporting.

In 2009, The New York Times cited several anonymous intelligence officials alleging that "the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism" and "the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant".[70]

On 15 March 2012, the American magazine Wired published an article with the headline "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)",[71] which was later mentioned by U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson during a congressional hearing. In response to Johnson's inquiry, NSA director Keith B. Alexander testified that these allegations made by Wired magazine were untrue:

On 6 June 2013, Britain's The Guardian newspaper began publishing a series of revelations by an unnamed American whistleblower, revealed several days later to be former CIA and NSA-contracted systems analyst Edward Snowden. Snowden gave a cache of internal documents in support of his claims to two journalists: Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, Greenwald later estimated that the cache contains 15,000 – 20,000 documents, some very large and very detailed, and some very small.[73][74] This was one of the largest news leaks in the modern history of the United States.[24] In over two months of publications, it became clear that the NSA operates a complex web of spying programs which allow it to intercept internet and telephone conversations from over a billion users from dozens of countries around the world. Specific revelations have been made about China, the European Union, Latin America, Iran and Pakistan, and Australia and New Zealand, however the published documentation reveals that many of the programs indiscriminately collect bulk information directly from central servers and internet backbones, which almost invariably carry and reroute information from distant countries.

Due to this central server and backbone monitoring, many of the programs overlap and interrelate among one another. These programs are often done with the assistance of US entities such as the United States Department of Justice and the FBI,[75] are sanctioned by US laws such as the FISA Amendments Act, and the necessary court orders for them are signed by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In addition to this, many of the NSA's programs are directly aided by national and foreign intelligence services, Britain's GCHQ and Australia's DSD, as well as by large private telecommunications and Internet corporations, such as Verizon, Telstra,[76] Google and Facebook.[77]

On 9 June 2013, Edward Snowden told The Guardian:

They (the NSA) can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

— Edward Snowden[78]

The US government has aggressively sought to dismiss and challenge Fourth Amendment cases raised: Hepting v. AT&T, Jewel v. NSA, Clapper v. Amnesty International, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, and Center for Constitutional Rights v. Obama. The government has also granted retroactive immunity to ISPs and telecoms participating in domestic surveillance.[79][80]

The US district court judge for the District of Columbia, Richard Leon, declared[81][82][83][84][85][86] on December 16, 2013 that the mass collection of metadata of Americans' telephone records by the National Security Agency probably violates the fourth amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.[87]

Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation – most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics – I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.[88]

"Plaintiffs have a substantial likelihood of showing that their privacy interests outweigh the government's interest in collecting and analysing bulk telephony metadata and therefore the NSA's bulk collection program is indeed an unreasonable search under the fourth amendment," he wrote.[88]

"The Fourth Amendment typically requires 'a neutral and detached authority be interposed between the police and the public,' and it is offended by 'general warrants' and laws that allow searches to be conducted 'indiscriminately and without regard to their connections with a crime under investigation,'" he wrote.[89] He added:

I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware 'the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,' would be aghast.[89]

Leon granted the request for a preliminary injunction that blocks the collection of phone data for two private plaintiffs (Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer, and Charles Strange, father of a cryptologist killed in Afghanistan when his helicopter was shot down in 2011)[88] and ordered the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered. But the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his 68-page opinion the "significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues."[87]

On 20 May 2014, U.S. Representative for Michigan's 8th congressional district Republican congressman Mike Rogers introduced Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 with the goal of authorizing appropriations for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 for intelligence and intelligence-related activities of the United States Government, the Community Management Account, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Retirement and Disability System, and for other purposes.[90]

Some of its measures cover the limitation on retention.--A covered communication (meaning any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage) shall not be retained in excess of 5 years, unless:(i) the communication has been affirmatively determined, in whole or in part, to constitute foreign intelligence or counterintelligence or is necessary to understand or assess foreign intelligence or counterintelligence; (ii) the communication is reasonably believed to constitute evidence of a crime and is retained by a law enforcement agency; (iii) the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning; (iv) all parties to the communication are reasonably believed to be non-United States persons; (v) retention is necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life, in which case both the nature of the threat and the information to be retained shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees not later than 30 days after the date such retention is extended under this clause; (vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or compliance purposes, including a court order or discovery obligation, in which case access to information retained for technical assurance or compliance purposes shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an annual basis; or (vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or compliance purposes, including a court order or discovery obligation, in which case access to information retained for technical assurance or compliance purposes shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an annual basis; or (vii) retention for a period in excess of 5 years is approved by the head of the element of the intelligence community responsible for such retention, based on a determination that retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States, in which case the head of such element shall provide to the congressional intelligence committees a written certification describing-- (I) the reasons extended retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States; (II) the duration for which the head of the element is authorizing retention; (III) the particular information to be retained; and (IV) the measures the element of the intelligence community is taking to protect the privacy interests of United States persons or persons located inside the United States.[91]

On 10 December 2014, Republican U.S. Representative for Michigan's 3rd congressional district member of Congress Justin Amash criticized the act on his Facebook as being "one of the most egregious sections of law I've encountered during my time as a representative" and "It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American".[92]

On 11 December 2014, a petition was created on We the People section of the whitehouse.gov website petitioning the Obama administration to veto the law.

The USA Freedom Act was signed into law on June 2, 2015, the day after certain provisions of the Patriot Act had expired. It mandated an end to bulk collection of phone call metadata by the NSA within 180 days, but allowed continued mandatory retention of metadata by phone companies with access by the government with case-by-case approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[93]

Most of the NSA's collected data which was seen by human eyes (i.e., used by NSA operatives) was used in accordance with the stated objective of combating terrorism.[160][161][162]

Other than to combat terrorism, these surveillance programs have been employed to assess the foreign policy and economic stability of other countries.[163]

According to reports by Brazil's O Globo newspaper, the collected data was also used to target "commercial secrets".[164] In a statement addressed to the National Congress of Brazil, journalist Glenn Greenwald testified that the U.S. government uses counter-terrorism as a "pretext" for clandestine surveillance in order to compete with other countries in the "business, industrial and economic fields".[165][166][167]

In an interview with Der Spiegel published on 12 August 2013, former NSA Director Michael Hayden admitted that "We [the NSA] steal secrets. We're number one in it". Hayden also added that "We steal stuff to make you safe, not to make you rich".[163]

According to documents seen by the news agency Reuters, information obtained in this way is subsequently funnelled to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.[168] Federal agents are then instructed to "recreate" the investigative trail in order to "cover up" where the information originated,[168] known as parallel construction. (Were the true origins known, the evidence and resulting case might be invalidated as "fruit of the poisonous tree", a legal doctrine designed to deter abuse of power that prevents evidence or subsequent events being used in a case if they resulted from a search or other process that does not conform to legal requirements.)

According to NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong, most violations of the NSA's rules were self-reported, and most often involved spying on personal love interests using surveillance technology of the agency.[169]

• Censorship in the United States
• Domain Awareness System
• Freedom of speech in the United States
• Global surveillance
• Internet censorship in the United States
• Labor spying in the United States
• List of Americans under surveillance
• List of government mass surveillance projects
• Mass surveillance in the United Kingdom
• Police surveillance in New York City

• "The NSA Files (Dozens of articles about the U.S. National Security Agency and its spying and surveillance programs)". The Guardian. London. 8 June 2013.
• "CriMNet Evaluation Report" by the Office of the Legislative Auditor of a Minnesota program to improve sharing of criminal justice information, March 2004.
• Smyth, Daniel. Avoiding Bloodshed? US Journalists and Censorship in Wartime, War & Society, Volume 32, Issue 1, 2013.
• Deflem, Mathieu, Silva, Derek M.D., and Anna S. Rogers. 2018. "Domestic Spying: A Historical-Comparative Perspective." Pp. 109-125 in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems, Volume 2, edited by A. Javier Treviño. New York: Cambridge University Press.