Spencer Ackerman

The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.

As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013. During that year, it submitted 178 applications for the data to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during that period, which, as first revealed by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden, permitted the ongoing, daily collection of practically all US phone records.

The number of "selectors" NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the "less than 300 times" it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.

In May 2013, it looked as though privacy advocates had scored a tenuous victory against the widespread surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden a year ago. Then came a resurgent intelligence community, armed with pens, and dry, legislative language.

During several protracted sessions in secure rooms in the Capitol, intelligence veterans, often backed by the congressional leadership, sparred with House aides to abridge privacy and transparency provisions contained in the first bill rolling back National Security Agency spying powers in more than three decades.

The episode shows the lengths to which the architects and advocates of bulk surveillance have gone to preserve their authorities in the time since the Guardian, 12 months ago, began disclosing the scope of NSA data collection. That resistance to change, aided by the power and trust enjoyed by the NSA on Capitol Hill, helps explain why most NSA powers remain intact a year after the largest leak in the agency's history.

"This is not how American democracy is supposed to work," said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who had supported the bill but ultimately voted against it.

Senior leaders at the agency say that Snowden thrust them into a new era. James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, said the intelligence agencies need to grant a greater degree of transparency or risk losing public confidence permanently. But exactly one year on, the agency, under public pressure, has divested itself of exactly one activity, the bulk collection of US phone data.

Yet while the NSA will not itself continue to gather the data directly, the major post-Snowden legislative fix grants the agency wide berth in accessing and searching large volumes of phone records, and even wider latitude in collecting other kinds of data. There are no other mandated reforms. President Barack Obama in January added restrictions on the dissemination of non-Americans' "personal information", but that has not been codified in law.

The coalition of large Internet firms demanding greater safeguards around their customers’ email, browsing and search histories have received nothing from the government for their effort.

A recent move to block the NSA from undermining commercial encryption and amassing a library of software vulnerabilities never received a legislative hearing. While there have also been significant commercial changes brought by companies that fear the revelations imperiling their businesses -- Google's Gmail service broadened its use of encryption, will soon present end-to-end encryption for its Chrome browser; and after the Washington Post revealed that the NSA intercepts data transiting between Google and Yahoo storage centers, Google expanded encryption for Gmail data flowing across the Internet and Yahoo implemented default email encryption -- the bitterest disappointment has been the diminished ambitions for surveillance reform contained in the USA Freedom Act.

"That," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said, "was a very frustrating process for us."

[Commentary] In a secured room beneath the US Capitol, legislative aides working to finalize a bill intended to constrain the National Security Agency attempted to out-think a battery of lawyers working for the Obama Administration and the intelligence services.

The NSA, its credibility hurt by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures, is trying to reassure its overseers that it will abide by new congressional action, even as its advocates labor to shape the bill to its liking. But the agency's post-9/11 history has left the architects and advocates of the bill concerned about the ways in which it might once again reinterpret a law intended to restrain it into one allowing it more surveillance leeway than congressional architects intend.

Recent meetings between Hill aides and administration and intelligence lawyers yielded a sense of the legal reasoning likely to result if the USA Freedom Act becomes law. The NSA thinks it has not earned the public’s suspicion and has sought to assuage it since the Snowden disclosures. Its battalions of lawyers are preoccupied with restraining surveillance, veterans say, far more than they are with expanding the frontiers of the law. Still, congressional testimony has suggested that the agency will be reluctant to let legislation aimed at restricting surveillance have the final word.

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a "backdoor" in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications.

The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases. Now, in a letter to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed for the first time this backdoor had been used in practice to search for data related to “US persons.”

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter. “These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”

The legal authority to perform the searches, revealed in top-secret NSA documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden, was denounced by Sen Wyden as a “backdoor search loophole.” Clapper did not disclose how many such searches had been performed by the NSA.

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies -- both for the Internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the Internet.

Asked during a hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the FISA Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.” De explained: “Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,” De said. “Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process that any recipient company would receive.”

After the hearing, De added that service providers also know and receive legal compulsions surrounding NSA’s harvesting of communications data not from companies but directly in transit across the Internet under 702 authority.

Tumblr is one of the centerpieces of the intelligence community’s attempts at rebranding in the wake of what it considers a crisis wrought by Edward Snowden: a web clearinghouse of formerly classified documents related to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance authorities, an exercise in transparency.

But the documents on the site are most often presented without a critical disclosure. While statements accompanying them refer to decisions by director James Clapper and other administration officials to release the surveillance-related information, nearly all the instances of such declassification – eight out of 12 – came to be published only after the government lost transparency cases, a fact that the Tumblr, known as IC On The Record, most often omits or obscures.