Intelligence officials have been promising Congress they would provide lawmakers with an estimate of the number of American communications that are collected under Section 702. That estimate is a critical piece of information for lawmakers to have as they consider whether and how to reauthorize and reform the warrantless Internet surveillance of millions of innocent Americans in the coming months.
But during a hearing on Section 702 in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, despite previous assurances, said he won’t be providing that estimate out of national security and, ironically, privacy concerns.
He told lawmakers it is “infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a U.S. person’s communications may be incidentally collected under Section 702.” To do so would require diverting NSA analysts’ attention away from their current work to “conduct additional significant research” to determine whether the communications collected under Section 702 are American. “I would be asking trained NSA analysts to conduct intense identity verification research on potential U.S. persons who are not targets of an investigation,” he said. “From a privacy and civil liberties perspective, I find this unpalatable.”
https://www.technocracy.news/index.php/2017/06/13/nsa-reneges-promise-tell-congress-many-innocent-americans-spies/