The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has asked a federal court to order the release of National Security Agency (NSA) documents concerning the legality or otherwise of the agency’s surveillance of American citizens. Earlier this year, the NSA refused to provide these documents to the House Intelligence Committee. The Committee struck back at the spy agency. Representative Porter Goss, chairman of the oversight panel, wrote in a committee report that the NSA’s reasons for withholding the documents were unpersuasive and dubious. When the report came out, EPIC submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the documents. The NSA ignored the 20-day time limit on such requests, prompting EPIC’s decision to sue.
The charter of the National Security Agency does not authorize domestic intelligence gathering, said EPIC director Mark Rotenberg, yet we have reason to believe that the NSA is engaged in the indiscriminate acquisition and interception of domestic communications taking place over the internet. He notes that the current issue of the New Yorker magazine contains an article on the NSA by Seymour Hersh. In it, Hersh says the NSA took only 11 months to fill three-years’ worth of planned storage capacity for intercepted internet traffic. Was all that traffic international? EPIC doesn’t believe that it was, and has every intention of finding out.
