Having appeared to confirm no 'actual' American emails were intercepted in previous statements, it seems President Obama has some more questions to answer after the Guardian reveals that in fact, the Obama administration permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and Internet usage of Americans for more than two years. “The internet metadata of the sort NSA collected for at least a decade details the accounts to which Americans sent emails and from which they received emails,” the Guardian's Greenwald wrote. “It also details the Internet protocol addresses (IP) used by people inside the United States when sending emails – information which can reflect their physical location. It did not include the content of emails." Is it any wonder that Obama said he was "concerned" about firther leaks today.
Via Russia Today [6],
The Obama administration permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and Internet usage of Americans for more than two years, new documents reveal.
According to leaked NSA documents published by The Guardian on Thursday, a secretive surveillance program that put email and Internet metadata into the hands of the United States government was authorized after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama through 2011.
The leaked evidence comes three weeks to the day after The Guardian first began publishing classified NSA documents attributed to Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old former intelligence analyst from the US who is now wanted there for espionage. He is reportedly in Moscow and has sought asylum from at least two foreign countries.
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One of the two papers published this week, a 2009 working draft from the NSA’s Office of the Inspector General, explains how the agency initiated the "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States.” That document is marked as “top secret.”
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“The internet metadata of the sort NSA collected for at least a decade details the accounts to which Americans sent emails and from which they received emails,” the journalists wrote. “It also details the Internet protocol addresses (IP) used by people inside the United States when sending emails – information which can reflect their physical location. It did not include the content of emails.”