US government collected US email records in bulk - all approved by secret FISA court
Latest disclosures from whistleblower Edward Snowden show NSA tapping Americans' internet usage data
A secret programme to collected email and internet usage was launched by ex-President Bush and continued up until 2011, according to the latest documents to be leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) staffer Edward Snowden.
The data collection was approved by the same secret court that presides over Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests - and which has never turned down a government surveillance request. The FISA court simply rubber-stamped a "bulk collection" order for internet data every 90 days.
The data collection programme began under the Bush administration under a NSA programme called "Stellar Wind"
The order demanded that US internet companies bulk-collect 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", according to the latest report by The Guardian, the newspaper that broke the story.
Over time, the scope of the data collection was extended until the NSA gained authority to "analyse communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the US", according to a Justice Department memo from 2007.
While Stellar Wind was brought to a close in 2011, other documents seen by The Guardian show that some collection of US citizens' online records continues today.
In December 2012, claims The Guardian, the NSA launched a new program enabling it to analyse communications where one end of the correspondence is located in the US.