Washington Post reports
NSA can bypass secret court
with 'foreign' Google, Yahoo taps

The NSA is able to work around restrictions on surveillance of Americans with its secret taps on Google and Yahoo data centers overseas, the Washington Post reports today.

Report by Gellman and Soltani
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html

The spy agency has broken into main arteries that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to a report by Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, who cite documents leaked by Edward Snowden and "knowledgeable officials."

"By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans," the Post says.

"Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight," the newspaper says, adding: "NSA documents about the effort refer directly to 'full take,' 'bulk access' and 'high volume' operations on Yahoo and Google networks. Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner."

Outside U.S. territory, statutory restrictions on surveillance seldom apply and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has no jurisdiction, the paper says. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who heads the Senate intelligence committee, has acknowledged that Congress conducts little oversight of intelligence-gathering under the presidential authority of Executive Order 12333 , which defines the basic powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies, the paper reports.