NSA to share data with other agencies without “minimizing” American information

On Thursday the New York Times reported that the Obama Administration had recently finalized rules to give the National Security Agency (NSA) more leeway in sharing its vast trove of intercepted communications with the 15 other government agencies that make up the Intelligence Community.

Previously, agencies like the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have to request information on a target from the NSA. The NSA, in turn, would retrieve communications pertaining to that target and scrub the documents of information that was considered irrelevant to the search, including the names of innocent Americans—a process called “minimization.” Now, that middle step has been cut out. The agencies need only get approval from the NSA to access its data, and agents from the agencies are expected to carry out minimization on their own.

As the New York Times puts it, “Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the NSA will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.” Although the agency analysts who will have access to the NSA’s surveillance powers are directed to ignore and redact information pertaining to innocent Americans, if they see evidence of criminal acts in the data they access, they are directed to hand it over to the Justice Department.