Why the Washington Post's big NSA revelation is a bust

Half of the the Snowden cache contained U.S. person communication of some sort. Again, not really surprising, especially if the intercepts came from the PRISM program. People around the world often communicate with companies here in the U.S. (which DOES count as a U.S person), or with friends from college who live here, and it is not even remotely remarkable that a foreign target’s stored e-mails would include a “selector” that might be based in the U.S. or a U.S. person’s name in the conversation itself.

The Post article says that MOST of those communications were minimized, according to law. But 9,000 or so identifiable U.S. person terms/selectors/account holders were not. This means that, in the above example, maybe the NSA minimized my e-mail address but not my telephone number. Why might the NSA not have minimized this? Because doing so would require an analyst to look at the content of every communication and run every selector (telephone number and e-mail address) through a database to figure out if it should be minimized. This would be inordinately time-intensive, so the NSA relies on automation, and THEN, when the analyst IS looking at specific communication, the analyst is required to minimize any un-minimized selector that makes it through.

The analyst’s judgment can be subjective. On the first instance, the analyst has to figure out whether the communication is relevant to a foreign intelligence purpose. Then, they must figure out whether the selector terms, names, and identities are foreign and domestic. If the specific communication IS relevant to a foreign intelligence purpose, the analyst will spend time analyzing it.