(2. Juli) Shortly after the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (“PCLOB” or “Board”) began operation as a new independent agency, Board Members identified a series of programs and issues to prioritize for review. As announced at the Board’s public meeting in March 2013, one of these issues was the implementation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008.

Several months later, in June 2013, two classified National Security Agency (“NSA”) collection programs were first reported about by the press based on unauthorized disclosures of classified documents by Edward Snowden, a contractor for the NSA. Under one program, implemented under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA collects domestic telephone metadata (i.e., call records) in bulk. Under the other program,
implemented under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”), the government collects the contents of electronic communications, including telephone calls
and emails, where the target is reasonably believed to be a non-U.S. person located outside the United States.

A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators asked the Board to investigate the two NSA programs and provide an unclassified report. (…)

The Board has found that certain aspects of the program’s implementation raise privacy concerns. These include the scope of the incidental collection of U.S. persons’ communications and the use of queries to search the information collected under the program for the communications of specific U.S. persons. The Board offers a series of policy recommendations to strengthen privacy safeguards and to address these concerns.