美国安局每年搜集全球2.5亿封电子邮件_BEC初级作文

美国安局每年搜集全球2.5亿封电子邮件

The rest are acquired by the NSA from Internet service providers at the point where they are sent or received. The roughly 56,000 annual emails in question were from "upstream" sources.

Intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, defended their practices.

"This is not an egregious overreaching by a greedy agency seeking to spy on Americans. This is a technological problem that resulted in an inadvertent collection of a relatively small number of U.S. person communications," a senior intelligence official told reporters.

In the newly declassified ruling of the FISA Court, the court in a footnote estimates that, based on data supplied by the NSA, between 2008 and 2011, the agency might have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emailed communications of Americans annually.

U.S. intelligence officials told reporters that the domestic emails were collected under a program designed to target the emails of foreign terrorism suspects.

The program does not collect emails because of flagged words such as "bomb." Instead it takes in those mentioning specific addresses, or going to or from particular addresses, one official said.

One way that emails of American citizens can get caught in the net is because the program captures the screenshot of the person's webmail account that shows a page of emails received or sent, rather than just the one targeted email, he said.

"For technological reasons NSA was not capable ... and still is not capable of breaking those down into their individual components," the official said.