WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has ended a controversial surveillance practice of collecting e-mail traffic merely because it contains the e-mail address or phone number of a foreign target, a procedure that greatly increased the chances that purely domestic communications would be gathered.
The agency agreed to end the ‘‘about the target’’ collection to win approval from a federal court to continue a major surveillance program known colloquially as ‘‘Section 702’’ of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
That’s a reference to part of a statute — the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 — that allows the NSA to gather from US telecommunications and Internet providers the e-mails, phone calls, text messages, and other electronic communications that could contain foreign intelligence.
The ‘‘about’’ collection came to public light as one of a series of disclosures in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Those revelations sparked months of national and international debate about the proper scope of government surveillance.
The ‘‘about’’ surveillance was the most problematic part of the ‘‘upstream’’ collection portion of Section 702, in which the agency gathers e-mails and text messages from telecom companies that own the infrastructure making up the backbone of the Internet. Upstream collection is a comparatively small part of overall 702 collection. One estimate by the surveillance court in 2011 put it at about 9 percent. Even so, it could result in ‘‘a large overall number of purely domestic’’ communications, a privacy oversight board concluded in 2014.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 found that the way the agency was conducting its upstream program violated the Constitution. The NSA proposed changes, which the court approved, allowing the ‘‘about’’ collection to continue.
But the NSA discovered last year that some analysts were querying the upstream data in violation of the rules. It reported the incidents to Congress and the surveillance court. The court issued two extensions as the NSA worked to fix the problems. Then on Wednesday, the court approved the agency’s proposed new rules to address the issue.
‘‘After considerable evaluation of the program and available technology, NSA has decided that its Section 702 foreign intelligence surveillance activities will no longer include any upstream Internet communications that are solely ‘‘about’’ a foreign intelligence target,’’ the agency said in a statement Friday. Instead, the NSA said, it will limit its collection to communications that are sent directly to or from a foreign target.