Photo by Sean MacEntee / Available on Flickr
By Aimee Thomson
The recent and ongoing disclosures by Edward Snowden have revealed massive U.S. government-operated surveillance programs that vacuum up almost every aspect of modern communication in the name of national security. Since the first documents came to light last June,[1] a broad coalition of civil rights and privacy advocates has demanded reform of the substantive laws and procedural safeguards underlying these programs. Six months later, however, domestic surveillance remains little changed.
A full exploration of the legal authority for, and scope and use of, the signals intelligence collected by the National Security Agency (NSA) exceeds the scope of this article.[2] But, in brief, the revealed surveillance programs fall into two principal legal categories.
N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change 