From Wired News article: NSA Secret Database Ensnared President Clinton’s Private E-mail:
A secret NSA surveillance database containing millions of intercepted foreign and domestic e-mails includes the personal correspondence of former President Bill Clinton, according to the New York Times.
An NSA intelligence analyst was apparently investigated after accessing Clinton’s personal correspondence in the database, the paper reports, though it didn’t say how many of Clinton’s e-mails were captured or when the interception occurred.
The original report actually comes from the New York Times: E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress which reports since April disclosures have been made showing the NSA went “beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009″ to collect private communications of Americans. Democrat Representative Rush Holt has been investigating.
From Wired:
he database, codenamed Pinwale, allows NSA analysts to search through and read large volumes of e-mail messages, including correspondence to and from Americans. Pinwale is likely the end point for data sucked from internet backbones into NSA-run surveillance rooms at AT&T facilities around the country.
Those rooms were set up by the Bush administration following 9/11, and were finally legalized last year when Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act. The law gives the telecoms immunity for cooperating with the administration; it also opens the way for the NSA to lawfully spy on large groups of phone numbers and e-mail addresses in bulk, instead of having to obtain a warrant for each target.
Wired has written about NSA spy rooms in the past.
