Just in Time for Trump, the NSA Loosens Its Privacy Rules
As the privacy and civil liberty community braces for Donald Trump’s impending control of US intelligence agencies like the NSA, critics have called on the Obama administration to rein in those spying powers before a man with a reputation for vindictive grudges takes charge. Now, just in time for President-elect Trump to inherit the most powerful spying machine in the world, Obama’s Justice Department has signed off on new rules to let the NSA share more of its unfiltered intelligence with its fellow agencies—including those with a domestic law enforcement agenda.
Over the last month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed off on changes to NSA rules that allow the agency to loosen the standards for what raw surveillance data it can hand off to the other 16 American intelligence agencies, which include not only the CIA and military intelligence branches, but also the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The new rules, which were first reported and released in a partially redacted form by the New York Times, are designed to keep those agencies from exploiting NSA intelligence for law enforcement investigations, permitting its use only in intelligence operations.
