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On March
6, 1984, the Attorney General submitted the report for
calendar year 1983. It notes 549 applications for orders and extension of orders, 549 orders issued by the court, and no modifications
or denials.
There has been a continuing increase in the number of FISA surveillances since 1980, the first full year of FISA operation (see Appendix C). While the Committee, for security reasons, cannot discuss the categories of surveillances with any specificity, it can be
noted that the significant increases in the number of surveillances
occur in the categories of foreign power and non-US. person agent
of foreign power surveillances, rather than in the U.S. person category, although there has been an increase in the latter.
In addition, because surveillances of agents of foreign powers
must be renewed every 90 days, the calendar year number of application figures may be misleading. For example, if the same agent
of a foreign power is continuously targeted for one year, there will
be at least three, and possibly four, applications for that year.
V. NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
“WATCHLIST”
The first definition of electronic surveillance in FISA (section
101(fX1)) affects the use of NSA computer seletion technology to retrieve the international communications of a United States person
when that person is in the United States and NSA intentionally
targets that person. Targeting is accomplished by using a person’s
name, or other unique identifier, to select that person’s communications. This definition was specifically added to the Act to regulate an NSA program of the late sixties and early seventies which
was commonly referred to as “watchlisting.”
NAS fully understands and abides by this provision. However, a
civil suit, Jabara v. Webster, 691 F.2d272 (6th Cir. 1982), in which
the plaintiff alleged that watchlisting occurred, appears to have
caused some confusion outside NSA as to the applicability of this
definition to NSA’s monitoring of international communications.
NSA understands this definition to require a court order before it
searches through communications as they are collected for communications of a particular United States person when that person is
in the United States. This requirement applies to searches of previously collected communications while those communications reside
in data bases of unprocessed intercept. Once a communication is retrieved from such a data base and is used to develop an intelligence
report, the FISA no longer applies to the subsequent retrieval of
that intelligence report. It is NSA’s practice to delete a United
States person’s name from intelligence report; and as a practical
matter, it is not possible to retrieve NSA intelligence reports issued
since 1975 by the names of United States persons.
If the circumstances of the Jabara case occurred today, NSA
could seek an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court to select any international communications that the target
would send or receive after the request. If necessary, and after obtaining a court order, the NSA could review available, unprocessed
In such circumstances, more than one order results from one application. A single application
may also
request authority to surveil one facility of a foreign power, by the use of different surveillance techniques.
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