The National Security Agency has just released an important…

It is a big-deal doc but it also appears to be more a housekeeping update of the previous one rather something that makes major substantive changes, unless I’m missing something, so my current plan is to tweet for specialists rather than write a NYT article for general readers./2

These procedures govern, at a 30,000-foot level, DOD/NSA surveillance that is authorized by Executive Order 12333 because it uses techniques that fall outside the sort of national-security wiretapping that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) regulates. /3

FISA covers collection inside the US from a wire of coms w/ at least one end on domestic soil. So this is for all the other stuff, like collection abroad, certain satellite interceptions, & warrantless bulk collection of foreign-to-foreign coms as they transit the US network./4

The previous procedures date back to 1988 and were signed by then-AG Edwin Meese and then-deputy secretary of defense William Taft. (They were released in 2014 as part of the Snowden fallout.)/5
https://t.co/uZ5Cny2Ldk

The 1988 version had been created to deal with the revolution in communications caused by the transition to fiberoptic network technology. (For more, see the secret post-FISA history of US surveillance law/policy/tech in Chapter 5 of my book “Power Wars.”) /6

The 1988 Meese-Taft rules were called the “Classified Annex” to DOD Manual 5240.01. This new version is less censored & is called the “Redacted Annex” – in part bc some classified stuff, e.g. transit authority, appears to have been pushed off into a different implementing doc. /7

The new version was signed by Bill Barr and Mark Esper. It is getting pushed out at the end of the Trump administration, as often happens with things officials have been working for years and want to wrap it up before they walked out the door./8

However, as I understand it, this update is not Trumpy. It is something civil servants have been working on since the Obama admin and that just ran into a lot of delays. Here is what Glenn Gerstell, who was the NSA’s general counsel until recently, emailed me: /9

Minor mystery solved: In Sept, out of the blue, Trump issued a directive “clarifying” that the NSA could hunt for coms of Americans being held hostage abroad. Turns out that was bc in finalizing this, DOJ worried that this longstanding practice lacked explicit authorization./10

But the diffs between the old & new rules seem to be largely about codifying changes since 1988 (creation of ODNI, FISA Amendments Act), adding discussion of existing training, & codifying practices we've knew about since Snowden, like contact chaining thru US person metadata./11

That’s what I got for now./12