Reports the National Security Agency is secretly tapping...

The statement was the first official agency rebuttal of a project, known as MUSCULAR, that reportedly skirts Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court jurisdiction by collecting U.S. citizens’ communications overseas (CD Oct 31 p9). “NSA works with a number of partners and allies in meeting its foreign-intelligence mission goals, and in every case those operations comply with U.S. law and with the applicable laws under which those partners and allies operate,” the statement said. NSA’s communications collections systems “target communications links that contain” email addresses, phone numbers or other selectors “of foreign intelligence interest,” said the statement. “When a validated foreign intelligence target uses one of those means to send or receive their communications, we work to find, collect, and report on the communication.” Speaking at an American Bar Association event Thursday, Office of the Director of National Intelligence General Counsel Robert Litt said the media reports don’t tell the full story (http://bit.ly/18Kq1nQ). “The media reports are often based on documents that are exceptionally complicated, dense and jargonized, and require a level of technical knowledge that most people, including me, don’t have,” he said. “And the documents often present only part of the story.” Unfortunately, he said, “we frequently cannot correct their mistakes without compromising sensitive sources and methods.” But it’s important the public “differentiate between technical capacity and actual practice ... between what we can do technically and what we can do legally,” he said.