The NSA Promised a Public Estimate of Section 702 Surveillance. Where Is It?

We do not have a public estimate of the number of U.S. persons’ communications that are “incidentally” collected as part of the NSA’s surveillance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. As a civil society organization involved in ongoing discussions with ODNI over the acquisition and use of Americans’ personal information, we are pushing for the IC to determine and release this estimate. Along with other civil society groups and coalition partners, we have written a letter addressed to DNI Avril Haines and NSA Director General Timothy Haugh. You can read the letter in full below.

For over a decade, members of Congress and civil society organizations have called on the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to estimate the scale of “incidental” collection under Section 702. Former DNI Dan Coats and former NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett publicly pledged to provide this number in 2017 but backtracked soon after. The IC claimed they could not find a satisfactory estimation method that “respects individual privacy, protects intelligence sources and methods, and imposes minimal burden on IC resources.” However, in 2022, two Princeton researchers cracked the code, thus providing IC officials with a new methodology that could reliably estimate the scale of incidental collection.

While this number would be only a partial proxy for the number of U.S. persons communications obtained under Section 702, it would be a meaningful and important start to providing the rough estimate members of Congress have repeatedly requested.

*Note that the total number of collections differs from the numbers we do have, which are statistics on queries of 702 data.