N.S.A. Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrant, Letter Says

The disclosure comes amid increased scrutiny from Congress and a Federal Trade Commission crackdown on trade data brokers.

The National Security Agency purchases certain logs related to Americans' domestic Internet activities from commercial data brokers, according to an unclassified letter from the agency.

The letter, addressed to a Democratic senator and obtained by The New York Times, provided few details about the nature of the data, other than to point out that it did not include the content of Internet communications.

Yet this revelation is the latest to highlight a legal gray area: intelligence and law enforcement agencies buy sometimes potentially sensitive and revealing national data to broker-dealers, which would require a court order to acquire it directly.

This comes as the Federal Trade Commission has begun to Crack down on companies trading personal location data collected from smartphone apps and sold without people's knowledge or consent as to where it would end up and for what purpose. be used.

In a letter Thursday to the director of national intelligence, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, argued that “Internet metadata” – logs showing when two computers communicated, but not the content of a message – “may be as sensitive” as location data that the F.T.C. target.

He urged intelligence agencies to stop buying Internet data on Americans if it was not collected according to the F.T.C. standard. featured location records.

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