Intelligence gathered by the United States government inside the United States or specifically targeting US citizens is legally required to be gathered in compliance with the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and under the authority of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court). NSA global data mining projects have existed for decades, but recent programs of intelligence gathering and analysis that include data gathered from inside the United States such as
PRISM were enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President
George W. Bush and renewed under President
Barack Obama in December 2012. Boundless Informant was first publicly revealed on June 8, 2013, after classified documents about the program were leaked to
The Guardian. This report contained a
Top Secret heat map produced by the Boundless Informant program summarizing data records from 504 separate
DNR and
DNI collection sources or
SIGADs. In the map, countries that are under surveillance are assigned a color from green to red (which does not correspond to intensity of surveillance). As this map shows that almost 3 billion data elements from inside the United States were captured by the NSA over a 30-day period ending in March 2013, Snowden stated that this tool was collecting more information on Americans located within the United States than on
Russians in
Russia. Snowden stated that he had raised concerns about this with his superiors at the NSA beginning in October 2012, specifically with two superiors in the Hawaii regional base of the NSA Threat Operations Center and two superiors in the Technology Directorate of the NSA. Snowden states that he brought up these concerns through the
Dissent Channel. • October 20, 2013:
France: a chart showing almost 70 million telephony metadata was published by the newspaper
Le Monde. • October 28, 2013:
Spain: a chart showing 60 million telephony metadata was published by the newspaper
El Mundo. • November 19, 2013:
Norway: a chart showing 33 million telephony metadata was published by the tabloid paper
Dagbladet. • December 6, 2013:
Italy: a chart showing almost 46 million telephony metadata was published by the
tabloid paper ''
L'Espresso''. • February 8, 2014:
Netherlands: a chart showing 1.8 million telephony metadata was published by the newspaper
NRC Handelsblad. Initially, these media wrote that the BoundlessInformant charts showed how many phone calls the NSA intercepted from a particular country. A first correction of this interpretation is that the program doesn't count the content of phone calls, but only the metadata thereof (see
below). A second correction is about by whom and where these data were collected. On August 5, a week after the publication of a chart from BoundlessInformant in Germany, the German intelligence agency (BND) said that they collected these data from foreign communications, related to military operations abroad. A similar statement was made by the
Norwegian Intelligence Service, after a chart about Norway was published on November 19. On February 4, 2014, the Dutch government revealed that the 1.8 million metadata in the chart about the Netherlands were not collected by NSA, but instead by the
Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD), also to support military operations, which almost led to the resignation of the Dutch
interior minister. On October 29, 2013,
NSA-director Keith B. Alexander declared that accusations in French, Spanish and Italian media about NSA intercepting millions of phone calls from these countries are "completely false". He added that "This is not information that we collected on European citizens. It represents information that we and our
NATO allies have collected in defense of our countries and in support of military operations." == Technology ==