It’s still stunning that this is even happening in America. Kudos to these researchers.

Christopher White of the College Fix reports.

University Researchers Show NSA Can Legally Spy By Rerouting Internet Traffic

The National Security Agency can legally monitor every American, inside and outside the U.S., “by collecting their network traffic abroad,” according to a working paper by researchers at Harvard University and Boston University.

This can happen without any checks and balances from Congress or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees surveillance requests from the NSA, said researchers Axel Arnbak of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Sharon Goldberg, a BU assistant professor of computer science.

The paper documents what it calls “interdependent technical and legal loopholes” that the NSA could use to snoop on American citizens inside the U.S.

Arnbak and Goldberg aren’t the only ones raising red flags. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal agency that ensures “liberty concerns” are considered in anti-terrorism policy, is reviewing the same NSA legal authority as the researchers, and a former State Department official warned in a recent op-ed the legal authority is prone to abuse.

The researchers focus on Executive Order 12333, which was issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to authorize foreign intelligence investigations, and the U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18. The executive order “has largely been ignored by the public and other branches of Government in recent months, especially since relevant legal documents related to EO 12333 remain classified or redacted,” the working paper said.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) limit the NSA’s authority to carry out domestic electronic surveillance, whereas the executive order does not have any congressional oversight and has never been subject to court review.

If messages between two people in the U.S. are intercepted and rerouted through overseas routers, Arnbak and Goldberg say, the NSA could stockpile massive amounts of data and content without violating U.S. law.