NSA spying on citizens:Traffic shaping allows spying on Americans

The government's use of traffic shaping exploits a fundamental principle about internet traffic: Data takes the quickest and most efficient route, which sometimes means bouncing from different countries around the globe, rather than staying within a country's borders. Now the real question remains, is NSA spying on citizens?

Now since the disclosures of Edward Snowden in 2013 about NSA spying on citizens, the U.S. government has assured its citizens that the NSA cannot spy on their electronic communications without the approval of a special surveillance judge. Domestic communications, the government says, are protected by statute and the Fourth Amendment. In practice, however, this is no longer strictly true. These protections are real, but they no longer cover as much ground as they did in the past.

US citizens are afforded constitutional protections against surveillance or searches of their personal data. Any time the government wants to access an American's data, they must follow the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, a Washington DC-based court that authorizes the government's surveillance programs.

But if that same data is collected outside the US, the bulk of the NSA's authority stems from a presidential decree dating back more than three decades.

But according to the new analysis, the NSA has clandestine means of "diverting portions of the river of internet traffic that travels on global communications cables," which allows it to bypass protections put into place by Congress to prevent domestic surveillance and allows NSA to spy on citizens.

Surveillance Act, as enacted by Congress, as it falls solely under the watch of the executive branch and is not reviewed by the courts.

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