It doesn’t matter if the emails you send are banal or innocent in nature, the fact that the NSA can collect your emails and read them without the need for a warrant has rubbed many people the wrong way, especially American citizens who basically felt like their government has been spying on them.However the good news is that the practice has stopped, or at least to a certain extent. In a report from The New York Times, it seems that the National Security Agency (NSA) has announced that they will be halting the practice of collecting emails of Americans exchanged with people overseas.
Now this doesn’t mean that they won’t stop their surveillance program, but rather according to the report, “The agency is no longer collecting Americans’ emails and texts exchanged with people overseas that simply mention identifying terms — like email addresses — for foreigners whom the agency is spying on, but are neither to nor from those targets.”
This means that just because your emails to someone in another country mentions a foreigner under surveillance, it will no longer be collected en masse. In a statement made by the NSA, “Instead, this surveillance will now be limited to only those communications that are directly “to” or “from” a foreign intelligence target. These changes are designed to retain the upstream collection that provides the greatest value to national security while reducing the likelihood that NSA will acquire communications of U.S. persons or others who are not in direct contact with one of the Agency’s foreign intelligence targets.”