Mayer 14 Jonathan Mayer PhD candidate in computer science & law lecturer at Stanford. December 3, 2014 Web Policy Executive Order 12333 on American Soil, and Other Tales from the FISA Frontier
The United States is the world’s largest telecommunications hub. Internet traffic and voice calls are routinely routed through the country, even though both ends are foreign.
According to leaked documents, the NSA routinely scoops up many of these two-end foreign communications as they flow through American networks.2 The agency calls it “International Transit Switch Collection,” operated under “Transit Authority.” That authority stems from Executive Order 12333, not the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
