Freshly declassified documents from the Reagan years shows how the National Security Agency uses unchecked presidential powers to conduct surveillance. Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 is used to collect e-mails of U.S. citizens and to intercept overseas internet traffic between Google and Yahoo data centers. (Ars Technica, September 30, 2014, by Cyrus Farivar)
Obtained by the ACLU and the Media Freedom and Information Access Center at Yale, the documents shed light on the process empowering surveillance. “Because the executive branch issued and now implements the executive order all on its own, the [surveillance] programs operating under the order are subject to essentially no oversight from Congress or the courts,” writes Alex Abdo for the American Civil Liberties Union, September 29, 2014)