The following is a list of 13 reasons why your Internet activitie - E-mails might be suspicious to the US Government and put up a red flag against you.
1. If you regularly call people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen, your telephone records have probably passed through an NSA computer. Most likely, however, if you’ve been calling rug merchants or relatives, no one at the NSA knew your name. (A computer program sanitizes the actual identifying information.) Depending on the time, date, location, and contextual factors related to the call, a record may not have been created.
2. If you’ve sent an e-mail from an IP address that has been used by bad guys in the past (IP addresses can be spoofed), your e-mail’s metadata—the hidden directions that tell the Internet where to send it (that is, the To and From lines, the subject line, the length, and the type of e-mail) probably passed through a server. The chances of an analyst or a computer actually reading the content of an e-mail are very slim.
3. If you are or were a lawyer for someone formally accused of terrorism, there is a good chance that the NSA has or had—but could not or cannot access (at least not anymore)—your telephone billing records. (N.B.: A Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report notes that the FISA Amendments Act does not require material erroneously collected to be destroyed.)
4. If you work for a member of the “Defense Industrial Base” on sensitive projects and your company uses Verizon and AT&T, your e-mail has likely been screened by NSA computers for malware.
5. Before 2007, if you, as an American citizen, worked overseas in or near a war zone, there is a small chance that you were “collected on” by a civilian NSA analyst or a member of the NSA’s Central Security Service (the name given to the military service elements that make up a large part of the NSA’s workforce).
6. If you, from September 2001 to roughly April 2004, called or sent e-mail to or from regions associated with terrorism and used American Internet companies to do so, your transaction records (again, without identifying information) were likely collected by your telecommunications company and passed to the NSA. The records were then analyzed, and there is a tiny chance that a person or a computer read them or sampled them. The NSA would ask telecommunications companies for tranches of data that correlated to particular communities of interest, and then used a variety of classified and unclassified techniques to predict, based on their analysis, who was likely to be associated with terrorism. This determination required at least one additional and independent extraneous piece of evidence.
7. There is a chance that the NSA passed this data to the FBI for further investigation. There is a small chance that the FBI acted on this information.
8. If you define “collection” in the broadest sense possible, there is a good chance that if the NSA wanted to obtain your transactional information in real time and knew your direct identity (or had a rough idea of who you are), they can do so, provided that they can prove to a FISA judge within seventy-two hours that there is probable cause to believe you are a terrorist or associated with a terrorist organization.
9. If the NSA receives permission from a judge to collect on a corporation or a charity that may be associated with terrorism, and your company, which is entirely separate from the organization in question, happens to share a location with it (either because you’re in the same building or have contracted with the company to share Internet services), there is a chance that the NSA incidentally collects your work e-mail and phone calls. It is very hard for the agency to map IP addresses to their physical locations and to completely segregate parts of corporate telephone networks. When this happens, Congress and the Justice Department are notified, and an NSA internal compliance unit makes a record of the “overcollect.”
10. If any of your communications were accidentally or incidentally collected by the NSA, they probably still exist somewhere, subject to classified minimization requirements. (The main NSA signals-intelligence database is code-named PINWALE.) This is the case even after certain collection activities became illegal with the passage of the 2007 FISA Amendments Act, the governing framework for domestic collection. The act does not require the NSA to destroy the data.
11. If you are of Arab descent and attend a mosque whose imam was linked through degrees of association with Islamic charities considered to be supporters of terrorism, NSA computers probably analyzed metadata from your telephone communications and e-mail.
12. Your data might have been intercepted or collected by Russia, China, or Israel if you traveled to those countries. The FBI has quietly found and removed transmitters from several Washington, D.C.–area cell phone towers that fed all data to wire rooms at foreign embassies.
13. The chances, if you are not a criminal or a terrorist, that an analyst at the NSA listened to one of your telephone conversations or read one of your e-mail messages are infinitesimally small given the technological challenges associated with the program, not to mention the lack of manpower available to sort through your irrelevant communications. If an unintentional collection occurred (an overcollect), it would be deleted and not stored in any database.
Read more: 13 Ways to Know if the Government is Reading Your Email | Mental Floss
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