The NSA is intercepting attorney-client privileged communications

This last Monday, according to the ABA Journal, NSA chief Keith Alexander acknowledged the NSA is scooping up attorney-client communications, but said that it is “affording appropriate protection” to those communications.

article here

Attorney - client communication intercepted by the NSA - What happens?

When the National Security Agency realizes it has intercepted an attorney-client communication through its monitoring program it "minimizes" the impact by stopping the monitoring of that communication and "identifying it as an attorney-client communication in a log maintained for that purpose if the client is someone known to be under criminal indictment in the United States. Otherwise, it is read.

Story here, via State Bar of Michigan blog.

From the article: [the guidelines don’t] apply to all attorney-client calls. It provides only for the minimization (and protection) of the calls of “a person who is known to be under criminal indictment in the United States”—someone who has already been charged under US law. This is because indicted persons have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel. People who aren’t indicted don’t have this right, and so their calls are not minimized.