"Court rebuked NSA on its use of phone data; 2009 ruling says agency violated its own procedures" by Scott Shane | New York Times, September 11, 2013
WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials released secret documents Tuesday showing that a judge reprimanded the National Security Agency in 2009 for violating its own procedures and misleading the nation’s intelligence court about how it used the telephone call logs it gathers in the hunt for terrorists.
It was the second case of a severe scolding of the spy agency by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to come to light since the disclosure of thousands of NSA documents by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor, began this summer.
The newly disclosed violations involved the NSA program that has drawn perhaps the sharpest criticism from members of Congress and civil libertarians: the collection and storage for five years of information on virtually every US phone call....
The new documents show that the agency compares each day’s phone call data as it arrives with an “alert list” of thousands of domestic and foreign phone numbers that it has identified as possibly linked to terrorism.
See: Snowden a Sharp S.O.B.
Yeah, he sure is, but one phone number draw in 2.5 million people?
The agency told the court that all the numbers on the alert list had met the legal standard of suspicion, but that was false....
A senior US intelligence official, briefing reporters before the documents’ release, admitted the sting of the court’s reprimand but said the problems came in a complex, highly technical program and were unintentional....
Sorry, but we are sick of lame-ass excuses.
Related: NSA collected thousands of US communications
Oh, you also collected all those "because many web mail services use such bundled transmissions, it was impossible to collect the targeted materials without also sweeping up data from innocent domestic users?"
I'm glad I never open e-mail anymore. It's check and delete all no matter what is in there.
“The documents only begin to uncover the abuses of the huge databases of information the NSA has of innocent Americans’ calling records,” said Mark M. Jaycox, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He said the agency’s explanation — that none of its workers fully understood the phone metadata program — showed “how much of a rogue agency the NSA has become.”
On that has also collected and is still collecting political communications, meaning they have loads of stuff to blackmail Congress -- and then they are passing it all along to Israel and thus AIPAC.
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Intelligence officials have expressed some willingness to adjust the program in response to complaints from Congress and the public, possibly by requiring the phone companies, rather than the NSA, to stockpile the call data. But they say that the program remains crucial in detecting terrorist plots and is now being run in line with the court’s rules....
Sick of government hot air being blown up our asses, too.
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