The National Security Agency used a now-defunct collection...
The National Security Agency used a now-defunct collection program to obtain thousands of emails and other communications exchanged between American citizens before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ruled in October 2011 that the program was unconstitutional, said the FISC…
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opinion that U.S. intelligence officials released Wednesday. Officials planned to also release two other related documents Wednesday, but they weren’t available at our deadline. The NSA began collecting communications through the program beginning in 2008; the NSA had been diverting “wholly domestic” communications into the same repository it had been using to examine foreign communications, said the opinion. The NSA did not reveal to FISC that the communications were being collected improperly until 2011. At that time, the government “advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” then-FISC Judge John Bates said in the opinion. The NSA revised its data collection procedures after FISC ruled the program was unconstitutional, removing the collected communications it determined were fully domestic in 2012, according to the documents. The government released the documents after the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the government to release them in accordance with a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). EFF said in a statement that the documents’ release “is just one step in advancing a public debate on the scope and legality of the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs."