Court Upbraided N.S.A. on Its Use of Call-Log Data

[MNBrewer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/us/court-upbraided-nsa-on-its-use-of-call-log-data.html

Intelligence officials released secret documents on 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.
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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 N.S.A. documents by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor, began this summer.

The newly disclosed violations involved the N.S.A. 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 phone call made in the United States. The agency uses orders from the intelligence court to compel phone companies to turn over records of numbers called and the time and duration of each call — the “metadata,” not the actual content of the calls.

Since Mr. Snowden disclosed the program, the agency has said that while it gathers data on billions of calls, it makes only a few hundred queries in the database each year, when it has “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a telephone number is connected to terrorism.

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This might be the worst part of all, however, "There was nobody at N.S.A. who really had a full understanding of how the program was operating at the time".