U.S. reveals it collected tens of thousands of communications with no terror links
Security agency still may retain phone records
WASHINGTON The Obama administration has given up more of its surveillance secrets, acknowledging that it was ordered to stop scooping up thousands of Internet communications from Americans with no connection to terrorism — a practice it says was an unintended consequence when it gathered bundles of Internet traffic connected to terror suspects.
One of the documents that intelligence officials released Wednesday came because a court ordered the National Security Agency to do so. But it is also part of the administration’s response to the leaks by analyst-turned-fugitive Edward Snowden, who revealed that the NSA’s spying programs went further and gathered millions more U.S. communications than most Americans realized.
The NSA declassified three secret court opinions showing how it revealed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that one of its surveillance programs may have collected and stored as many as 56,000 emails and other communications by ordinary Americans annually over three years.
The court ruled the NSA actions unconstitutional and ordered the agency to fix the problem, which it did by creating new technology to filter out buckets of data most likely to contain U.S. emails, and then limit the access to that data — and destroy it every two years, instead of every five years, as mandated by the court for other U.S. records gathered by the NSA.
The NSA still may retain Americans’ phone records and in some cases copies of their Internet traffic for five years or even longer in some circumstances.
The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, released the information Wednesday “in the interest of increased transparency,” and as directed by President Barack Obama in June, according to a statement accompanying the online documents. Obama pledged to Americans in comments before his summer vacation to give them more information on how U.S. intelligence agencies were gathering their data, in answer to critics including lawmakers on Capitol Hill who have proposed more than a dozen pieces of legislation aimed at trimming NSA’s spying powers since the Snowden leaks began.
Wednesday’s release of court documents was also in response to a 2012 lawsuit won by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group.
Only after the documents were disclosed to reporters did an Obama administration official acknowledge that the release of some of the documents was prodded by the group’s 2012 lawsuit.
The release Wednesday of the FISA opinion, two other 2011 rulings and a secret white paper on the NSA’s surveillance came less than two weeks after a federal judge in Washington gave government lawyers a time extension in order to decide which materials to declassify.