Surveillance-court papers to be released

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is preparing to release hundreds of pages of secret documents this week from the court that oversees a National Security Agency program that gathers the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.

The documents, which include orders and opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued from 2004-11, are being released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group.

The department said in a court filing that it would release the records by Tuesday.

The release will come after the disclosure last month of an 85-page surveillance court opinion that rebuked the National Security Agency for violating Americans’ right to privacy as part of a separate program that targets the collection of foreigners’ emails and phone calls.

In that opinion, the judge scolded the agency for collecting tens of thousands of “wholly domestic” emails in violation of the Constitution, and hinted that the agency possibly violated a criminal law against spying on Americans.

A footnote in that opinion took the agency to task for violations related to the phone-records collection. No content or subscriber names are collected.

“Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the required standard,” Judge John Bates wrote in the Oct. 3, 2011, opinion released last month.