<div dir="ltr"><h1><span class="">NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ e-mails before court struck down program</span></h1>
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By <span class=""> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ellen-nakashima/2011/03/02/ABdt4sM_page.html" rel="author">Ellen Nakashima</a></span>,
<span class="">Wednesday, August 21, <span class="">3:07 PM</span></span>
<a href="mailto:ellen.nakashima@washpost.com?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27NSA%20gathered%20thousands%20of%20Americans%E2%80%99%20e-mails%20before%20court%20struck%20down%20program%27" id="bec61a4171-1093-46b0-bc65-8408345bb20d" class="">E-mail the writer</a>
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<p><span class=""></span> The National Security Agency
unlawfully gathered as many as tens of thousands of e-mails and other
electronic communications between Americans as part of a
now-discontinued collection program, according to a 2011 secret court
opinion.</p>
<p>The 86-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S.
intelligence officials on Wednesday, explains why the chief judge of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the time ruled the
collection method unconstitutional. The judge, John D. Bates, found that
the government had “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.”</p>
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<p>Under the program, the NSA diverted large volumes of
international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United
States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily
for processing and for the selection of foreign communications, rather
than domestic ones. But in practice the NSA was unable to filter out the
communications between Americans.</p><p>A month after the FISA court
learned of the program in 2011 and ruled it unconstitutional, the NSA
revised its collection procedures to segregate the transactions most
likely to contain the communications of Americans. In 2012, the agency
also purged the domestic communications that it had collected.</p><p>“This
was not in any respect an intentional or wholesale breach of privacy of
American persons,” Robert S Litt III, the general counsel for the
Office of the Director of the National Intelligence, said Wednesday.</p><p>Officials
stressed that it was the NSA that brought the collection method to the
court’s attention as part of its regular reporting process.</p><p>The Washington Post <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html">reported last week</a>
that the court had ruled the program unconstitutional. But the newly
declassified opinion sheds new light on the volume of Americans’
communications that were obtained by the NSA, as well as the FISA
court’s interpretation of the program. </p><p>In addition to the October
2011 court order, U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday declassified
a follow-up order about the NSA’s revised collection methods.</p><p>The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.</p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
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