14 DAY TRIAL // Following a legal battle won by the EFF, the NSA disclosed hundreds of top secret documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The documents indicate the intelligence agency spent three years collecting domestic data because there were misunderstandings about the rules.
The NSA improperly tracked more than 15,000 suspects in violation of FISA court rulings, which, of course, resulted in very little repercussions for the agency.
Basically, the FISA courts determined that a list of suspects cleared the bar for reasonable suspicion and ruled that those individuals could be placed on the NSA alerts lists. This would mean their phone records would get flagged as soon as they enter the system.
The NSA, however, ignored the rules entirely. According to a software audit on January 15, 2009, out of close to 18,000 phone records, less than 2,000 had cleared the FISA court’s standard.
The document indicates the NSA was perfectly fine with the mistake and even its in-house lawyers viewed the alert process as a means of identifying someone on the list, rather than just the names they were supposed to keep an eye on.
The court ruling complete with the Alert List came in 2006. This means that up until 2009, the overreach of the NSA wasn’t even discovered and the intelligence agency merely shrugged in response.
The agency gave out a statement signed by General Alexander in which the violation of the FISA limitations, but tried to justify the actions of the agency by saying they misunderstood the minimization procedures. The NSA, it seems, felt the search restrictions only applied to archived data.
Of course, the statement makes no reference to the fact that the Obama administration only declassified the documents because the EFF won the rights, but rather make it look as it is all from their own decision.