NSA Violated Court Rules To Search Phone Records
Repeated violations
Tuesday saw more disconcerting news about the US National Security Agency, as a clutch of newly declassified documents reportedly showed that the NSA searched Americans' phone call records without paying heed to court-ordered requirements for doing so, and that the agency misrepresented the secret call-tracking program to legal officials.
The roughly 1,800 pages of documents, which were released today in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, show, according to various reports, that from May 2006 to January 2009 the NSA investigated nearly 18,000 phone numbers -- but that only 2,000 of those numbers involved a court-mandated "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of a link to terrorist activities.
