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.