Declassified court documents highlight NSA violations

By Ellen Nakashima, Julie Tate and Carol Leonnig, E-mail the writers

The National Security Agency for almost three years searched a massive database of Americans’ phone call records in violation of court-approved privacy rules, and the problem went unfixed because no one at the agency had a full technical understanding of how the system worked, according to new documents and senior government officials.
The improper activity went on from May 2006 to January 2009, according to a scathing March 2009 opinion by Judge Reggie B. Walton, a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Read the documents

Court records detail NSA violations

The Obama administration declassified documents about intelligence collection under Section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on Sept. 10.

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It was one of more than a dozen documents declassified and released Tuesday in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups, and at the direction of President Obama in the wake of the June disclosure of the massive phone records collection by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden.
At issue was the NSA’s use of an “alert list” of numbers linked to terrorist suspects to see whether there had been any contact between those numbers and any numbers in the database, officials said. NSA was using that tool to see whether any numbers in the database should be followed up on for further analysis.
In fact, only numbers in which analysts could prove there was “reasonable articulable suspicion” of a link to foreign terrorists could be queried against the database, according to court-approved rules.
Walton said NSA’s explanation for its violation of the court order — that some NSA personnel thought the querying rules applied only to archived data — “strains credulity.” He also expressed consternation at NSA’s inaccurate description of the process it was using to query the database.
“The court finds that the government’s failure to ensure that responsible officials adequately understood the NSA’s alert list process, and to accurately report its implementation to the court, has prevented for more than two years both the government and the FISC from taking steps to remedy daily violations,” Walton wrote.
The secret program began without any court or congressional approval in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks but was put under court authorization in May 2006 when some phone companies balked at providing the data solely at the request of the executive branch.
Under the “bulk records” collection, the NSA receives daily transfers of all customer records from the nation’s major phone companies. Those records include phone numbers called and received, their time and duration, but no customer name or call content.