The National Security Agency illegally intercepted thousands of e-mails from Americans with no connection to terrorism and misled the court about the scope of what it was doing, according to latest declassified documents.
Officials disclosed the history of that unlawful surveillance yest, releasing three partially redacted opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that detailed the judges’ concerns about how the NSA had been siphoning data from the Internet in an effort to collect foreign intelligence.
The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group based in San Francisco.