Declassified files detail blatant violations, abuse of NSA domestic spying program

The new information from Intelligence Community Documents Regarding Collection under Section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) shows that the government on a daily basis spied on Americans’ telephone numbers, calling patterns as well as users IP addresses during the surveillance of foreign terror suspects. the spying agency crossed referenced a selected list of some 16,000 phone numbers against databases which contained millions of records, thus violating the law, two senior intelligence officials told Bloomberg.

The metadata program which started in 2006 enabled the NSA to gather more information about a specific number that the agency claimed could be linked to terrorist activity. The agency also kept an alert list that was cross-referenced with new numbers to consider whether they should be added to a list of "reasonable articulable suspicion."

The NSA gathered the bulk phone records under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which requires private companies to turn over evidence that is relevant to a terrorism investigation. However, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the NSA must have “reasonable, articulable suspicion” to run that number against a larger database. Only about 2,000 numbers on the list in 2009 met that legal condition, according to sources.

The released documents according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper relate to “compliance incidents that were discovered by the NSA, reported to the FISC and the Congress, and resolved four years ago.”

According to the documents, the US District Judge Reggie Walton who oversaw a secret US spy court wrote he was "deeply troubled" in March 2009 after discovering government officials had been accessing domestic phone records without “articulable suspicion.”  

source rt.com