FOXNews.com: NSA Collected Thousands of Emails From Americans With No Terror Ties

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NSA Collected Thousands of Emails From Americans With No Terror Ties Aug 21st 2013, 21:09 Published August 21, 2013 FoxNews.com The National Security Agency was rebuked by a secret court in 2011 for collecting thousands of emails and other online details from Americans, according to court opinions which were declassified for the first time on Wednesday.  The Office of the Director of National Intelligence took the unusual step of declassifying more than 100 pages of documents, amid the escalating public debate about government surveillance programs. The release comes several days after a report showed that the NSA had violated privacy rules and overstepped its authority thousands of times.  Some of those incidents were minor, but the documents released Wednesday detail major compliance problems.  In 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was notified of a major problem involving "upstream collection," which is the collection of Internet traffic outside of the service providers. The NSA was collecting bundled email communications under a provision  which focuses on foreign Internet traffic. The NSA, though, was not effectively segregating all the traffic from Americans.  The court rebuked the NSA for the violation.  "For the first time the government has now advised the Court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe," John D. Bates, a judge on the surveillance court, said in October 2011.  The NSA then worked with Congress and the court to correct the problem but ultimately decided it could not salvage the data it collected. It was purged in 2012.  Fox News reviewed the documents along with several other news agencies before their release on Wednesday. Based on the documents, at least 75 million Internet communications were purged.  The NSA claims the problem was technical in nature because the pulling of Internet traffic is automated.  The documents were released in response to President Obama's directive for the NSA to be more transparent, according to senior intelligence officials. It also seemed designed to answer growing criticism that the NSA oversight is inadequate by the surveillance court, and its own internal reporting systems are lacking. Fox News' Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.

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