Obama administration Releases Documents on N.S.A. Includes 2004 Ruling on Email Surveillance.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration released hundreds of pages of newly declassified documents related to National Security Agency surveillance late Monday, including an 87-page ruling in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first approved a program to systematically track Americans’ emails during the Bush administration. “The raw volume of the proposed collection is enormous,” wrote Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who was then the chief judge on the secret surveillance court. The government censored the date of her ruling in the publicly released document, and many sections — including a description of what she had been told about terrorism threats — were heavily redacted.
The ruling was among a trove of documents that were declassified and made public by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, including those by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
The documents show that as early as 2006, an inspector general review recommended tighter controls over the bulk telephone metadata program to reduce the risk that they would violate the limits on the collection of data. In 2009, the court would sharply rebuke the N.S.A. for violating its own procedures and misleading the nation’s intelligence court about how it used the telephone call logs.
Jameel Jaffer, a senior lawyer with the A.C.L.U., argued that the release of the documents demonstrated what he argued were structural problems with the surveillance court, which decides major issues.
“This is a reminder a lot of the most important and far-reaching decisions of the past decade were issued by this court, which meets in secret and hears only from the government and doesn’t publish its decisions,” Mr. Jaffer said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/us/latest-release-of-documents-on-nsa-includes-2004-ruling-on-email-surveillance.html?src=recg
