NSA collected thousands of emails from Americans, rebuked by court

The National Security Agency was rebuked by a secret court in 2011 for collecting thousands of emails and other online details from Americans with no ties to terrorism, 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 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.


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Normally mistakes by politicians are short lived because the main electorate body has in effect a short memory. Which is why Obama's numbers fluctuate so much and why this admin is constantly stalling investigations. But I believe this will stick like New Mexico mud and do permanent damage.