NSA Violated Privacy Protections, Officials Say

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WE’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A LONG TIME: The NSA has been spying on Americans for more than thirty years. New York Times writer David Burnham detailed the agency’s growing power in 1983.
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WE’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A LONG TIME: The NSA has been spying on Americans for more than thirty years. New York Times writer David Burnham detailed the agency’s growing power in 1983.

The National Security Agency for years conducted searches of its phone-records database that violated privacy protections by not meeting a court-ordered standard, intelligence officials acknowledged Tuesday. They said the violations continued until a judge ordered an overhaul of the program in 2009.

The revelations called into question NSA’s ability to run the sweeping domestic surveillance programs it introduced more than a decade ago in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Officials said the violations were inadvertent, because NSA officials didn’t understand their own phone-records collection program.

Top U.S. officials, including NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander, have repeatedly reassured lawmakers and the public that the phone-records program has been carefully executed under oversight from the secret national security court.

– WALL STREET JOURNAL

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