Secret court rebuked NSA for snooping on emails

WASHINGTON: A federal judge sharply rebuked the National Security Agency in 2011 for repeatedly misleading the court that oversees its surveillance on domestic soil, including a program that is collecting tens of thousands of domestic emails and other internet communications of Americans each year, according to a secret ruling made public on Wednesday. 

The 85-page ruling by Judge John D Bates, then serving as the chief judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, involved an NSA program that systematically searches the contents of Americans' international internet communications, without a warrant, in a hunt for discussions about foreigners who have been targeted for surveillance. 

The Justice Department had told Judge Bates that NSA officials had discovered that the program had also been gathering domestic messages for three years. Judge Bates found that the agency had violated the Constitution and declared the problems part of a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court. The release of the ruling was the latest effort by the Obama administration to gain control over revelations about NSA surveillance prompted by leaks by the former agency contractor Edward J Snowden. 

The collection is part of a broader program under a 2008 law that allows warrantless surveillance on domestic networks as long as it is targeted at non-citizens abroad. While the NSA fixed problems with how it handled those purely domestic messages to the court's satisfaction, the 2011 ruling revealed further issues . "The court is troubled that the government's revelations regarding NSA's acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program," Judge Bates wrote. 

One of the examples was redacted in the ruling. Another involved a separate NSA program that keeps logs of all domestic phone calls, which the court approved in 2006 and which came to light in June as a result of leaks by Snowden. In March 2009, the surveillance court learned that NSA analysts were using the phone log database in ways that went beyond the practice because of a "repeated inaccurate statements" in government filings to the court.