The NSA: A blight on our democracy

Secret court allowed NSA wider NSA surveillance even after finding abuses (Click on this link to read more)

Rss@dailykos.com (joan Mccarter)

Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 7:32 pm

The latest document dump from the the Office of the Director of National Intelligence includes an order from the FISA court that allowed the NSA to collect an "expanded amount" of data from people's emails, despite the court's displeasure with the NSA's overreach and over-collection in another program.

The judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recounted a litany of problems with the first, smaller program, including the NSA collecting more categories of information than had been approved by the court and sharing data more widely within the electronic eavesdropping agency than had been authorized. 

[...] 

The programs let the NSA search for Americans who had electronic contact with people who were in turn linked to people hostile to the United States. At times, however, analysts queried the database with names that had not been found to be terrorists or foreign agents, the judge found.