Documents show NSA may have collected tens of thousands of emails of Americans

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

Documents show NSA may have collected tens of thousands of emails of Americans

WASHINGTON | Wed Aug 21, 2013 5:55pm EDT

(Reuters) - U.S. intelligence officials released new documents on Wednesday showing that the National Security Agency may have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emailed communications of Americans per year between 2008 and 2011.

The officials revealed the documents as part of an effort to explain how the NSA spotted, and then fixed, technical problems which led to the inadvertent collection of emails of American citizens without warrants.

The move is the Obama administration's latest response to continuing controversy over alleged electronic eavesdropping excesses by the NSA.

The documents included a formerly "top-secret," but newly-declassified ruling by the ultra-secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in which the court itself, in an obscure footnote, estimates, based on data supplied by NSA, that between 2008 and 2011, the agency might have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emailed communications of Americans in each of those three years.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/21/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSBRE97K14Y20130821

[Cooley Hurd]

1. Only 56000?

Betcha more, and this statement is an attempt to downplay things.

[Pholus]

2. When the NSA uses the term "collection,"

it means something completely different from you and me. They didn't hoover only 56,000 emails per year the way we'd use "collect". By their definition of the word, they had HUMAN NSA analysts lay eyes on purely domestic communications 56,000 times per year in error. That is out of everything they suck up (which at 1.6% of global internet traffic easy encompasses the less than 1% that is email/texts).

Remember with the NSA every word they say is carefully chosen and in many cases has been redefined within their organization to mean something else.