Opinions from a secret court were declassified on Wednesday, revealing the National Security Agency misrepresented the amount of internet communications they were collecting to the court. One of the opinions was written by U.S. District Judge John Bates in October 2011. In the opinion, Bates explained the NSA had admitted they were gathering more information than they were legally allowed to. He wrote, “NSA acquires valuable information through its upstream collection, but not without substantial intrusions on Fourth Amendment protected interests.”
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court estimated 58,000 domestic communications were collected each year. A senior intelligence official for the NSA said the collection was a mistake. He said, “This was a situation where there was technological problem that could not be avoided, rather than any overreach.”
