In January 2007, a judge on the FISA court issued two orders, one covering the collection of foreign communications and another dealing with domestic ones. After the contents were collected in that fashion, rules would be applied to screen out Americans’ communications in some circumstances and setting limits on when the database could be consulted, the report said.

It was apparently more difficult to get the court’s agreement on a legal justification for the collection of the contents of phone calls and e-mails than of Internet metadata. But the Justice Department came up with a theory that the word “facility” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had traditionally been understood to mean a specific telephone number or e-mail address, could be “changed to encompass the gateway or cable head that foreign targets use for communications” — that is, the entire line. That gave the N.S.A. access to the contents of a huge number of communications.

Notes:

- It is assumed, as no source or reprt has denied and numerous leaks have basically confirmed, the NSA collects all Metadata, on ALL DOMESTIC calls within the US. Which is a TOTALLY unprecedented use of search warrants. Untill the leaks by Snowden reported first by the Guardian, these were Secret and the threshold for bringing a suit to test the legality of these warrants couldn’t be filed as we were prevented from even knowing about them.

- The collection and storage of FOREIGN intelligence included the infamous “51%” rule, described by Steven Colbert as “a flip of a coin plus 1%” where the NSA can keep, store and later access, ANY communication where they are 51% sure it doesn’t involve a domestic source.

WASHINGTON — The March 2004 confrontation in the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft — a dramatic point in the Bush administration’s internal debate over warrantless surveillance — was apparently set off by a secret National Security Agency program that was vacuuming up “metadata” logs of Internet communications, according to a draft of a 2009 N.S.A. inspector general report obtained by the British newspaper The Guardian.

The report, the latest document given to the paper by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, may clear up a long-running mystery over which program White House officials wanted Mr. Ashcroft and other Justice Department officials to sign off on when they went to his Washington hospital room. Because of their refusal, according to the report, the Bush administration shut down the metadata collection for several months, then re-established it under a secret order from a national-security court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

The program continued to operate for the first two years of the Obama administration but has since ended, Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, said Thursday.

The program continued to operate for the first two years of the Obama administration but has since ended, Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, said Thursday.

“The Internet metadata collection program authorized by the FISA court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted,” Mr. Turner said. “The program was discontinued by the executive branch as a result of an interagency review.”

A separate N.S.A. program that has been collecting domestic “telephony metadata” — logs of all telephone calls dialed by Americans — has continued. That program was among the first of Mr. Snowden’s revelations. It is not clear whether Internet metadata collection has continued under a different program.

More: New Leak Suggests Ashcroft Confrontation Was Over N.S.A. Program