NSA: Two Views-FISC Court Judge Vs Gov Lawyers
The new documents show that in 2009, the NSA checked an “alert list” of nearly 18,000 telephone numbers against daily reports it got of Americans’ phone calls. The numbers on the alert list were supposed to be from suspected terrorists, but most of them didn’t meet the standard of “reasonable articulable suspicion” (RAS). Specifically, a FISC judge wrote in March 2009 that “only 1,935 of the 17,835 identifiers on the alert list were RAS-approved.”
The FISC court judge slammed the government for exceeding its mandate and verging on dishonesty, but the government’s lawyers clearly don’t see it that way.
“The fact that while the NSA is not perfect and screws up from time to time, there is absolutely no indication that there has ever been any abuse of this or frankly, any other program—spying for improper purposes or intentionally exceeding the bounds of proper authority,” Robert Litt, general counsel for ODNI, told reporters.
That same 2009 FISC order says that the government had not lived up to the court’s requirements.
More: NSA: No One ‘Had a Full Understanding’ of 2009 Call-Checking Program