But they also appear to raise new questions about operations by the eavesdropping³（窃取） National Security Agency and its oversight⁴ by the secret U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

 

"The court is troubled that the government's revelations regarding the NSA's acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program," Judge John Bates of the surveillance court wrote in one of the declassified⁵ documents.

 

More specifically, Bates said in an October 2011 ruling that the court had concluded that the process that resulted in improper⁶ collections of the tens of thousands of emails was "in some respects, deficient⁷ on statutory（法定的） and constitutional grounds."

 

The newly declassified documents can be found at www.icontherecord.tumblr.com

 

 

The emails in question represent only a small slice of the electronic communications scooped⁹ up around the world by the NSA. It targets about 250 million email communications for collection each year and, under a separate program, has captured and kept records of millions of phone calls by Americans.

 

According to the documents, only about 9 percent of the emails - or less than 25 million - are collected from "upstream" sources, which officials familiar with intelligence operations said are cable links belonging to telecommunications companies.

 

The rest are acquired by the NSA from Internet service providers at the point where they are sent or received. The roughly 56,000 annual emails in question were from "upstream" sources.

 

Intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity¹⁰, defended their practices.

 

"This is not an egregious overreaching by a greedy agency seeking to spy on Americans. This is a technological¹¹ problem that resulted in an inadvertent collection of a relatively¹² small number of U.S. person communications," a senior intelligence official told reporters.

 

In the newly declassified ruling of the FISA Court, the court in a footnote estimates that, based on data supplied by the NSA, between 2008 and 2011, the agency might have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emailed communications of Americans annually¹³.

 

U.S. intelligence officials told reporters that the domestic emails were collected under a program designed to target the emails of foreign terrorism suspects.

 

The program does not collect emails because of flagged words such as "bomb." Instead it takes in those mentioning specific addresses, or going to or from particular addresses, one official said.

 

One way that emails of American citizens can get caught in the net is because the program captures the screenshot of the person's webmail account that shows a page of emails received or sent, rather than just the one targeted email, he said.

 

"For technological reasons NSA was not capable ... and still is not capable of breaking those down into their individual components," the official said.

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