National Security Agency personnel regularly searched call tracking data using thousands of numbers that had not been vetted in accordance with court-ordered procedures, according to previously-secret legal filings and court opinions released by the Obama administration Tuesday.
The agency also falsely certified to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that analysts and technicians were complying with the court's insistence that searches only be done with numbers that had a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of terrorism, according to a senior intelligence official.
The searches began in 2006 and continued until March 2009, officials said.
An internal inquiry into the misstatements also found that no one at the NSA understood how the entire call-tracking program worked. "There was nobody at NSA who really had a full idea of how the program was operating at the time," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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