SPYING ON YOU

FISA Court: NSA Had Pattern of Lies

Collected thousands of Americans’ emails.

The National Security Agency has had a history of misleading about their activities, a secret surveillance court said in an 85-page opinion from 2011 that was declassified Wednesday. The FISA court’s strongly worded opinion also suggested that the agency may have broken the law in spying on Americans. “The government has now advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” Judge John Bates wrote. The decision reveals that the NSA collected 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year, thus refusing to comply with laws that limit surveillance to foreigners.