World Gossip News

A secret U.S. intelligence court let the National Security Agency collect an expanded amount of data about Americans' email even after finding that the agency systematically exceeded the limits of a smaller program, newly released documents show. The judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recounted a litany of problems with the first, smaller program, including the NSA collecting more categories of information than had been approved by the court and sharing data more widely within the electronic eavesdropping agency than had been authorized.

The agency intensified its domestic operations after the September 11, 2001, attacks in hopes of finding people in the country working with terrorists or spies. The programs let the NSA search for Americans who had electronic contact with people who were in turn linked to people hostile to the United States. The NSA was allowed to share criminal evidence with law enforcement agencies, but in other cases it was supposed to obscure email addresses to protect the identities of U.S. citizens because of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches.