NSA: No one “had a full understanding” of 2009 call-checking program

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released a new batch of secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents Tuesday afternoon. The documents come from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and they detail NSA violations of spying protocols from 2006 to 2009. They were released in relation to an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit.

On a Tuesday morning phone call with reporters, two top intelligence officials downplayed the court’s findings, insisting that the court “did not find any intentional effort” to violate the law.

“These are some incredibly complicated systems that NSA was not able to fully and accurately articulate to the court, in large part because no one at NSA had a full understanding of how the program was operating at the time,” said Robert Litt, general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

SOURCE: arstechnica.com