WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency released reports Wednesday on intelligence gathering that may have violated the law or U.S. policy over more than a decade, including the unauthorized surveillance of Americans' communications overseas.
The agency, responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, released a series of reports to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board that cover the period from the fourth quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2013, according to the documents.
The heavily redacted reports include examples of data on Americans being emailed to unauthorized recipients, stored in unsecured computers and retained after the information was supposed to be destroyed, according to the documents. They were posted on the agency's website Wednesday.
The National Security Agency's surveillance programs, initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, unleashed an international uproar after they were disclosed in classified documents leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden last year.
Congress has considered legislation aimed at curbing the agency's collection of bulk telephone calling and other electronic data.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by lawmakers under post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws, issued a 238-page report in January urging the abolition of the bulk collection of Americans' phone records. The five-member board said the program has provided only "minimal" help in thwarting terrorist attacks.
The lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union seeks to shed light on an executive order first issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and modified many times since then.
The executive order allows the NSA to conduct surveillance outside the U.S. While the agency by law can't deliberately intercept messages from Americans, it can collect such messages that get vacuumed up inadvertently as part of its surveillance of foreigners overseas.
After foreign intelligence is acquired, "it must be analyzed to remove or mask certain protected categories of information, including U.S. person information, unless specific exceptions apply," the NSA said in a statement before posting the documents.
The extent of that collection has never been clear.
The agency said Wednesday that it has multiple layers of checks in place to prevent further errors in intelligence gathering and retention.
"The vast majority of compliance incidents involve unintentional technical or human error," the National Security Agency said in its executive summary. "NSA goes to great lengths to ensure compliance with the Constitution, laws and regulations."
The intelligence community is required to report potential violations to the board, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In some cases, surveillance of foreign targets continued even when those targets were in the U.S., although such "non-compliant data" were later purged, according to the reports released Wednesday.
Some analysts sent intelligence information to other analysts who were not authorized to receive it, according to the documents. That information was deleted from recipients' files when discovered.
Because of extensive redactions, the publicly available documents don't make clear how many violations occurred and how many were unlawful.
The NSA inspector general last year documented "twelve instances of intentional misuse" of intelligence that occurred between 2003 and 2013, the NSA said in a statement.
A Section on 12/25/2014