The National Security Agency was acquiring thousands of digital communications from Americans as of 2011, according to a declassified document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The glimpse of the NSA's surveillance on people in the U.S. was revealed Wednesday in an 86-page court assessment of the constitutionality of agency's data collection methods. It was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The 2011 assessment was based on NSA's own review of what the document refers to as "a statistically representative sample" drawn from the intelligence agency's collection of upstream data. "Upstream data" refers to Internet communications, such as email, as they transit, rather than to acquisitions directly from Internet service providers, the court document said.
The review revealed that NSA acquired roughly 2000 to 10,000 "multi-communication transactions," or MCTs, each year that contain at least one wholly domestic communication. An MCT refers to the capture of multiple different communications at once, such as emails within a single webmail service, one staff member at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. EFF has been fighting for the federal court to release the review for over a year.
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