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The October 26, 2016 Notice and Hearing
Since 2011, NSA's minimization procedures have prohibited use ofU.S.-person
identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collection under Section 702. The October
26, 2016 Notice informed the Court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in
violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to
the Court. The Notice described the results of an NSA IG Report which analyzed queries using a
set of known U.S.-person identifiers (those associated with targets under Sections 704 and 705(b)
of the Act, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1881c and 1881d(b)), during the first three months of 2015, in a subset
of particular NSA systems that contain the results of Internet upstream collection. That relatively
narrow inquiry found that. analysts had made.
separate queries using. U.S.-person
identifiers that improperly ran against upstream Internet data. The government reported that the
NSA IG and OCO were conducting other reviews covering different time periods, with
preliminary results suggesting that the problem was widespread during all periods under review.
At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government's failure to disclose
those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional "lack of candor" on
NSA's part and emphasized that "this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue."