UNITED STATES APR 26 201/ LeeAnn Flynn Hall, Clerk of Court -FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE COURT WASHINGTON, D.C.-
page 19 of this report:
note/re: '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.'
how much intel did they gather and were these hired 'private contractors'
?
TOP SECRETHSWORCON/NOFORN proposed NSA procedures, although deficient as applied to other forms of MCTs, were consistent with the statute and the Fourth Amendment as applied to "MCTs as to which the 'active user' is known to be a tasked selector"). That point is significant to the current matters: as discussed below, the 2016 Certifications only authorize acquisition of MCTs when the active user is the target of acquisition. 3. The October 26, 2016 Notice and Hearing Since 2011, NSA's minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.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." October 26, TOP SECRETHSWORCON/NOFORN
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https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3718776/2016-Cert-FISC-Memo-Opin-Order-Apr-2017-1.pdf