NSA collected 56,000 US emails a year
The National Security Agency may have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emails of Americans per year between 2008 and 2011, in a program that a secret US court said may have violated US law and the Constitution.
The once-classified documents were released by US intelligence agencies as part of an unprecedented White House effort to smooth the uproar following revelations by former contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of secret government surveillance programs.
US officials say the documents show that intelligence collection programs that inadvertently intrude on Americans' privacy are found and fixed. But they also appear to raise new questions about operations by the eavesdropping National Security Agency and its oversight by the secret US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
