NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ e-mails before court ordered it to revise its tactics (washingtonpost.com)

A recently declassified redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion reveals that the NSA may have collected upwards of 56,000 wholly domestic e-mails annually because of its “upstream” collection method, which made it technically impossible to filter out domestic communications that were swept up in the surveillance. The judge accused the NSA of repeatedly making “substantial misrepresentation[s] regarding the scope of a major collection program,” which was deemed in violation of the Fourth Amendment and revised after the NSA chose to provide the court with more complete information.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-gathered-thousands-of-americans-e-mails-before-court-struck-down-program/2013/08/21/146ba4b6-0a90-11e3-b87c-476db8ac34cd_story.html

Read the FISC opinion here: https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/fisc_opinion_10.3.2011.pdf

Learn more about NSA Surveillance Programs here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/glenn-greenwald-security-liberty

ACLU resources and blogs on NSA surveillance here: https://www.aclu.org/time-rein-surveillance-state-0