New documents reveal parameters of NSA's secret surveillance programs The papers, made available to The Washington Post and Britain's Guardian newspaper, are the first public written documentation of procedures governing a far-reaching NSA surveillance program authorized by Congress in 2008 to gather the e-mails and phone calls of targets who are supposed to be foreigners located overseas. In recent days, the Obama administration has defended the program as critical to national security, saying it has helped foil more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and abroad. President Obama said after the disclosures that NSA domestic activities "do not involve listening to people's phone calls, do not involve reading the e-mails of U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, absent further action by a federal court, that is entirely consistent with what we would do, for example, in a criminal investigation." The new documents show that the NSA collects, processes, retains and disseminates the contents of Americans" phone calls and e-mails under a wide range of circumstances. NSA Director Keith B. Alexander described the program as "limited, focused and subject to rigorous oversight." Testifying before Congress, he said "the disciplined operation" of this and a related surveillance program "protects the privacy and civil liberties of the American people." A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the documents Thursday. Privacy advocates expressed concern about what they viewed as rules that leave much wiggle room for NSA analysts to monitor Americans" communications. "These documents confirm what we have feared all along, that the NSA believes it can collect Americans" international communications with little, if any, restriction," said Alex Abdo, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. Its procedures allow it to target for surveillance essentially any foreigner located abroad - whether or not they're suspected of any wrongdoing, let alone terrorism. Administration officials say the surveillance program does not target Americans anywhere without a warrant. Still, said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, "there's a lot of leeway to use "inadvertently" acquired domestic communications," for instance, for criminal inquiries. And the rules show that the communications of lawyers and their clients may be retained if they contain foreign intelligence information, although dissemination must be approved by the NSA general counsel.