Officials: NSA data-gathering thwarted terrorist plots WASHINGTON - Top U.S. intelligence officials said Saturday that information gleaned from two controversial data-collection programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries. They also said gathered data is destroyed every five years. Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA in one of the programs, the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege. No other new details about the plots or the countries involved were part of the newly declassified information released to Congress on Saturday and made public by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Intelligence officials said that both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The officials offered more detail on how the phone records program helped the NSA stop a 2009 Al Qaeda plot to blow up New York City subways. They said the program helped them track a co-conspirator of Al Qaeda operative Najibullah Zazi - though it wasn't clear why the FBI needed the NSA to investigate Zazi's phone records, because the FBI would have had the authority to gather records of Zazi's phone calls after identifying him as a suspect.