Agency spied illegally on thousands Violations: The NSA improperly checked a select list of phone numbers on a daily basis. America's National Security Agency (NSA) violated restrictions on checking US telephone records for surveillance and misled judges on how the data was used for almost three years, it has been revealed. The agency improperly checked a select list of phone numbers on a daily basis against databases containing millions of call records, documents released to privacy groups by the office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to lawsuits show. The violations occurred between May 2006 and January 2009 and involved checks on up to 16,000 phone numbers, including some based in the United States, two unnamed senior intelligence officers with knowledge of how the program operated said. The new disclosures add to evidence that US intelligence agencies violated legal and administrative restrictions on domestic spying. Congress is considering new restraints on intelligence gathering programs. "I think it's pretty damning," Trevor Timm, a digital rights analyst with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the groups that sued the agency, said. This shows a larger pattern that a lot of times the NSA doesn't alert the court to serious privacy violations, whether they are intentional or unintentional, for years. NSA collects bulk phone records, such as numbers and call durations, under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which allows the government to compel US companies to turn over "any tangible thing" that is relevant to a terrorism investigation. Under rules imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the agency must have "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that a phone number is connected to a terrorist plot in order to query it against the larger database of records. Between May 2006 and January 2009, NSA analysts would query the database with thousands of numbers on an "alert list" that did not meet the necessary legal standard, the intelligence officials said. The alert list grew from 3980 in 2006 to 17,835 in 2009 when only 2000 of those numbers met the necessary legal standard, the official said. Furthermore, the agency misled the court during those years, claiming the necessary legal standard was being met for all numbers queried, the official said, adding that lawyers interacting with the court didn't realise what was being done. It was not the first time the agency had acknowledged violations or that it had misled the court. NSA said last month that some analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade. Legal opinions declassified on August 21 revealed that NSA intercepted as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans who weren't suspected of having links to terrorism, before the secret court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011. In a declassified legal opinion from October 2011, the court said the agency misrepresented the scope of surveillance operations three times in less than three years.