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 At approximately 1:30 p.m. EST on Christmas Eve, the National Security Agency responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union by releasing more than a decade’s worth of incriminating quarterly and annual reports, David Lerman at Bloomberg News reports. 
 
 According to the heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board, intelligence operatives routinely emailed private data on American citizens to unauthorized recipients, stored that data in unsecured computers, and retained it long after laws required it be destroyed. 
 
 “The government conducts sweeping surveillance under this authority — surveillance that increasingly puts Americans’ data in the hands of the NSA,” the ACLU’s Patrick C. Toomey told Bloomberg News in an email. “Despite that fact, this spying is conducted almost entirely in secret and without legislative or judicial oversight.” 
 
 In an executive summary, the NSA concluded that “[t]he vast majority of compliance incidents involve unintentional technical or human error. [The] NSA goes to great lengths to ensure compliance with the Constitution, laws and regulations.” 
 
 However, in one case, an NSA analyst “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting.” In another, a civilian requested that intelligence be gathered on “the telephone number of his foreign-national girlfriend without an authorized purpose for approximately one month[.]” 
 
 In an August 2013 statement to Bloomberg News, the NSA claimed that “[o]ver the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found. [The] NSA takes very seriously allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations — responding as appropriate.” ||||| The National Security Agency today released reports on intelligence collection that may have violated the law or U.S. policy over more than a decade, including unauthorized surveillance of Americans’ overseas communications. 
 
 The NSA, responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, released a series of required quarterly and annual reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board that cover the period from the fourth quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2013. 
 
 The heavily-redacted reports include examples of data on Americans being e-mailed to unauthorized recipients, stored in unsecured computers and retained after it was supposed to be destroyed, according to the documents. They were posted on the NSA’s website at around 1:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve. 
 
 In a 2012 case, for example, an NSA analyst “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting,” according to one report. The analyst “has been advised to cease her activities,” it said. 
 
 Other unauthorized cases were a matter of human error, not intentional misconduct. 
 
 Last year, an analyst “mistakenly requested” surveillance “of his own personal identifier instead of the selector associated with a foreign intelligence target,” according to another report. 
 
 Unauthorized Surveillance 
 
 In 2012, an analyst conducted surveillance “on a U.S. organization in a raw traffic database without formal authorization because the analyst incorrectly believed that he was authorized to query due to a potential threat,” according to the fourth-quarter report from 2012. The surveillance yielded nothing. 
 
 The NSA’s intensified communications surveillance programs initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington unleashed an international uproar after they were disclosed in classified documents leaked by fugitive former contractor Edward Snowden last year. 
 
 No New Legislation 
 
 Congress has considered but not passed new legislation to curb the NSA’s collection of bulk telephone calling and other electronic data. 
 
 The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by lawmakers under post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism laws, issued a 238-page report in January urging the abolition of the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. The five-member board said the program has provided only “minimal” help in thwarting terrorist attacks. 
 
 The ACLU, which filed a lawsuit to access the reports, said the documents shed light on how the surveillance policies of NSA impact Americans and how information has sometimes been misused. 
 
 “The government conducts sweeping surveillance under this authority -— surveillance that increasingly puts Americans’ data in the hands of the NSA,” Patrick C. Toomey, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in an e-mail. 
 
 No Oversight 
 
 “Despite that fact, this spying is conducted almost entirely in secret and without legislative or judicial oversight,” he said. 
 
 The reports show greater oversight by all three branches of government is needed, Toomey added. 
 
 The ACLU filed suit to turn a spotlight on an executive order governing intelligence activities that was first issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and has been modified many times since then. 
 
 The order allows the NSA to conduct surveillance outside the U.S. While the NSA by law can’t deliberately intercept messages from Americans, it can collect messages that get vacuumed up inadvertently as part of its surveillance of foreigners overseas. 
 
 Masking Identities 
 
 After foreign intelligence is acquired, “it must be analyzed to remove or mask certain protected categories of information, including U.S. person information, unless specific exceptions apply,” the NSA said in a statement before posting the documents. 
 
 The extent of that collection has never been clear. 
 
 The agency said today it has multiple layers of checks in place to prevent further errors in intelligence gathering and retention. 
 
 “The vast majority of compliance incidents involve unintentional technical or human error,” NSA said in its executive summary. “NSA goes to great lengths to ensure compliance with the Constitution, laws and regulations.” 
 
 Report Violations 
 
 The intelligence community is required to report potential violations to the oversight board, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 
 
 In some cases, surveillance of foreign targets continued even when those targets were in the U.S., although such “non-compliant data” were later purged, according to the reports released today. 
 
 Some analysts sent intelligence information to other analysts who weren’t authorized to receive it, according to the documents. That information was deleted from recipients’ files when discovered. 
 
 Because of the extensive redactions, the publicly available documents don’t make clear how many violations occurred and how many were unlawful. While the reports contain no names or details of specific cases, they show how intelligence analysts sometimes have violated policy to conduct unauthorized surveillance work. 
 
 �?Intentional Misuse’ 
 
 The NSA’s inspector general last year detailed 12 cases of “intentional misuse” of intelligence authorities from 2003 to 2013 in a letter to Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. 
 
 Those cases included a member of a U.S. military intelligence unit who violated policy by obtaining the communications of his wife, who was stationed in another country. After a military proceeding, the violator was punished by a reduction in rank, 45 days of extra duty and forfeiture of half of his pay for two months, according to the letter. 
 
 In a 2003 case, a civilian employee ordered intelligence collection “of the telephone number of his foreign-national girlfriend without an authorized purpose for approximately one month” to determine whether she was being faithful to him, according to the letter. The employee retired before an investigation could be completed. 
 
 Ignoring Restrictions 
 
 The NSA acknowledged last year that some of its analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade. 
 
 “Over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found,” the agency said in a statement to Bloomberg News in August 2013. “NSA takes very seriously allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations -- responding as appropriate.” 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: David Lerman in Washington at dlerman1@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editors responsible for this story: John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net Elizabeth Wasserman ||||| WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency said Friday that some of its analysts knowingly and deliberately exceeded its surveillance authority on occasion over the past decade and that those involved were disciplined. 
 
 "Very rare instances of willful violations of NSA's authorities have been found," the agency said in a statement. It said none of the abuses involved violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or the USA Patriot Act. NSA violations of both laws have been highlighted in the leaks of classified information by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden. 
 
 Two U.S. officials said one analyst was disciplined in years past for using NSA resources to track a former spouse. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. 
 
 "NSA takes very seriously allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations - responding as appropriate," the agency statement said. "NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency's authorities." 
 
 The Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed this week on the willful violations by the NSA's inspector general's office, as first reported by Bloomberg. 
 
 "The committee has learned that in isolated cases over the past decade, a very small number of NSA personnel have violated NSA procedures — in roughly one case per year," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, said in a statement Friday. 
 
 "These incidents ... in most instances did not involve an American's information," Feinstein said. "I have been informed by NSA that disciplinary action has been taken, and I am reviewing each of these incidents in detail." 
 
 In an interview with reporters last week, the NSA's director of compliance, John DeLong, said the abuses "are taken very seriously." 
 
 "When we make mistakes, we detect, we correct and we report," DeLong said. 
 
 Obama administration officials and intelligence overseers in Congress have described the FISA and Patriot Act violations as inadvertent. The NSA this week declassified a secret FISA court ruling from 2011 that revealed the agency had inadvertently scooped up, over a three-year period, as many as 56,000 emails of Americans not connected to terrorism. 
 
 The agency had reported the gathering of those emails — they were mixed in with terrorism targets' emails — to the FISA court and Congress, and was ordered to change the practice. 
 
 The NSA also released documents showing that it created a new procedure to separate the bulk caches of emails most likely to contain those Americans' communications, limit access to them and destroy them more frequently than other information the agency gathers. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Kimberly Dozier on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kimberlydozier ||||| The National Security Agency reported its own violations of surveillance rules to a U.S. intelligence court and promised additional safety measures to prevent similar missteps over and over again, according to more than 1,000 pages of newly declassified files about the federal government's controversial program of collecting every American's phone records during the past seven years. 
 
 A sign stands outside the National Security Administration (NSA) campus on Thursday, June 6, 2013, in Fort Meade, Md. Another release of declassified government surveillance documents is underway as part... (Associated Press) 
 
 According to court records from 2009, after repeated assurances the NSA would obey the court's rules, it acknowledged that it had collected material improperly. In one instance, the government said its violations were caused by "poor management, lack of involvement by compliance officials and lack of internal verification procedures, not by bad faith." In another case, the NSA said it improperly collected information due to a typographical error. 
 
 The intelligence court judge, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, said in the 2009 case that since the government had repeatedly offered so many assurances despite the problems continuing, "those responsible for conducting oversight at the NSA had failed to do so effectively." Bates called his conclusion "the most charitable interpretation possible." 
 
 The Obama administration published the heavily censored files Monday night as part of an ongoing civil liberties lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the government's collection of phone records, which the White House has said is important to countering terrorism. The files published Monday night were so heavily censored that one of the two justifications for the government to search through Americans' phone records was blacked out. 
 
 The latest release reflects the administration's strenuous efforts to maintain its legal authority to collect Americans' phone records amid opposition on Capitol Hill. 
 
 Meanwhile, in a legal victory for the administration, the Supreme Court on Monday refused to intervene in the NSA controversy. It rejected a call from a privacy group to stop the agency from collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers in the United States. While the justices on Monday declined to get involved in this issue, other lawsuits on the topic are making their way through the lower courts around the country. 
 
 In the new disclosures, some files were declassified ostensibly to show that even when NSA employees collected records improperly or improperly shared material among themselves, those problems were reported to the intelligence court and new procedures were put in place to prevent them from happening again. 
 
 Similar documents about the U.S. collecting phone records were previously declassified and published in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Obama administration has revealed others to convince Congress to allow it to continue collecting the phone records. 
 
 After the NSA began the bulk collection program in 2006, one NSA inspector general's report said rules already in place were "adequate" and "in several aspects exceed the terms" of what the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had required. But it recommended three additional practices be formally adopted. These included such obvious ideas as not allowing analysts who searched phone records in the terror database also to approve which numbers can be searched, and periodically checking the phone numbers that analysts searched to make sure they had actually been approved. 
 
 Despite the assurances in 2006 that rules were adequate, problems surfaced in 2009 that were so serious that the intelligence court temporarily shut down the surveillance program. 
 
 One of the newly disclosed files was a slap _ intentionally or otherwise _ at Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who is leading the fight on Capitol Hill to rein in the government's phone records collection. In a ruling to justify the program by the then-chief judge of the intelligence court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, she quoted a 2001 floor speech by Leahy to explain that Congress believed that phone records could be collected under U.S. laws. 
 
 Leahy has proposed ending the NSA's sweep of phone records, allowing the government to seek only records related to ongoing terror investigations. 
 
 The documents included training materials for NSA analysts, who were warned that they should only search the database of all phone records for numbers they suspected were associated with terrorists: "Analysts are NOT free to use a telephone selector based on a hunch or guess," according to a 2007 training presentation. It added that the NSA's legal standard for picking a phone number for a terror suspect required "some minimal level of objective justification." 
 
 The training slides noted that the government shouldn't snoop on the phone records of Americans whose only suspicious behaviors were protected by the First Amendment, such as speaking or writing in opposition to the U.S. government, worshipping at a mosque or working as a journalist. 
 
 "A telephone selector believed to be used by a U.S. person shall not be regarded as associated with (censored) solely on the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment," it said. 
 
 The administration has been under pressure to reveal more details about the government's domestic surveillance program since a former intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, released documents showing massive trawling of domestic data by the National Security Agency. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writers Jack Gillum, Stephen Braun, Matt Apuzzo, Lolita C. Baldor, Charles Babington, Marcy Gordon and Richard Lardner contributed to this report.
– While many people were wrapping presents and prepping for holiday dinners, the NSA did its own holiday sharing on Christmas Eve: The agency released 10 years' worth of declassified documents, Mashable reports. The materials, which covered a period from the middle of 2001 through early 2013, are the heavily redacted versions of reports presented to the president's Intelligence Oversight Board, made public after an ACLU lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. And while the executive summary released by the NSA stresses that the agency "goes to great lengths to ensure compliance with the Constitution, laws, and regulations," it also notes certain "compliance incidents" that were the result of "unintentional technical or human error," including mistaken investigations into the wrong targets and ill-trained analysts who conducted overly broad searches. "The government conducts sweeping surveillance ... that increasingly puts Americans' data in the hands of the NSA," ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey told Bloomberg in an email. “Despite that ... this spying is conducted almost entirely in secret and without legislative or judicial oversight." And not every "error" has been accidental: The NSA has previously admitted that there have been "rare instances of willful violations," including an NSA analyst who used her access to pry into her spouse's telephone directory, Raw Story notes. Other no-nos revealed by the documents include data on Americans sent via email to unauthorized parties, stored on unsecured computers, and kept after its destroy-by date, Bloomberg notes. What it all means? More checks and balances are needed from all government branches, says Toomey. (The NSA might not be able to spy on you if you have a new iPhone.)