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The secret court order, leaked by Snowden, shows that the NSA collects the metadata of all Verizon Business Network Services phone calls, on a daily basis. The court order says the metadata should include telephone numbers, routing information, the time the calls were made, how long the calls lasted, and the unique identifying numbers that pinpoint the device and the subscriber. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has also reportedly ordered Sprint and AT&T to turn over the same data. In a letter written June 21, Clapper apologized for his "clearly erroneous" answer, saying he had been confused by Wyden's line of questioning. In an interview on June 8, Clapper also said "collect" means something different to intelligence officials. Clapper told NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell that Americans should think of the NSA programs like a library. The NSA acquires all kinds of data to store in the "library," but the data is not "collected" until an analyst pulls a book off the shelf. According to Department of Defense regulations, "Information shall be considered as 'collected' only when it has been received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component in the course of his official duties... Data acquired by electronic means is 'collected' only when it has been processed into intelligible form." Tweet this clip Next clip ►

Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mark Udall, D-Colo., singled out Alexander's claim in an October 2012 letter, writing, "We believe that this statement incorrectly characterized the minimization requirements that apply to the NSA's FISA Amendments Act collection, and portrays privacy protections for Americans' communications as being stronger than they actually are." The senators did not specify what exactly was wrong with what Alexander said. Alexander replied to Wyden and Udall, but did not correct the alleged misstatement. One possibility: Based on the leaked 2009 document on NSA internal procedures, we now know the NSA can also keep all encrypted communications for as long they are useful to NSA code-breaking efforts, even communications between Americans in the U.S. Internal NSA procedures require analysts to destroy any Americans' communications — unless there is foreign intelligence value or evidence of a crime, or unless the communications are encrypted. Of course, analysts can only make those determinations after they've already looked at the domestic communications. When Alexander said, "nobody else can see it," he appears to have meant, nobody else other than NSA analysts. For encrypted communications, analysts need to first decrypt them, and then read them, before determining if the communications "are, or are reasonably believed likely to become, relevant to a current or future foreign intelligence requirement." And until the NSA can decrypt them, it can keep them, indefinitely. Also, Wyden and Udall might have known that the NSA "incidentally" hits on good guys more often than officials had previously admitted. In a congressional hearing on July 17, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis said that when targeting a suspected terrorist, analysts look at their contacts "two or three hops" out. That means analysts look at all the people the suspected terrorist has contacted (first hop), all the people those people have contacted (second hop), and all the people those people have contacted (third hop). That's a lot of people. One study found that strangers on Facebook are on average separated by 4.74 degrees of separation. Finally, we know the NSA is also collecting raw internet traffic through taps directly into fiber-optic cables and other infrastructure. What we don't know is how much "good guy" content that's sweeping up. An NSA spokesperson did not answer our questions about Alexander's statement or the subsequent revelations. Tweet this clip Next clip ►