Just-released rulings by a secret court have shed new light on the scope of the National Security Agency's domestic data surveillance programs, showing that the agency collected data on a secret "alert list" of thousands of phone numbers for three years without determining whether it had "reasonable grounds" to do so. The NSA said in court filings of its own that the collection was inadvertent and came about because its officials didn't have a "complete understanding" of how the program was supposed to work. The just-declassified documents are just the latest revelations about the secret NSA program that was first exposed by former contractor Edward Snowden's leaks back in June. In the 2009 opinion by the national security court, a judge sharply criticized the NSA for misusing its "alert list" and falsely certifying that its searches were being done only on numbers with "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of terrorism links.

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