Privacy security

Secret spy court scolded NSA, FBI for not deleting data

Analysts within the National Security Agency “potentially” violated the law by improperly failing to delete information collected about people on the Internet, the federal court overseeing U.S. intelligence agencies declared in an opinion declassified on Tuesday.

A judge on a secretive federal court was “extremely concerned” that the NSA’s continued to hold on to data that it was supposed to delete, he wrote in the November 2015 opinion.

By maintaining retention of the information, the spy agency violated “several provisions” of its internal policies, and was “potentially” in violation of the law, Judge Thomas Hogan of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) claimed in the heavily redacted order.

In addition to the infractions by the NSA, officials at the FBI also failed to abide by protections designed to protect attorney-client privileges in an unidentified number of cases discovered in 2014 and 2015, Hogan claimed.