David Edwards and Nick Juliano, Raw Story
Powerful supercomputers are vacuuming up so much information that logs of calls to or from innocent Americans could exist in government databases indefinitely, the nation’s top intelligence official said Tuesday.
“You may not even realize it’s in the database because you do lots of collection,” Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said, referring to the “inadvertent collection” of Americans’ communications through a vast surveillance program instituted after 9/11.
An untold number of communication logs on US citizens could exist within a National Security Agency database of information gained through warrantless wiretaps of foreigners abroad, McConnell said, because NSA spies do not examine the full contents on all the information it collects until it has a reason to do so.
(Original Article)