[eupharis]

Washington Post did revise the story. And yes, they should have issued an explicit correction. But this is still a major story:

> Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-door search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were swept up in a search for someone else.

> “As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said.

US Senators with classified knowledge of the program don't have knowledge of what exactly it entails or how it is being used. I can forgive the Post for getting some of the details wrong.

[brown9-2]

They had the knowledge but they could not publicly disclose a classified program. That's what "unable" means here.

[eupharis]

Ah yes, I should've included the next sentence:

> Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number.

This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program.

Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say, 300 million?

[AJ007]

In the recent Senate Intelligence hearing Senator Wyden asked General James Clapper "Does the NSA collect any data at all on millions or hundred of millions of Americans?" Response: "No sir, it does not .. not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."

If ones assumes that William Binney both knows what he is talking about and is telling the truth, then the NSA has been collecting data on Americans since before September 11th.

If the rest of what William Binney says is also correct, then the NSA initially was keeping the data on Americans anonymized, for viewing only after a court order -- but then after September 11th disabled data anonymization for some order of time.

If the data has been anonymized once again, this may present legal problems in how officials can guarantee this because it would reveal past illegal activity which those same officials may have been involved in.