The National Security Agency may keep the emails and telephone calls of citizens and legal residents if the communications contain "significant foreign intelligence" or evidence of a crime, according to classified documents that lay out procedures for targeting foreigners and for guarding Americans' privacy.
Newly disclosed documents describe a series of steps the world's largest spy agency is supposed to take to keep Americans from being caught in its massive surveillance net. The documents suggest that the NSA has latitude to keep and use citizens' communications under certain conditions.
The papers, leaked to The Washington Post and Britain's Guardian newspaper, are the first public written documentation of procedures governing a far-reaching NSA surveillance program authorized by Congress in 2008 to gather the emails and phone calls of targets who are supposed to be foreigners located overseas.