Officials: NSA Has Mistakenly Intercepted Phone Calls And Emails Of Innocent Americans

The National Security Agency (NSA) has on occasion accidentally intercepted the private emails and phone calls of innocent Americans with no links to terrorism, two former U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Some of the emails and phone calls were obtained via the NSA’s massive surveillance program that provides intelligence officials access to millions of Americans personal information. Following a bombshell report from the Guardian newspaper, the Obama administration was forced to admit the existence of the secret data mining program.

Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s director of national intelligence in 2009 and 2010, said in one particular instance, analysts mistakenly entered “one digit wrong” when collecting data on phone numbers and mined a significant amount of information on Americans with no terror ties.