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 According to an order from the court posted Tuesday on a website
operated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the
court issued the order on Dec. 31.
The order, signed by FISC Chief Judge Thomas Hogan, said the court
concluded that a surveillance application, apparently submitted by
the NSA, met the requirements of the USA Freedom Act, which
President Barack Obama signed last year.
That law replaced an older one that allowed NSA to collect telephone
"metadata" - records of American citizens' and residents' calls,
including their origin and destination, when a call was placed and
how long it lasted. However, U.S. intelligence officials have said
the NSA did not collect the content of phone calls under this
program and did not look at the data without some specific
justification.
 Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed classified details of
the collection program in 2013, and last year, Congress and the
Obama administration narrowed the government's power to collect such
domestic telephone metadata.
Under the new law and revised procedures, the government no longer
collects bulk telephone metadata, but must request targeted
information from telecoms companies after obtaining authorization
from the foreign intelligence court.
The identities of the telecoms "providers" and the individuals or
numbers whose metadata the NSA has targeted were redacted from the
version of the court order released on Tuesday.
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Hogan says in the opinion that the government was seeking "the
ongoing daily production of detailed call records relating to an
authorized international terrorism investigation", but does not
offer further detail about the nature of the investigation.
In his order, the judge accepts the argument that while the
government was obliged to explain why targeting the telephone
numbers of individuals is "relevant" to its investigation, it does
not need to demonstrate the same relevance when examining numbers
called from the initially targeted phones.
The judge also said that although the new surveillance law requires
government agencies to promptly destroy telephone metadata that it
might have mistakenly collected on U.S. persons, they sometimes can
retain such data for as long as six months if they have reason to
believe it could provide evidence of a crime.
(Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by John Walcott and David
Gregorio)
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