US weighs end to spying on leaders

The memorandum said the judges were “engaged throughout and asked questions, which were answered by the briefers and other subject matter experts,” and said the judges appreciated the amount and quality of information the NSA provided.


It said that two days later, one of the judges, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, renewed the court's permission to resume collecting phone records.

The documents also included previously classified testimony from 2009 for the House Intelligence Committee by Michael Leiter, then head of the National Counterterrorism Center. He and other officials said collecting Americans' phone records helped indict Najibullah Zazi, who was accused in a previously disclosed 2009 terror plot to bomb the New York City subways.

The documents also show the NSA considered tracking targets using cellphone location data, and according to an April 2011 memo consulted the Justice Department first, which said such collection was legal. Only later did the NSA inform the FISA court of the testing.

NSA commander Gen. Keith Alexander revealed the testing earlier this month to Congress but said the agency did not use the capability to track Americans' cellphone locations nor deem it necessary right now.

Asked Monday if the NSA intelligence gathering had been used not only to protect national security but American economic interests as well, White House spokesman Jay Carney said: “We do not use our intelligence capabilities for that purpose. We use it for security purposes.”

But National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden later clarified that: “We do not use our intelligence capabilities to give U.S. companies an advantage, not ruling out that we are interested in economic information.”

Carney acknowledged the tensions with allies over the eavesdropping disclosures and said the White House was “working to allay those concerns,” though he refused to discuss any specific reports or provide details of internal White House discussions.