The National Security Agency (NSA) may have "inadvertently" and illegally intercepted private emails to 56,000 per year between 2008 and 2011 as part of a program that a secret court found that may have violated the laws and the Constitution of the United States, show documents published Wednesday, August 21.

These previously classified secret documents were declassified by the White House, trying to fall the scandal caused by revelations of Edward Snowden computer on the extent monitoring programs for U.S. intelligence agencies. 

According to U.S. officials, the documents show that programs to collect information that led the NSA to intrude "inadvertently" on the private lives of Americans were identified , s and corrected.

The interception of emails between U.S. citizens should normally be authorized by a warrant.

But this was not the case, which led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a secret court that oversees intelligence activities in question in 2011 on the legality , shares of the NSA. 

The extrajudicial collection of tens of thousands of emails seemed "in certain respects, lacking legal and constitutional basis," has found John Bates, a magistrate of the FISC, in October 2011, we read in one of declassified documents Wednesday.

According to U.S. officials and a court document declassified by the White House, the NSA has decided to "destroy" these collected "inadvertently" and strengthen its procedures.

"When there is a complex operation in terms of technology, in which thousands of people are involved, there are bound to be mistakes," pleaded one American intelligence official. 

NSA happen annually screened some 250 million emails in the world and millions of telephone conversations.

Reuters