U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized

The U.S.
government only searched
for detailed information on
calls involving fewer than 300
specific phone numbers
among the millions of raw
phone records collected by
the National Security Agency
in 2012, according to a
government paper obtained
by Reuters on Saturday.
The unclassified paper was circulated
Saturday within the government by
U.S. intelligence agencies and
apparently is an attempt by spy
agencies and the Obama
administration to rebut accusations
that it overreached in investigating
potential militant plots.
The administration has said that even
though the NSA, according to top-
secret documents made public by
former agency contractor Edward
Snowden, collects massive amounts
of data on message traffic from both
U.S. based telephone and internet
companies, such data collection is
legal, subject to tight controls and
does not intrude on the privacy of
ordinary Americans.
The paper circulated on Saturday said
that data from the NSA phone and
email collections programs not only
led U.S. investigators to the ringleader
of a plot to attack New York's subway
system in 2009, but also to one of his
co-conspirators in the United States.
The paper discusses an NSA program
that collects "metadata" - raw
information that does not identify
individual telephone subscribers -
from major U.S. phone companies
showing all calls made by those
companies' subscribers to phones
within the United States and overseas.
It also mentions another NSA
program, called Prism in leaked
documents, that collects from internet
companies what the paper says are
emails of foreigners who might be of
interest to counterterrorism or
counter-proliferation investigators.
Millions of phone records were
collected in 2012, but the paper says
U.S. authorities only looked in detail at
the records linked to fewer than 300
phone numbers.
A person familiar with details of the
program said the figure of fewer than
300 numbers applied to the entire
mass of raw telephone "metadata"
collected last year by the NSA from
U.S. carriers - not just to Verizon,
which is the only telephone company
identified in a document disclosed by
Snowden as providing such data to
the NSA.
The paper repeats assertions by
administration spokesmen that NSA
email and telephone data-collection
programs contributed to the
disruption of "dozens of potential
terrorist plots here in the homeland
and in more than 20 countries around
the world."
The paper says NSA collection of email
and telephone data helped U.S.
authorities track down Najibullah Zazi,
an Afghan immigrant who in 2009 was
arrested for plotting to bomb the New
York City subway system. Zazi pleaded
guilty to terrorism charges.
NSA monitoring of the email of
alleged al Qaeda operatives in
Pakistan led them to an unnamed
person in the United States who was
making "efforts to procure explosive
material," according to the
government paper. The NSA gave its
raw information to the FBI, which
identified Zazi, who was then living in
Colorado. After tailing him to New
York, the FBI arrested him.
By cross-checking Zazi's phone
number with its giant data base of raw
phone traffic, the paper said more
leads were generated for the FBI. One
of those leads took authorities to Adis
Medunjanin, who was convicted last
year in the subway plot and sentenced
to life in prison.