According to court records from 2009, after repeated assurances the NSA would obey the court’s rules, it acknowledged that it had collected material improperly. In one instance, the government said its violations were caused by “poor management, lack of involvement by compliance officials and lack of internal verification procedures, not by bad faith.” In another case, the NSA said it improperly collected information due to a typographical error.

The intelligence court judge, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, said in the 2009 case that since the government had repeatedly offered so many assurances despite the problems continuing, “those responsible for conducting oversight at the NSA had failed to do so effectively.” Bates called his conclusion “the most charitable interpretation possible.”

The Obama administration published the heavily censored files Monday night as part of an ongoing civil liberties lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the government’s collection of phone records, which the White House has said is important to countering terrorism. The files published Monday night were so heavily censored that one of the two justifications for the government to search through Americans’ phone records was blacked out.