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Article snippet: WASHINGTON — Soon after the Trump administration took office this year, the National Security Agency secretly briefed its new overseers at the White House that they had inherited a problem with the agency’s warrantless surveillance program. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was delaying its annual reauthorization because the N.S.A. had discovered widespread violations of a rule for how analysts could handle Americans’ emails collected under the program. Now, the agency director, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, was proposing to solve the problem by significantly reducing an important type of surveillance undertaken through the program. President Trump’s new national security team, recalled Thomas P. Bossert, Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, decided to bless the N.S.A.’s proposal. The move increased the risk that the program might miss something important it otherwise would have collected, but removed a cloud at a time when the law on which the program is based, the FISA Amendments Act, is about to expire unless Congress extends it. “We decided to act on that, rather than getting into a conflict with the court, and struck a balance to protect the country without getting into Americans’ privacy,” Mr. Bossert said in an interview. He added, “We want to confine the program in a way that focuses on security and minimizes concerns about Americans’ domestic collection.” Mr. Bossert spoke about the sequence of events leading up to the program’s contraction, the ou... Link to the full article to read more