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fice of the Director of National Intelligence -- reports used as the basis for informing Congress.
• Obama has repeatedly said that Congress was thoroughly briefed on the programs revealed by Snowden in June, but some senior lawmakers said they had been unaware of the NSA audit until they read the news on Friday. The programs described earlier vacuum up vast amounts of metadata -- such as telephone numbers called and called from, the time and duration of calls -- from most Americans' phone records, and scoop up global Internet usage data.
• White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that the NSA documents showed that NSA's Compliance Office established in 2009 "is monitoring, detecting, addressing and reporting compliance incidents," and that "the majority of the compliance incidents are unintentional." In a statement from the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, where the president is vacationing, he added that the administration is "keeping the Congress appropriately informed of compliance issues as they arise."
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• LAS VEGAS (AP) -- UFO buffs and believers in alien encounters are celebrating the CIA's clearest acknowledgement yet of the existence of Area 51, the top-secret Cold War test site that has been the subject of elaborate conspiracy theories for decades.
• The recently declassified documents have set the tinfoil-hat crowd abuzz, though there's no mention in the papers of UFO crashes, black-eyed extraterrestrials or staged moon landings.
• Audrey Hewins, an Oxford, Maine, woman who runs a support group for people like her who believe they have been contacted by extraterrestrials, said she suspects the CIA is moving closer to disclosing there are space aliens on Earth.
• "I'm thinking that they're probably testing the waters now to see how mad people get about the big lie and cover-up," she said.
• For a long time, U.S. government officials hesitated to acknowledge even the existence of Area 51.
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