Defiance of a court order can result in civil or criminal contempt charges, as well as sanctions against the party responsible. So far, no one involved appears to have asked White to impose any punishment or sanction on the NSA over the newly disclosed episodes, although the details of what happened are still emerging.

It’s really disappointing,” said David Greene, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been leading the prolonged litigation over the program in federal court in San Francisco. “The obligation’s been in place for a really long time now. … We had a major dust-up about it just a few years ago. This is definitely something that should’ve been found sooner.

The last legal showdown over the issue may have actually compounded the NSA’s problems. In May 2014, an NSA official known as “Miriam P.” assured the court that the data were safe.

The NSA is preserving magnetic/digital tapes of the Internet content intercepted under the [PSP] since the inception of the program,” she wrote, adding that “the NSA has stored these tapes in the offices of its General Counsel.

The agency now says, regrettably, that the statement may have been only partially accurate when made.

The latest NSA filing says the ongoing investigation indicates that officials did a physical inspection in 2014 to confirm the tapes’ presence in the counsel’s office storage space. However, “those tapes largely concerned metadata,” not the content of communications the NSA intercepted.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/19/nsa-deletes-surveillance-data-351730