Did the NSA Director mislead hackers about NSA compliance problems?

NSA Director Keith B. Alexander denied that there were any problems with the NSA snooping programs and cited oversight by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to verify that point.

Barton Gellman’s reporting revealed that in October 2011 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court ruled an NSA process collecting data from fiber optic cables was “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion. It ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program. This appears to directly contradict Alexander’s claim that “no one at NSA had ever gone outside the boundaries” of their authority.