The Obama administration on Wednesday declassified opinions from a secret court that oversees government surveillance showing the National Security Agency was broadly collecting domestic Internet communications of Americans and misrepresenting the scope of that effort to the court.

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice published three declassified documents on a new government website hosted on Tumblr called "IC (Intelligence Community) On The Record."

In a press call that preceded the release of the documents, three senior intelligence officials defended their record. The general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Robert Litt, portrayed the documents as evidence of an intelligence agency working within the rules and making few mistakes.

"This is not an egregious overreaching by a greedy agency seeking to spy on Americans," he said. "It's an inadvertent collection of a relatively small number of US person communications."