NSA Broke Privacy Rules Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds 312
NettiWelho writes "The Washington Post reports: The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents. Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls."
Take a breath, get some perspective. (Score:2, Informative)
Last year there were 900-odd total including 195 FISA act violations and roughly 700 violations of executive orders.
Of the FISA act violations: they break it down further:
This is not evidence of a vast conspiracy to deprive you of your rights. It's evidence of people failing to do things properly.
I figure to come up with that many errors, there must have been several thousand searches per year that were done as intended and according to the law. If they were always ignoring the law, that means the NSA would hardly be searching anything. If they were 99.9% in compliance, there would be about 900,000 searches to get about 900 errors. I think both of those scenarios are implausible. Nobody believes there are just a couple thousand searches per year and I doubt the NSA is good enough and careful enough to get 99.9% compliance. At the very limit of plausibility, they are not listening to all your phone calls.
Re:Take a breath, get some perspective. (Score:4, Informative)
The WP broke it down for you. 2776 cases includes incidence over 4 years. Last year there were 900-odd total including 195 FISA act violations and roughly 700 violations of executive orders. Of the FISA act violations: they break it down further:
This is not evidence of a vast conspiracy to deprive you of your rights. It's evidence of people failing to do things properly.
I figure to come up with that many errors, there must have been several thousand searches per year that were done as intended and according to the law. If they were always ignoring the law, that means the NSA would hardly be searching anything. If they were 99.9% in compliance, there would be about 900,000 searches to get about 900 errors. I think both of those scenarios are implausible. Nobody believes there are just a couple thousand searches per year and I doubt the NSA is good enough and careful enough to get 99.9% compliance. At the very limit of plausibility, they are not listening to all your phone calls.
My bad. Those 900 or so errors were for one quarter. The whole year is 2776, with 2012Q1 being the worst. Also, the trend is increasing.
Re:3 frightening words (Score:5, Informative)
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
George Washington
It's not just government itself. The phenomenon I described above also explains why issues that should be factual/scientific are instead political. I'll give an example: marijuana is a Schedule I substance. Schedule I means "no medical use". Yet we have doctors prescribing it and patients using it who report relief of symptoms. We have lots of laws like this which directly contradict the available facts. It's because so many people aren't concerned with facts. They are concerned with their feelings, their fears, and with what offends them.
Re:3 frightening words (Score:5, Informative)
Schedule I drugs are not drugs with no medical use.
Schedule I drugs are drugs that a particular government organization has *decided* have no medical use. This isn't a scientific claim; it's a political one.
The most blatant example is heroin, which is Schedule I in the USA but used in much the same way as morphine in the UK.
One article I actually read, and now wish I hadn't (Score:5, Informative)
A few interesting tidbits to share...
1) The documents reports 2776 violations of American privacy in just the 12 months ending in May 2012. Oh, and that's only for their Fort Meade data center and a few others in D.C. area, rather than for all of their data centers across the U.S.. They acknowledge the number would be significantly higher if it included all of them. Oh, and those are the number of incidents that occurred, not the number of Americans who were violated in each incident, which is actually a much higher number but isn't reported.
2) They quadrupled their oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009. And the results? Between 2011 and 2012, the number of infractions nearly doubled. Not halved, doubled.
3) They accidentally collected a "large number" of calls for people in Washington D.C. when there was a mixup between the international code for Egypt (20) and the area code for D.C. (202). No disclosure on what they meant by "large number", but considering the severity of other infractions, it has to be pretty large.
4) They didn't report the Egypt/D.C. mixup to the organization that oversees/audits them, nor to Congress or anyone else outside the agency, because it was deemed irrelevant to any of them. It was deemed irrelevant since "there were no defects to report", to quote a March 2013 report on the issue.
5) "Incidental" information on Americans that is collected when targeting foreigners is regularly allowed to enter their database and is freely searchable from then on. They don't count these as violations, nor do they report them, and they are apparently pervasive under their current way of doing things.
6) In one violation, they hijacked a fiber line going through the U.S. and temporarily held onto all data going through it so that they could process it. This went on for several months before the FISC ruled that what they were doing was a violation of the 4th Amendment since they were incapable of filtering out the communication of American citizens. FOIA requests have been submitted for the ruling, but the Obama administration is apparently working to block the requests.
Geez. After reading something like this, I can see why no one around here reads the articles. They're way too depressing.
Re: 3 frightening words (Score:5, Informative)
Wow!
Moderated as a troll.
I re-read the comment and couldn't find one thing that was trollish. Extremely sarcastic, but not troll-ish.
Of course Obama is being blamed for executive orders given in 2008 (he didn't take office until January 2009), just as he is blamed for the 2007 recession (the so called 'Obama' recession), and just as he is blamed for the 1984 phone give away program (expanded from land lines to wireless in 2008*) the so-called 'Obama'-phones. It doesn't matter who did it or when it happens, for some people it will always be Obama's fault, just as for others everything wrong with the world from 2001 through 2008 was always Dick Cheney's fault.
Facts don't matter to some people if it disagrees with their opinions, they have their villians and must blame their villians for all wrongs. As others have pointed out above. This is exactly the kind of thinking that gets in the way of making informed choices for better government.
Its also probably why I was moderated 'troll'. I must have stepped on someone's precious opinions.
* By the way, Clinton increased the lifeline phone program in 1996 as well, so it isn't just the one party that gives us too much governement, sometimes the Democrats spend too much as well;)
Percent of compliance is irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
I figure to come up with that many errors, there must have been several thousand searches per year that were done as intended and according to the law.
This is a secret program and the only thing you can be sure of is that your do NOT have all the facts. This is an agency and a program that has NO accountability to the electorate. They operate in secret, their findings are secret, their actions on those findings are secret, their oversight is toothless and secret, and we can't even fight against the program because we cannot prove we were harmed and thus can't prove standing in front of a judge. Exactly how stupid do you have to be to think that the NSA is to be trusted unconditionally based on a tiny bit of leaked information?
If they were 99.9% in compliance, there would be about 900,000 searches to get about 900 errors.
Even if they were 100% in compliance it STILL would be a violation of our 4th amendment rights. The NSA's actions have never come under serious judicial review. The FISA court is a rubber stamp fig leaf of a justification. You can loudly proclaim that this program is "legal" all you want but that doesn't make it so nor does it make it right. Jim Crow laws once were "legal" but they still were wrong and ultimately unconstitutional. Furthermore even if we take your 900 number at face value (and in reality I do not) that is 900 people who were unlawfully deprived of their civil rights in some manner. Even one is too many.