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NSA Broke Privacy Rules Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds
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."
broad new powers
Now congress HAS to do something about it!
How unlikely is that?!
We (the people) gave them a little power, and they grossly over stepped the bounds.
Thank God Snowden exposed the NSA programs so that now they are finally being scrutinized.
The question left is, what are we(the people) going to do about it?
I vote for dissolving the NSA and DoHS.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
You can trust us.
-- NSA
I would like to meet someone (adult) that's surprised by these news.
I would like to know his answer to the question: "At which point in human history and in which location has a government not spied on its own citizens?".
I often wonder if people understand what "secret" means.
Anyone else reminded of the Tuttle/Buttle debacle in Brazil?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Seriously. Do you think any federal employee will get sent to prison or dismissed?
The NSA and its employees pose a similar problem as Guantanamo, just the reverse. Do you really want all of these people run around in the wild after all that happened? You cannot dismiss or punish them because it would just turn their special knowledge and skills against you in the long run.
“You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.” I guess this means, if you look at it from the relative perspective of how many people we spy on, over 2000 isn't really that great a number.
Oh that's right. Asking our government to hold itself accountable is farcically funny...
Boring, nothing to see here, moving on...
Didn't you get the memo? German minister of the interior, Friedrich, has declared the debate resolved. He has us know that everything was lawful and that we need not worry. Why are you still discussing this?
Time to go back to "sneakernet" and face-to-face communications. Since we now know that even encrypting your data may not be a fool-proof way to secure our communications from prying governement/corporatocracy eyes.
We might as well shred the Constitution and start over again. Our governement "by the people and for the people" doesn't abide by it anyway. :-(
2776 for one year = 27,760,000 USD fines. Although this sort of mass scale violation should be considered a larger crime.
2776 with five years per violation is 13,880 years of jail time.
However consider more closely that these errors likely affect thousands to tens or even hundreds of thousands citizens privacy. instead of looking at all information from Egypt they looked at all of the communications for Washington DC. Extrapolating those numbers out to the reality of how much private information and how many people were illegally spied upon by the NSA and you can safely say this would bankrupt the executive branch pretty quickly.
Broke the rules? Overstepped its legal authority?
Is that the euphemism we're using now for "broke the law"?
Back in the day, all it took was one honest U.S. Attorney to see something like this and get a grand jury to indict the culpable officials, acting independently of corruption from above. Hell, a good lawyer could probably make a grand jury case for a RICO indictment against the whole administration.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
See, they told us about it! Surely we can trust them. Don't worry next month we'll get some new tidbit after this calms down, as they "turn up the heat a little more".
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
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.
Maybe we need a new amendment to make all of this legal ? Because clearly it's not going to stop. If you've done nothing illegal, you don't have to worry, right ?
Two other groups that need to be thanked for all of this is the DoJ and the journalists. If the DoJ hadn't had gone and obtained the phone records of some journalists this would have probably been quietly brushed aside. You know cause the journalists don't want to get shut out but now all bets are off and the news agencies are happy to report on things that effect them.
The findings conveniently move the goalposts - it implies that the issue is that the spying is being done incorrectly, not that it's being done at all; if it were done "correctly" we would never know, which was the NSA's original win condition.
Yep. We're fucked.
It's not just on Slashdot, but generally in the press.
They broke laws, not just 'rules', yet the words 'illegal', 'law', 'constitutional rights' are nowhere to be found in the press coverage.
"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"
I'm shocked, shocked to find that lying to congress, spying on Americans and trampling the constitution is going on in here!
3 frightening words: broad new powers
The frightening thing is that those broad new powers were still overstepped about three times per day. In separate news, we were assured that only about 30 people have the power to make decisions in the NSA which means that every one of them is still exceeding his authority about three times a month on average. After being granted broad new powers.
Who was president in 2008, at the time that "broad new powers" were granted? Or more importantly, who was vice-president in 2008? And, how many connections might he have had within the intelligence community? And equally importantly, who is president in 2013 and gets to deal with the fallout generated by the poor decision-making abilities of previous administrations?
I smell a pattern. It's probably the sweat stains in someone else's shirt this time.
U.S. attorneys are employed by the department of justice. The head of the department is Attorney General Eric Holder, on record for multiple perjury before congress in the context of clandestine operations. Do you really think Holder will give the "goahead" to indict him and his cronies?
Think again.
The NSA didn't break the Holy Copyright laws. Therefore, they're safe from prosecution. It's not like they stole quadrillions of US dollars from the public by recording their private phone calls ("stealing" their conversations) without prior consent and license. Or did they? It would be interesting if people starting suing the NSA for copyright violations instead of "mere" violation of their privacy. Now that would hurt the NSA, if they got convicted.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
...We can do that.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Story is a whitewash. I read the article earlier (can't reach it from where I am at the moment, or I'd have a few choice quotes) and it's sooo clearly bullshit. Especially since Snowden's NSA leaks. The proof is clear that MILLIONS of Americans have been spied on and are still being spied on. Damage control FAIL much?
All data generated by me is owned by me.
Period.
And do they think it's mere coincidence that the current president of Russia used to be the head of the KGB?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
Here is a person who was surprised by the audit results and had not seen them: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Head of the Senate Intelligence committee, directly in charge of congressional oversight of the NSA.
Damn, NSA! You scary!
The states all have laws which kind of mirror the federal laws for wiretapping and such. What is to stop a states attorney general from getting convictions? Why does the federal government have to do everything?
Why? It sends a clear message.
And . . . it needs to include the supervisors and superiors who authorised it.
202 area code isn't country code for Egypt? I'll make sure that doesn't happen agai... Whoops! Look what I did again. Uh oh!
National No Shit Day
what they were doing was a violation of the 4th Amendment since they were incapable of filtering out the communication of American citizens.
Can anyone point me to where in the U.S. constitution I can find a declaration that all the rights therein only apply to citizens?
Funny, I can't. It does not mention citizens vs. not. It simply says "The right of the People". Weird.
And the declaration of independence specifically says "all men". Granted, women and black people don't count on that one, we had to fix that later. Sigh. Yes, I know the Declaration is NOT the constitution.
Point is, this whole thing about the laws not counting against non americans is Crap.
TD
How is a government subsidized tradein for a new car destroying wealth? Seem more like aid in purchasing a capital good to me.
You should add that the number of incidents they're reporting only includes the incidents that were captured by their audit system. We have no idea how thorough their audit and logging system is and at what level of access someone needs to be before they can effectively cover their tracks or just bypass the logs and audit altogether. And even if their current audit system is able to catch all policy violations we have no idea how many people would be involved or even made aware if a decision is made in the future to either alter the policy of what counts as a violation, or make alterations to the audit system.
So that jackass general from the NSA was lying through his teeth at Black Hat a few weeks ago?
Of course he was.
But the sad, pathetic, embarrassing fact was that people cheered for him. A charismatic father-figure lying asshole manages to persuade the spineless and easily led.
Story of human history. We won't have a paradise on Earth until people stop wanting to be coddled by Strong Leaders.
The stronger you want your leadership, the more prone to cowardice you are. The frustratingly funny part is that such people constantly whine about people not taking responsibility for themselves. -When what they really mean is, "People are not following Daddy's Rules and are complaining when things don't work out! They should SUFFER!"
The rules are broken, you pack-animal ingrates. Grow a neo-cortex, grow up and move off Daddy's farm. And take a risk in life once in a while. The universe is your creative sandbox, but all you want is to move in safe steps, and strangle the beauty out of the world by putting it all in bank accounts, controlling everything under the sun.
Fireflies *die* in jars, you blunderheads.
So clearly they roll out their spy system features without seeking FISA court approval.
I guess you can wipe your ass with the Constitution for all it's worth nowadays. :(
Still, over time I've learned that all the NSA monitors are emails entering and leaving the US. That still concerns me because SaskTel leases server space in Florida, which means all my emails are being scanned, even though I'm a Canadian.
I really wouldn't care if they weren't scanning my emails. I'd just snigger and laugh as the poor dumb 'mericans tromp on down the road to a full scale police state.
The sad thing is that is what's happening, and the citizens of the US largely don't give a shit. What a pity they don't even remember what "freedom" means. It's barely been a decade since 9/11 and the majority has been brainwashed into thinking this type of spy system is the way things have always been.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
No argument from me. I was merely reporting my dislike for what I was reading.
How many violations were against ex-wives, ex-girlfriends (or current ones, 'just to be sure'), or that smoking hot girl working at the Hooters nearest NSA HQ?
Setting sex aside, consider greed. How many taps were then followed up with large buy / sell orders in someone else's name (or an alias)?
These might be the real reasons 90% are getting axed: human fucking nature to abuse absolute power for personal gain, satiation, and fear.
The only important question at this point is 'who is actually in charge of this situation'?
Note these...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130816/01174524199/simple-question-how-could-president-obama-not-know-that-inspector-generals-report-proving-him-liar-was-leaked-as-well.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130816/02462124204/how-could-dianne-feinstein-not-have-seen-report-laying-out-nsa-abuses.shtml
Both Obama and Feinstein are making themselves look STUPID, and that's not something politicians ever willingly elect to do. Now it is certainly possible that the press is capable of outmaneuvering politicians, but odds alone would dictate a different result eventually. But at every step along this garden path the figureheads have done and said the exact opposite thing as they should be doing or saying.
It's as if this is scripted. That worries me.
1917 US enters WW1 1941 The US enters WW2
Are you seriously arguing we should have stayed out of those wars? It wouldn't have mattered which party was in the white house. They are called WORLD wars for a reason.
Republicans are hawks, Democrats enter us in some of the biggest wars.
You seem to have left out the two gulf wars as well as Afganistan, all of which were stared under republican presidents. You also failed to mention that our involvement in Vietnam actually started MUCH earlier (in the 1950s) than you claim and both republican and democrat presidents share the burden of our involvement there.
Republicans are supposed to be for family values, but how many get caught in extramarital affairs?
They aren't for "family values". The term family values is a cynical political marketing term used to mask fear of families that aren't white, conservative and christian. It's a way of pandering to the religious right.
Democrats want to help the minorities. But almost the entire party fought the civil rights movement.
Conveniently your characterization of the Democrats ignores the changes that happened after 1964. Those same democrats who were against civil rights (virtually all of them southerners) switched to the republican party and have stayed there ever since. 93% of Southern Democrats and 100% of Southern Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But don't let actual facts get in your way of pretending that the current democrats are the same people.
No one can because it isnt there. Was never intended to be there. This conceit that it's ok to have our government violating rights all around the world in pursuit of whatever goals and there is no legal problem as long as US Citizens are exempted is the original sin of our current age.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
"Up here in space
I'm looking down on you
My lasers trace
Everything you do
You think you've private lives
Think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape
I'm watching all the time
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I'm elected electric spy
I'm protected electric eye
Always in focus
You can't feel my stare
I zoom into you
You don't know I'm there
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves
My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I'm elected electric spy
I'm protected electric eye
Electric eye, in the sky
Feel my stare, always there
There's nothing you can do about it
Develop and expose
I feed upon your every thought
And so my power grows
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I'm elected electric spy
I'm protected electric eye
Protected. Detective. Electric eye"
---
Judas Priest - "Electric Eye" -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1B_pZC8aWU&feature=related
Heavy metal - why I like it? It is often PROTEST music against injustices & things to be made aware of as dangers potentially... that's tune's 1 such example. So was the film "Enemy of the State".
APK
P.S.=> At least MY representative, whom I wrote about this no less in response to him this a.m. - HE couldn't be "bought out" like some were by lobbying by Obama & Alexander (which any state getting defense monies were DOUBLED if they went against defunding the NSA - how fucking obvious of BRIBES could you be for Pete's sake!)
I replied with this very Washington Post article to no less!
My rep VOTED to go with AMASH/To defund the NSA!
(Which would/could cut this kind of crap off @ the roots)
In the end - I can't BELIEVE they did this, getting caught in the act as they did... it's the old adage of "Absolute Power, Corrupting Absolutely" & I was WARNED in the mid 80's while in collegiate academia on the 1st of 2 degree by a history prof. about it (stuck with me to THIS VERY DAY, & I was never a history fan - am now, though):
"Totalitarian regimes start with little laws passing, getting an inch, & reaching for a mile: Pretty soon, you have Nazi Germany/Communist Russia - Don't *think* it can't happen HERE!"
In the end - ALL of this was necessary imo, part of the "growing pains" of any society when you put "mortal men in control" (ala MegaDeth "Symphony of Destruction"): "who guards the guards" etc./et al, & they got "carried away" & now just have to be "reined in"... I have NO issue with guys doing a job, & we do need them, but not surveilling US, their own (that's NOT in the NSA's original charter, & secret courts b.s. is B.S. - we're their employers, they are nothing more than civil servants, NOT masters)...
... apk
t-hehehe, what a j0ke. they're just throwing a cup of water on the carpet bombing uproar. lol.
No-Safe-Atomics.
...which party is at fault for one transgression or another, when it should be readily apparent by now that neither major party is working for the people's interests. The more people distracted in red vs blue finger-pointing, the less focus is on the real problems. There is no benefit in party loyalty.
It's not weird, it's by design. The constitution does not contain such language because then all the government would have to do is revoke your citizenship and they could do whatever they wanted without it being unconstitutional. It'd be a loophole large enough to drive a spy satellite through.
Or was he a whistle blower. Go put in your vote if you think so.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/recognize-edward-snowden-whistle-blower-and-guarantee-he-will-not-face-charges-his-acts-courage/m4pCqtjR
Mods, where is the -1 bullshit facts moderation?
RE: "11 MILLION motor vehicle deaths in the US that year"
The ignorance is great with this one. Seems to think 3% of the US population dies each year from motor vehicle deaths.
Common Sense, get some, factfucker.
Everything that Hitler did in Nazi Germany was "legal".
Everything that Stalin did in Soviet Russia was "legal".
Our Government is no better.
"NSA Broke Privacy Rules Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds".
Change the name with another thing, which is also true:
Facebook Broke Privacy Rules Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds
In the former, everyone decries the organization. In the latter, every cherishes the organization.
I am surprised that they admitted it, and released it.
He knows how to break the rules and get people to love him for it too.
What country is Obama from? Africa?? No problem for him. Just get the divorce records of your Senate opponent illegally unsealed and the rest is infamy (that's Seven of Nine's divorce records when she took her then hubby to liars court - aka divorce court).
Obama's been breaking the rules for decades.
They now own Pick'N'Pull and are a massive company with a long history.
Go look 'em up.
Stand on your head.
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.
That's not that suprsising. The number of infractions doubled, because there were more people looking at the logs.. They probably simply find more. The _actual_ number of infractions is probably completely unknown or can only be estimated. Considering that a typo in a search query can lead to a violation (e.g. Egypt/DC thing), there probably are a _lot_ more.
imho, this whole oversight debate is flawed. Providing oversight for this kind of system is fundamentally impossible because the error will never be 0.0% and thus, violations will _always_ happen.
captcha: planned. heh.