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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!
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);
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.
If they violated the law, lock them up.
Then again, they probably have enough blackmail on the congress critters to keep their program hush hush.
I doubt that. If the scandal continues to grow, as it looks likely to, these people will not have a lot to add to what is already known.
No, the main hurdles to neutering or disbanding the NSA are the strategic goals it serves, namely profiling of the population down to individual level, the intended chilling effects that come with blanket surveillance, and possibly a critical supporting role in establishing a totalitarian system. Being able to get rid of "undesirables" by tipping of law-enforcement (and these days it is almost impossible not to do something illegal when being online in the US) is also highly desirable. In addition, results from economic espionage must pay for a significant part of its operational budget.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I cannot. By the very definition of trust and trustworthy I cannot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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. :-(
Oh, I thought it was something different: "It looks like we got caught spying on a couple thousand Americans illegally, but if you compare how many times we were caught to how many times we committed the crime, that's a drop in the bucket."
It's similar to how Goldman Sachs is absolutely devastated when they have to pay a $500 million fine with no admission of wrongdoing - it takes them a full 3 days to get that money back.
I am officially gone from
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you take a small subset, bout 20%, and because it *lists* personnel mistakes you assume that a lie agency is telling the truth, then with that assumption you say all is ok, while neglecting the other 80% of the cases?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Whether it is deliberate or through incompetence is irrelevant. The NSA is still depriving US citizens of their rights on a frighteningly large scale. In addition, the director lied directly to Congress while under inquiry. Nothing is happening to the agency or its members as a result. There's plenty of reason to be upset.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Silly. Don't you know that when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal?
So, in other words, my data is either in the hands of immoral or incompetent people.
Gee, I feel safer already.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
If they keep spying on citizens of friendly countries on a frighteningly large scale, I wouldn't wonder that they got used to it and started spying on their own citizens as well. It's the whole mindset (spying on individuals) that has to be reviewed. In the past, governments used to spy on other governments, not on unsuspecting citizens. Now, they spy on everything they can get a tap on.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I'm more shocked that it's met with a collective shrugging of shoulders and as much as a "tsk" uttered by those that SHOULD react to it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yep. Us citizens do not get a pass if we "accidentally" break the law. The NSA should not get one either. Plus their definition of "accidentally" is pretty lame and not really that far removed from intentional.
immoral AND incompetent people.
FTFY
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.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. "
Please sheeple, the above is not that hard to understand what the intent was of this. The contortions of logic to justify FISA and the Patriot Act are ridiculous. Call, write, and go scream in person at your congress critter. We must have our republic back!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Over one year. That was the 2012 audit. What previous audits (if any) show, is not the subject of the article.
Note also that each case in question does NOT imply the violation of ONE person's privacy. From TFA: "The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders."
Which implies, if not a single instance that totalled 3000 Americans, a small number of instances that totalled 3000 Americans.
And that's not even counting the "we meant to spy on Country-code 20 (Egypt), but we accidently typed in "202" (Washington's Area Code), and swept up basically every phone call made in Washington before we realized our boo-boo...."
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
National No Shit Day
Wrong president. At least as far as we know.
--Richard M. Nixon, 19 May 1977 TV interview with David Frost
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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
Yep. Us citizens do not get a pass if we "accidentally" break the law. The NSA should not get one either. Plus their definition of "accidentally" is pretty lame and not really that far removed from intentional.
Occidental.. we meant to say all our spying was 'occidental'!!
Silence is a state of mime.
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.
Define effective.
So far, even while "sacrificing privacy of X thousand citizens", and at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, the NSA and its counterparts have completely failed to predict or prevent everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to September 11 to the Boston bombers, in arenas both foreign and domestic.
Including failing to prevent Edward Snowden.
And also only for the Washington area. From TFA:
It is a bit interesting that they got that information from "three government officials", instead of a stonewall.
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.
How is a government subsidized tradein for a new car destroying wealth? Seem more like aid in purchasing a capital good to me.
It wasn't the subsidy or the new car that destroyed capital, it was all the strings (like come attached to every government grant or subsidy). The "strings" in this case said that your trade-in, regardless of age or utility, had to be destroyed and crushed.
It even described how. First, you had to drain all the oil from the engine, add a sand/silica mixture to the cooling system, then you had to run the engine until it froze up. What was left of the car had to be crushed. This meant that not only were all those cars destroyed, but the ones left on the road are harder to find parts for because all the engine parts were destroyed and everything else was crushed. You can find lots of videos of engines being destroyed on the interwebs.
The value in all those destroyed cars was far greater than anything that was created by the incentives. And in the long term it hurts the poorest the most, who need transportation for jobs and keep their cars longer and rely on older cars to be reasonable to buy.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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.