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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);
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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."
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.