Via the Washington Post...
The NSA has broken privacy rules...
* "RULES...???" (NOT LAWS...?)
...or overstepped its legal authority...
* BROKEN LAWS...?
...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.
* IN 2008 BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS WERE CONTROLLED BY THE
DEMOCRATS. NANCY PELOSI WAS SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE. HARRY REID WAS SENATE
MAJORITY LEADER. (STILL IS!)
Most of the infractions...
* "INFRACTIONS..."
...involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or
foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted
by statute and executive order.
* SO... BREAKING THE LAW...???
They range from significant violations of law...
* THE INFRACTIONS...???
(*SNORT*)
...to typographical errors that resulted in unintended
interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.
Lawmakers on Friday were quick to express their dismay
over the latest surveillance revelations.
(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)
* THEIR "DISMAY." GREAT! SUPER! WONDERFUL!
(DON'T YOU ALL FEEL BETTER NOW? CONGRESS TO THE RESCUE!)
(*SNORT*)
The documents, provided earlier this summer to The
Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of
detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special
court that oversees surveillance.
* ...BY EDWARD SNOWDEN...
(*PURSED LIPS*)
In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed
to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the
Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
* INSTRUCTED BY WHOM? ILLEGALLY INSTRUCTED...???
In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report
the unintended surveillance of Americans.
* OH... THEY "DECIDED," DID THEY?
A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a
“large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error
confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for
Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to
the NSA’s oversight staff.
* OOPS...
In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new
collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court
ruled it unconstitutional.
* AND, AGAIN... WHO EXACTLY WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR NOT
INFORMING THE COURT... WAS HE, SHE (OR WERE THEY) DISCIPLINED... OR PERHAPS
PROMOTED?
The Obama administration has provided almost no public
information about the NSA’s compliance record.
* YOU MEAN "THE MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN
HISTORY?"
In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in
“as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole
described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check.
“Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.
* AND DID HE COP TO THESE "MISTAKES?" (OR ON
THE OTHER EXTREME, DID HE, LIKE CLAPPER AND HILLARY CLINTON, LIE UNDER OATH?)
The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012,
counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection,
storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most
were unintended.
* ASSUMING TOTAL TRUST IN THOSE TELLING YOU THEY WERE
UNINTENTIONAL... RIGHT?
(*SHRUG*)
Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of
standard operating procedure. 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.
* HAS ANYONE GONE TO JAIL OVER THIS VIOLATION OF A COURT
ORDER? IF NOT... WHY NOT...???
“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex
environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find
ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an
interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.
* VIOLATING COURT ORDERS...??? LYING TO CONGRESS...???
“You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity
that occurs each day,” he said. “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.”
* MISTAKES ARE MISTAKES... BUT DELIBERATE ACTIONS ARE
DELIBERATE ACTIONS.
There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of
recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications
improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.
(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)
The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely.
One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst
enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or e-mails.
* ONE... IN... TEN... (THAT'S A MERE 10% - LEAVING 90% TO
"EXPLAIN.")
But the more serious lapses include unauthorized access
to intercepted communications, the distribution of protected content and the
use of automated systems without built-in safeguards to prevent unlawful
surveillance.
* "LAPSES," HUH?
The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top
leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities
in the Washington area.
* OH... GREAT!
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Three government officials, speaking on the condition of
anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially
higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection
centers.
* YEAH... THANKS FOR "CLEARING THAT UP FOR US."
(*SNORTING WHILE SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked
her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can
and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are
appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”
* SO... EITHER SHE'S LYING OR ELSE SHE'S SO INCOMPETENT
THAT SHE EITHER DIDN'T KNOW OR DIDN'T CARE THAT THE AUDIT HAD BEEN DONE!
Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff
after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions
increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose
whether the trend has continued since last year.
One major problem is largely unpreventable, the audit
says, because current operations rely on technology that cannot quickly
determine whether a foreign mobile phone has entered the United States.
* REALLY...??? (I'D LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS SUPPOSED
TECHNOLOGICAL BLIND-SPOT.)
In what appears to be one of the most serious violations,
the NSA diverted large volumes of international data passing through
fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material
could be stored temporarily for processing and selection. The operation to
obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected
and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a
top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit.
NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not
practicably filter out the communications of Americans.
* UH-HUH... (AGAIN... I'D LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE
TECHNOLOGICAL BLIND-SPOTS.)
In October 2011, months after the program got underway,
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort
was unconstitutional. The court said that the methods used were “deficient on statutory
and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion,
and it ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the
program.
* AND THIS IS THE COURT ORDER THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
IGNORED... DELIBERATELY VIOLATED...?
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence,
has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth
Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama
administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the
opinion.
* GEEZUS...
Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its
errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semi-annual
reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical
Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.” Members of Congress may read the
unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room, and they are not
allowed to take notes. Fewer than 10% of lawmakers employ a staff member who
has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their
meaning and significance.
* AND WHAT PERCENTAGE OF HOUSE MEMBERS... AND WHAT
PERCENTAGE OF SENATORS... PERSONALLY EXAMINE THESE SEMI-ANNUAL REPORTS?
“What you really want to know, I would think, is how many
innocent U.S. person communications are, one, collected at all, and two,
subject to scrutiny,” said Julian Sanchez, a research scholar and close student
of the NSA at the Cato Institute.
The documents provided by Snowden offer only glimpses of
those questions. Some reports make clear that an unauthorized search produced
no records. But a single “incident” in February 2012 involved the unlawful
retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to
destroy, according to the May 2012 audit. Each file contained an undisclosed
number of telephone call records.
* AND HAVE THE FILES BEEN DESTROYED OR HAS THIS COURT
ORDER TOO BEEN IGNORED BY THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION?
In dozens of cases, NSA personnel made careless use of
the agency’s extraordinary powers, according to individual auditing reports.
One team of analysts in Hawaii, for example, asked a system called DISHFIRE to
find any communications that mentioned both the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson
and “radio” or “radar” — a query that could just as easily have collected on
people in the United States as on their Pakistani military target.
The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the
records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is
believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say
that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute
a . . .
violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for
inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress. Once added to its databases,
absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched
freely.
* MAKE YOU FEEL SECURE, FOLKS?
In one required tutorial, NSA collectors and analysts are
taught to fill out oversight forms without giving “extraneous information” to
“our FAA overseers.” (FAA is a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008,
which granted broad new authorities to the NSA in exchange for regular audits
from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court.)
* NICE...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Using real-world examples, the “Target Analyst Rationale
Instructions” explain how NSA employees should strip out details and substitute
generic descriptions of the evidence and analysis behind their targeting choices.
“I realize you can read those words a certain way,” said
the high-ranking NSA official who spoke with White House authority, but the
instructions were not intended to withhold information from auditors. “Think of
a book of individual recipes,” he said. Each target “has a short, concise
description,” but that is “not a substitute for the full recipe that follows,
which our overseers also have access to.”
* NO... "INTENDED TO WITHHOLD INFORMATION FROM
AUDITORS...?" NOT WHILE "THE MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN
HISTORY" IS IN OFFICE!
(*GUFFAW*)
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