Electronic Surveillance
New
NSA reports show spy agency routinely collected intel on Americans
Published time: December 26, 2014 18:43
Reuters
/ Jason Reed
Hundreds
of pages of reports previously classified top-secret were released by the
National Security Agency on Christmas Eve. They reveal dozens of instances of
the NSA unlawfully spying on United States citizens over the last decade.
The cache of files — a collection of quarterly and
annual reports sent from the NSA’s inspector general to the president’s
Intelligence Oversight Board dating back to 2001— were published on Wednesday this
week, pursuant to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that
has compelled the agency to provide public copies, albeit highly redacted ones,
of the IG’s past findings.
A
cursory glance though the documents shows NSA analysts wrongfully targeted US
citizens for surveillance many times a year, and regularly collected signals
intelligence, or SIGINT, on innocent Americans.
One document [PDF], a quarterly report
compiled for the president’s Intelligence Oversight Board in early 2012, reveals
that an NSA agent even routinely spied on her spouse for upwards of three
years.
“In an interview,” the report reads
in part, “…the analyst reported that, during the past two or three
years, she had searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his
knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting.”
“Although the investigation is ongoing,
the analyst has been advised to cease her activities,” the report continues.
Wednesday’s document dump was first spotted by Bloomberg News’ David Lerman, who
wrote that the data suggests the NSA has violated either federal law or US
policy for more than a decade.
“Because of the extensive redactions, the
publicly available documents don’t make clear how many violations occurred and
how many were unlawful. While the reports contain no names or details of
specific cases, they show how intelligence analysts sometimes have violated
policy to conduct unauthorized surveillance work,” Lerman wrote.
According
to the information in the unredacted documents, human error, software flaws and
ill-trained agents have all been blamed for policy breaches, in which American
citizens were illegally subjected to NSA surveillance. These programs aimed to
put foreigners’ internet records and phone logs in the hands of US intelligence
for counterintelligence.
“NSA goes to great lengths to ensure
compliance with the Constitution, laws and regulations,” the agency said in
a statement accompanying Wednesday’s release. “As conveyed in the released
materials, an array of technical and human-based checks attempt to identify and
correct errors, some amount of which occur naturally in any large, complex
system. Nevertheless, as the IOB reports make clear, NSA takes even
unintentional errors seriously and institutes corrective action, typically
involving at a minimum a combination of training and technical measures
designed to prevent recurrences. Data incorrectly acquired is almost always
deleted, referred to as the ‘purge’ process.”
The
hundreds of pages published this week reveal that, in instances where the NSA
admitted to wrongfully targeting US persons, data was destroyed. On some occasions,
however, the issues at hand involved the dissemination of wrongfully collected
material by and to persons unauthorized to access that information.
The reports show “how the NSA has misused the
information it collects [sic] over the past decade,”Patrick Toomey, a staff
attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, told the Wall Street Journal, and “…show an
urgent need for greater oversight by all three branches of government.”
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