Privacy at Risk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
NSA
released spying data in holidays to minimize press coverage: ACLU
Iran
Press TV
Sun Dec 28, 2014 9:41PM GMT
The
National Security Agency has used the Christmas holiday to 'minimize the
impact' of releasing a report on 12 years of privacy violations, the American
Civil Liberties Union says.
As Americans were busy celebrating, the NSA quietly published on Friday
hundreds of pages worth of declassified data spanning more than a decade of
intelligence collection.
'I certainly think the NSA would prefer to have the documents released
right ahead of the holidays in order to have less public attention on what they
contain,' Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney at the ACLU's national security
project, told the Guardian.
The reports to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) were
heavily redacted at the time of release -- many to the point of illegibility.
After a Freedom of Information Act request by ACLU this summer, a court
ordered the NSA to release documents by December 22, and the NSA sent them to
the ACLU by FedEx late on the 22nd.
But the ACLU didn't receive them until 'late in the day on the 23rd,'
Toomey said. The agency posted the documents to its website at 1:30 pm on
Christmas Eve as a tactic to minimize press coverage.
The report details various means, through which the NSA staff mishandled
the data, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private
information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients.
For instance, the report shows that the NSA employees have abused the
agency's data by spying on their spouses for over a decade, while some of the
documents showed how US citizens were 'inadvertently' spied on by the
government's spying apparatus.
'There are certain portions of the documents that really vindicate some
of the things [Edward] Snowden said when he first described the NSA
surveillance in terms of the ability of analysts to conduct queries - without
authorization - of raw internet traffic,' Toomey said.
'More generally, just the range of different compliance violations makes
it clear that at every step of the NSA's collection of information there are
vulnerabilities that leave the privacy of Americans at risk.'
The section detailing the total number of violations has been redacted
in the report. ACLU plans to sue the administration until the numbers are
released.
President Barack Obama's administration has been under pressure since
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency has been spying
on millions of people across the world, including leaders of countries allied
with Washington.
AN/NT
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