It’s been looking like NSA surveillance was likely to survive its recent scrutiny largely unscathed, but the Washington Post has just stirred the pot again with an article about a secret NSA internal QA review that found a few thousand errors every year where the agency broke applicable privacy rules. This number counts errors only at headquarters and not at the various regional collection centers.
[ul]
[li]In 2008, the agency grabbed information about “a large number” of calls in Washington DC’s 202 area code when a programmer who intended to target Egypt (country code 20) + Cairo (area code 2) left off the “011.”[/li]
[li]A particular collection method that captured and commingled domestic and foreign communications went on for several months in 2011 before being declared unconstitutional by the FISC. [/li]
[li]Various computer and operator errors.[/li]
[li]The report also notes that NSA analysts are taught to strip out details and substitute generic information in preparing materials for oversight reports.[/li][/ul]
Separately, the NY Times recently reported that the NSA is searching a much broader amount of Americans’ cross-border email than has been previously acknowledged. They are picking up not just direct communications with targets but also any communications mentioning the target or information linked to the target.
Some members of Congress were making noise on Friday, and it will be interesting to see how much it keeps up this week. Calls in Washington DC getting swept up during an election year may be hitting close to home, and the fact that it was the Bush administration doing that may give restive Democrats more latitude for opposition. Apparently no one in Congress had seen this report before the Post’s article, and Sen. Feinstein’s reaction is that her Intelligence Committee needs to do more to verify NSA compliance.
The FISC is taking a different tone now than it previously had. Early on, former chief judge Kollar-Kotelly emphasized that she had provided stern oversight, but now the current chief judge is emphasizing how limited the court’s powers actually are.
Another interesting aspect of this article is that it makes clear that the Post still has Snowden documents that it has not shown yet. One has to wonder what spurred the publication of this article now; if it was not intended as a rebuttal to the President’s recent speech, the timing inevitably makes it looks like one. Notably too, a senior official who seems likely to have been John Delong, the NSA’s director of compliance, gave an interview to the Post and then sought to change his responses; the Post refused.
Delong’s response essentially amounted to saying that if we knew how much spying they actually do, we’d see this was a drop in the bucket. Perhaps the administration sought to change his remarks because they sound somewhat more creepy than reassuring.
CLASSIFICATION NOTE: Some of the articles link to the actual NSA compliance report. The existence of the report was not classified (indeed, a few people tried to get it by FOIA), but the contents certainly still are, so any Dopers who are federal employees should bear in mind that they are forbidden to view it, even now.