Documents show NSA broke privacy rules many times
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the U.S. intelligence agency broad new powers in 2008. In one case, telephone calls from Washington were intercepted when the city’s area code was confused with dialing codes for Egypt and Cairo.
Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, which are restricted by law and executive order, according to documents leaked by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden and first published Thursday in The Washington Post.
They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls, the Post said, citing a May 3, 2012, internal audit and other top-secret documents.
The report was the latest in a series by various media on oncesecret surveillance programs, based on information provided by Snowden, who fled the U.S. and is now in Russia after having been granted temporary asylum.
In one of the documents, NSA 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.
The Post cited a 2008 example of the collection of a “large number” of phone records from Washingtonbased phone numbers when a programming error confused 202, the U.S. area code for the capital, for 202, the international dialing code for Egypt and the city code for Cairo. That’s according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff. The NSA also saw a large spike in the number of “roamers,” or overseas, phone calls wrongly tracked in the first quarter of 2012, when people travelled into the United States territory, which is outside NSA’s authority.
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.
The 2012 NSA audit obtained by the Post counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications.
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.
“At least some of these incidents seem to have implicated the privacy of thousands or millions of innocent people,” said Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said the number of incidents in the first quarter of 2012 was higher than normal, and that the number has ranged from 372 to 1,162 in the past three years.
“When NSA makes a mistake in carrying out its foreign intelligence mission, the agency reports the issue internally and to federal overseers — and aggressively gets to the bottom of it,” Vines said.