NSA Waited Until Christmas Eve To Release Details Of Its Illegal Surveillance On Americans

from the merry-christmas-everyone! dept

One of the recurring storylines from NSA defenders is that there's been "no abuse" of the surveillance programs. Except, that's not true. Leaked and released documents have shown thousands of examples of abuse including failed audits and minimal accountability. In fact, in many of the cases where abuse was found, it was only discovered thanks to employees confessing about abusing the systems years later -- meaning that it's quite likely that there are many more cases of abuse that the NSA itself doesn't even know about.

The ACLU has been seeking detailed reporting from the NSA on its abuses, filing a lawsuit against the agency for its failures to fully respond to a FOIA request. The NSA -- which has a habit of releasing important documents late on Friday evenings before a weekend -- took things one step further this time, waiting until Christmas Eve to dump a whole load of files detailing the NSA's abuse of surveillance practices. Some of the abuses appear rather egregious:

In a 2012 case, for example, an NSA analyst “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting,” according to one report. The analyst “has been advised to cease her activities,” it said.

Of course, beyond this being a rather blatant form of abuse, it seems noteworthy that this particular example was not included in the report that the NSA gave Congress in 2013 supposedly highlighting all of the examples of abuse. In fact, as you read through these reports, it appears that abuse and "mistakes" were fairly widespread. Here's opening one of the many reports at random and showing just a snippet of the listings: That's just one page out of 13 pages in that report, and the NSA just released nearly 50 such reports... on Christmas Eve. We'll be trying to dig through these in more detail as well, but it really says how badly the NSA wants to avoid discussing all these abuses, that it timed the release of these documents on Christmas Eve.

Filed Under: abuse, christmas eve, nsa, surveillance