By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--August 16, 2013
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Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls. The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency 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.
In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff. 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 Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.A lot of this, to be sure, does sound inadvertent. But the established rules don't give the NSA the discretion to ignore directives and keep things to itself because, in their view (however accurate), something is not a big deal. You're not doing things in "as transparent a way as we possibly can" when you decide to hush something up that you could have reported. This is troubling to me precisely because I for one do believe in the necessity of surveillance in the service of national security, and the safeguards that have been set up are designed to provide protection of people's constitutional rights while still allowing the surveillance activity necessary to protect the nation from harm. If the NSA wantonly ignores the rules whenever it feels like it, the whole thing breaks down and public confidence in any surveillance program collapses. At that point, you've just made it much more difficult to do what's necessary to protect the country - and you did it to yourself.
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