{"id":51784,"date":"2014-12-29T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2014-12-29T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=51784"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:27:07","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:27:07","slug":"nsa-releases-christmas-eve-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/12\/nsa-releases-christmas-eve-surprise\/","title":{"rendered":"NSA Releases Christmas Eve Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Alan Brandt\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Dec 20145 – <\/em>The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports<\/a>\u00a0documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees.\u00a0The heavily redacted reports to the President\u2019s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients.<\/p>\n

While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency\u2019s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a \u201cChristmas Eve surprise,\u201d\u00a0\u00a0is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.<\/p>\n

The reports, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, offer few revelations, but contain accounts of internal behavior embarrassing to the agency. In one instance an NSA employee \u201csearched her spouse\u2019s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting\u201d, a practice which previous reports<\/a> have indicated was common enough to warrant the name \u201cLOVEINT\u201d.<\/p>\n

Many of the reports appear to deal with instances of human error rather than malicious misuse of agency resources. Nonetheless, many of these errors are potentially serious, including entries suggesting that unminimized U.S. telephone numbers were mistakenly disseminated to unauthorized parties and that military personnel were given unauthorized access to raw traffic databases collected under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act.<\/p>\n

\"nsa<\/a><\/p>\n

There are also accounts of simple bumbling by NSA employees, including the apparently common mistake of targeting their own communications for surveillance. In one unintentionally amusing passage, an NSA analyst is said to have \u201ctargeted his personal cellphone,\u201d because he \u201cmistakenly thought it would be acceptable to [redacted].\u201d Another common example is the practice of NSA analysts accidentally designating their own communications as being those of a foreign intelligence target.<\/p>\n

\"nsa<\/a><\/p>\n

Even in their redacted form the reports give insight into the level of power individual agency employees have in ordering surveillance, and the intentional and unintentional abuses that can take place in an environment of minimal oversight. Though NSA officials have repeatedly suggested<\/a> that the agency has rigorous safeguards in place to prevent individual employees from abusing their powers of surveillance, the agency\u2019s own confidential internal reporting appears to contradict this.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government conducts sweeping surveillance under this authority -\u2014 surveillance that increasingly puts Americans\u2019 data in the hands of the NSA\u201d, Patrick Toomey of the ACLU\u2019s National Security Project said in comments to Bloomberg News<\/a>.\u00a0\u201cDespite that fact, this spying is conducted almost entirely in secret and without legislative or judicial oversight.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: murtaza.hussain@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Dec 20145 – The NSA on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}