'Jaw-Dropping' Record of Violations Reveals Perils of NSA Self-Policing

An internal National Intelligence Agency audit and other documents leaked to the Washington Post by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that despite official claims to the contrary, the spy agency broke its own guidelines, breaking “privacy rules” and overstepping “its legal authority” thousands of times each year as it collected online and phone data on Americans without a warrant or due process.

As the Post’s Barton Gellman reports:

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the ACLU, called the scale of the violations “jaw-droppping.”

“The rules around government surveillance are so permissive that it is difficult to comprehend how the intelligence community could possibly have managed to violate them so often,” said Jaffer in a statement. “Obviously it’s important to know what precisely these compliance incidents involved, and some are more troubling than others. But at least some of these incidents seem to have implicated the privacy of thousands or millions of innocent people.”

One aspect that the ACLU finds particularly worrying is the degree to which the FISA Court, designed to oversee these surveillance programs, is at the mercy of the spy agency itself when it comes to garnering information.

“That the FISA court is so reliant on the representations of intelligence officials is a real problem. In recent months, intelligence officials have made misleading and even false statements about the government’s surveillance activities,” Jaffer said. “It makes no sense at all to let the intelligence community police itself.”

In addition to foreign news outlets, including the UK’s Guardian, Germany’s Der Speigel, and Brazil’s O Globo—the Washington Post has been the only large US news outlet given access to the trove of NSA documents obtained by Snowden.

The latest revelations only deepen the tension generated by public statements made by government officials and the contents of classified documents regarding the NSA’s surveillance apparatus.

One important thing about the NSA audit revealed by the post, tweeted the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, is that “the reports are internal, NSA audits, which means high likelihood of both under-counting & white-washing.”

Among those seemingly unaware of the the number of annual violations by the NSA was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who only became aware of the internal report when asked about it by Gellman at the Post. In numerous public statements, Feinstein has sought to defend the NSA’s record and practices.