Recent media reports released a few top secret documents about how the US National Security Agency illegally spied on its citizens, thousands of times per year. It turned out that most of the May 2012 audit was a catalogue of cock-ups where the agency collected information by accident, blaming analyst and programming errors. However, in one situation the phone records of over 3,000 American citizens were collected despite the fact that the agency had been ordered to erase them by a surveillance court.
Overall, the audit reported 2,776 cases where the National Security Agency violated its own privacy rules. In one case, the spooks confused the US area code (202) with the international dialing code for Egypt and snooped on domestic US phone calls. In another situation, the agency mixed domestic and foreign emails collected from tapping into a fibre-optic cable passing through the country. The NSA wanted to store the emails and claimed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that they simply couldn’t filter out which emails belonged to the US citizens. In response, the court ruled that the email collection effort must stop, because it was “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds”.
The audit in question appears to have been provided to the mass media several months ago by famous Edward Snowden and was initially supposed to be seen by the NSA’s top brass and no politicians ever saw it. Although Snowden made promises to not reveal any secrets while he is staying in Russia, more information of what he had passed to the media earlier is expected to be released soon. It is known that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who has published the most NSA secrets based on Edward’s leaks, keeps working on a pile of them. According to his tweets, he will be releasing more data soon.
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