NSA Domestic Spying Story Won't Go Away

(FDL) Kevin Gosztola reports ~ Impossible to Know How Many Violations of Americans’ Privacy NSA Has Committed, Documents Show

The president has suggested that the public is wrong to think the NSA is somehow “out there willy-nilly just sucking in information on everybody and doing” what it pleases with it. However, documents provided to The Washington Post by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that thousands of privacy violations have occurred.
A May 2012 audit from the NSA shows 2,776 incidents of “unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications” occurred.
Journalist Barton Gellman reported, “Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.”
The audit, which was apparently only produced for senior officials in the agency, did not include incidents that occurred outside of NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade. The number of violations would be much higher if all “NSA operating units and regional collection centers” had been part of the audit.
A “violation” is a term of art in the NSA. According to Gellman, when the NSA “sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a US person who is believed to be involved in terrorism, that is not a “violation” of privacy, but rather incidental.

Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress. Once added to its databases, absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched freely.

Therefore, the surveillance is more “willy-nilly” than Obama might lead Americans to believe. Many, many, many violations can be justified by simply claiming it was an “incident” in the process of tracking suspected terrorists. (Like wartime deaths of civilians are called “collateral damage,” at the NSA, wartime surveillance of innocent Americans could be considered collateral spying.)

Meanwhile, (Politico)'s Tony Romm has more on the Summer Of Snowden ~ NSA questions hitting lawmakers on the home front

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