The Washington Post dropped two reports that exposes the NSA's blatant recklessness in its spying program. The first report is insane: the NSA has "broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority" thousands of times a year and the second report explains the insanity: the FISA court that's supposed to be in charge of government spying programs has said that "its ability do so is limited and that it must trust the government" to report when the government has screwed up.
Basically, the NSA gets to do whatever it wants and no one can really check it. So where to start, what about the 2,776 times the NSA has overstepped its bounds in the past year? According to the Washington Post, most of those deal with "unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States" which include mistakes like:
- Intercepting a large number of calls from Washington when someone confused the US area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt
- Starting a new collection method without noticing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court until it was in operation (it was later ruled unconstitutional)
- Violating a court order to obtain data of more than 3,000 Americans and green card holders.
The NSA simply seems like it could care less about the process. [Washington Post, Washington Post]
