NSA Reportedly Violates Privacy Rules And Laws “Thousands Of Times” A Year

Documents published by the Washington Post reveal that the NSA broke privacy rules, laws and regulations thousands of times each year. The details do not specify the ratio between accidental and intentional violations but they specified 2776 such incidents. The issues are mainly associated with incorrectly using software and systems and not recognising when a targeted phone is within U.S territory or not. Other incidents had been caused by “human error” such as typos or “too broad” queries.

One of the highlighted incidents as “serious” was when a programming error mistook the 202 U.S area code for Washington D.C for the +20 international dialling code of Egypt leading to widespread interception of American phone calls. Additionally the NSA are accused of redirecting vast amounts of internet traffic through NSA servers to store and extract information, much of it of U.S citizen data. The NSA didn’t report this to the FISA court and used it for months before even submitting it for scrutiny.

The report used to compile this information covers the NSA’s Fort Meade Headquarters and other outputs in the Washington area, had all NSA outputs and collection centres been included the number of incidents would apparently be much greater.

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