The US National Security Agency (NSA), which has been at the centre of a major controversy since Edward Snowden’s revelations over its far-reaching surveillance operations, reportedly broke privacy rules “thousands of times each year” since 2008.
Citing an internal audit and other documents, The Washington Post reported on Friday that a May 2012 audit found as many as 2,776 incidents of “unauthorised collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications” in the preceding 12 months.“Most of the infractions involve unauthorised surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of US e-mails and telephone calls,” the paper said.
The Post, which received leaked NSA documents from Snowden in May, said the documents include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. “In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” it said, adding that in one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans.
The report noted that the most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorised use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional. Responding to the new revelations, a senior NSA official was quoted as saying: “We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line.”