Drip by drip, new revelations regarding NSA domestic surveillance programs become known every week. Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald have planned their news drops as an elaborate production: First they released their initial documents, then a few more in the next weeks. Then they allowed time for the administration to respond and try to mislead the American people, and then they responded with new documents that appear to directly contradict the President’s claims.
This strategy was on clearest display last week, when another bombshell emerged after intelligence officials and administration actors had claimed that PRISM and other NSA surveillance programs were carefully regulated to protect American privacy with elaborate safeguards. Just when that narrative was starting to win over some people – and it was a critical part in the narrative in the Administration’s efforts to combat the Amash amendment – Snowden and Greenwald responded by releasing an internal NSA audit on the use of these surveillance programs. The audit concluded that the programs have been seriously abused, including 2776 incidents in just the Washington area and violations of rules of the court order.
“One in 10 incidents [of NSA abuse] is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or e-mails,” according to a telling part of the Washington Post article revealing the NSA audit. If a typographical error can so easily grant access to information on American citizens, then all of the data on American citizens is clearly available to the NSA but the NSA is simply using discretion to “avoid” accessing it.
If the NSA didn’t use its discretion and “accidentally” accessed all phone records in Washington, DC, of course that would be one of the serious types of incidents that would be reported to the Congressional oversight committee. Right? But apparently, no.
The NSA accidentally accessed “a large number” of phone records for people with a 202 area code, which is the area code of congressmen, senators, Supreme Court justices, think-tanks, and 501c4 groups including Tea Party groups and their staffs.
How did such a “typographical error” occur? Well apparently in 2008 the NSA confused the US area code 202 for 20, the international area code for Egypt. But surely any US resident would have known that 1-202-XXX-XXXX is a US phone number and will produce data on American citizens, not Egyptians. Furthermore, the audit focused on NSA facilities located in the Washington DC area, so the NSA employees involved presumably all had first hand knowledge that 202 was DC’s area code.
If the NSA was running a system that had serious concern for accessing data on American citizens, we would hope that they could program a system that would automatically rule out access to American area codes without some type of escalation. This is remarkably easy to program given that all US numbers begin with a 1 and have three numbers in their area code.
As someone who worked as a staffer in Congress, it’s difficult for me to convey the level of incriminating information that the NSA may have obtained in just this one incident. The agency would have learned which sources called which reporters, which members of Congress and their staff were using official resources for campaign activities, which 501c4 groups were coordinating with campaigns – and thats just for starters.
Over a month ago, I wrote, “If Prism is Good Policy, Why Stop with Terrorism,” examining how NSA surveillance data could be used for other public purposes. I suggested that we needed to draw a line in the sand, because otherwise, perfectly plausible arguments could be made for expanded uses of NSA data that include enforcing speed limits, combatting child pornography, and ending illegal downloading of copyrighted works:
If the barometer for violating the Fourth Amendment is efficacy, then why should these not also be up for discussion? The answer is clear: The Fourth Amendment was not designed for efficacy. It was designed for privacy and to defend our liberty. If that’s not the case, why even stop with these examples?
We now know that the data has been shared with other agencies for other purposes, including to the IRS and DEA through the Special Operations Division. And that these agencies were told to lie about where they got the data when they tried to use it in court.
If the House and Senate Intelligence Committees constituted a serious adversarial oversight branch, they should react to these NSA programs and this audit with outrage: at the misleading comments made to the American people by the administration, the findings of the audit itself, and most importantly at the fact that this audit remained classified...
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