NSA Admits 'illegally' spying on Americans… on Christmas Eve When Nobody is Looking. (SP).
Late Wednesday afternoon - yes, on Christmas Eve - the NSA dumped twelve years worth of documents detailing illegal surveillance and wiretapping.
The National Security Agency (NSA) cited a “classification review” in releasing quarterly reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board from 2001 to 2013. However, the release was in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The NSA may spy on foreign communications under U.S. law but are heavily restricted when targets communicate with U.S. citizens or when one end of the correspondence or phone calls originate or end in the U.S.
However, the documents in the NSA’s Christmas Eve dump suggest that those restrictions were ignored fairly often.
The reports include “descriptions of specific incidents which may have been unlawful or contrary to applicable policies,” the NSA said, on its website.
Extensive redactions make it difficult to identify just how many violations of protocol the NSA committed but it is clear they were numerous. The remaining vague language also makes it difficult to determine how serious the transgressions were.
In some of the incidents, it appears that the NSA analysts were well aware of the fact that their actions were illegal — or at least they should have been. Read the full story here.
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