The Post Tells Us What We Suspected

It's breaking news only in the sense that it confirms what many people have suspected for a very long time now -- enormous data gathering capability leads to a predictable result. Barton Gellman of the Washington Post explains:

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized 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 U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

And there's something else in Gellman's report that's interesting as well:

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, 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.

A less charitable person might say that agency personnel are instructed to obstruct justice, but we're trying to be charitable. The NSA would like us to be charitable, because, you see, darn the luck they're only human:

“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,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.

And that's the problem, of course -- humans are eternally curious and capable of bad behavior, especially if the risk of sanction seems small. The serpent made Eden a "complex environment."

So we're back to the question at the heart of Edward Snowden's revelations -- what do we gain and what do we lose if we have a government agency with the ability to monitor your every move? How much trust do you choose to give the NSA and its masters? Never mind; the second question is moot. You no longer have the ability to bestow your trust regarding the program. It's here and it's not going to be dismantled, because any politician would love to have it. George W. Bush had it and Barack Obama wasn't going to give it up, nor will Obama's successor.

What we can do is raise the level of disclosure that the agency itself must provide. Back to Gellman:

Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semiannual reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”

Members of Congress may read the unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room, and they are not allowed to take notes. Fewer than 10 percent of lawmakers employ a staff member who has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their meaning and significance.

The limited portions of the reports that can be read by the public acknowledge “a small number of compliance incidents.”

Under NSA auditing guidelines, the incident count does not usually disclose the number of Americans affected.

At this point, under the current structure, there's no practical way for anyone outside of the NSA apparatus to provide any real oversight, since the rules make oversight essentially impossible for Congress. Must be nice to operate in an environment where scrutiny isn't going to happen. And speaking of legal authority, how about that FISA court?

In one required tutorial, NSA collectors and analysts are taught to fill out oversight forms without giving “extraneous information” to “our FAA overseers.” FAA is a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted broad new authorities to the NSA in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court.

It's bureaucracy as "Fight Club." It's the dream of bureaucrats everywhere.