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A few hours before Christmas Eve, the National Security Agency released more than a decades worth of damning reports on its website. The reports, which had been submitted by the NSA to the Presidents Intelligence Oversight Board from 2001 to 2013, purport to cover any activity that could be considered unlawful or contrary to government policy. They included incidents in which individual employees abused their security clearances to target a current or former romantic partner as well as dozens of breaches that resulted from overly broad database queries, along with a lack of rigor in determining whether a foreign intelligence target had entered the United States or held US citizenship or permanent resident status. There were also numerous breaches related to poor data security.

In the documents, which were released in response to a FOIA lawsuit brought by the ACLU, NSA analysts are revealed to be all-too-human bumblers, mistakenly searching on their own information, improperly using colleagues credentials, sending highly classified information to the wrong printer, and mistyping email addresses.

There is no evidence in the reports of systematic lawbreakingnot a surprise considering the reports author. Instead, the NSA attributes most of its lapses to unintentional human error or technical mistakes. In a handful of cases, the agency points out, investigations have led to discipline or administrative action. Even so, the reports raise serious questions about the NSAs ability to protect the vast amount of personal data that is vacuumed up by its surveillance apparatus.

Courtesy: Cory Grenier

I became interested in the NSA spying program almost a decade ago when I learned about a large order AT&T had placed for Narus Semantic Traffic Analyzers. The equipment made it possible to inspect Internet traffic in real time, which made it a great tool for spying. A source had told me that the analyzers had been deployed in secret rooms around the country on behalf of the NSA. I looked into the story, but ultimately my editors chose not to pursue it. Even if I could prove it, they werent sure anyone would be interested in the specific details of how telecoms like AT&T were cooperating with the NSA. It was an era of limited newsroom resources, and we had other stories to pursue.

There was also a key question that I wasnt sure I could answer even if I confirmed my tip. Had any Americans been hurt by NSA spying? This is a concern that comes up again and again. Its raised by judges presiding over lawsuits brought by public advocates and civil libertarians. The lack of an affirmative answer is used to justify ongoing surveillance.

Yet, we still dont know if any individual has been hurt or what potential exists for someone to be hurt in the future. A lot depends on what the NSA does with information it collects on those it refers to as US Persons, or USPs, and most of that information is withheld from the public. The NSA claims it takes great pains to comply with the U.S. Constitution, as well as U.S. laws and regulations. The Christmas Eve reports are interesting because they showed where the agency, in its own opinion, has fallen short.

The agencys reports, which emphasize incidents in which US persons were improperly targeted, dont appear at first to correlate with a cache of 160,000 intercepted communications that the Washington Post obtained via Edward Snowden. The Post reporters claimed ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by theNational Security Agency. The story, published in July, raised new questions about the collateral harm to privacy from NSA surveillance.

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Highlights From Newly Released NSA Oversight Reports Reveal Bumbling Ineptitude But No Evidence Of Systemic Abuse

With little fanfare, the National Security Agency dropped hundreds of pages worth of surveillance reports into the dead of night before Christmas Evesome of which detailed U.S. citizens that were "inadvertently" swept up in the government's data dragnet.

As Americans were preparing to open holiday gifts, the agency quietly published a trove of declassified data spanning more than a decade of intelligence gathering. Those documents, required by the President's Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), were heavily redacted to protect disclosures of sensitive information.

Read MoreMeet the NSA's hacker recruiter

Entire swaths of text was blanked out, making it nearly impossible to identify specific names, programs or occurrences of privacy violations. However, the documents detailed a number of instances where analysts "erroneously" gathered information on U.S. citizens, or were at least guilty of shoddy practices.

In a 2012 quarterly report, for example, an analyst "forwarded in an email to unauthorized recipients the results of a raw traffic database query that included terms associated with "an unidentified U.S. citizen. The email was recalled, the report said, without providing further information.

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NSA declassifies trove of documents

With little fanfare, the National Security Agency dropped hundreds of pages worth of surveillance reports into the dead of night before Christmas Evesome of which detailed U.S. citizens that were "inadvertently" swept up in the government's data dragnet.

As Americans were preparing to open holiday gifts, the agency quietly published a trove of declassified data spanning more than a decade of intelligence gathering. Those documents, required by the President's Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), were heavily redacted to protect disclosures of sensitive information.

Read MoreMeet the NSA's hacker recruiter

Entire swaths of text was blanked out, making it nearly impossible to identify specific names, programs or occurrences of privacy violations. However, the documents detailed a number of instances where analysts "erroneously" gathered information on U.S. citizens, or were at least guilty of shoddy practices.

In a 2012 quarterly report, for example, an analyst "forwarded in an email to unauthorized recipients the results of a raw traffic database query that included terms associated with "an unidentified U.S. citizen. The email was recalled, the report said, without providing further information.

Continued here:
NSA Christmas gift: 12 yrs of surveillance data

After something of a disastrous 2014 as far as public relations goes, the NSA chose Christmas Eve to release a pile of incriminating reports forced out into the open by a Freedom of Information request from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The heavily redacted documents reveal evidence of illegal surveillance and staff errors, and the National Security Agency itself admits that analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade.

The ACLU say the released reports show the potential dangers of the NSAs surveillance policies and the ease with which data can be misused. The government conducts sweeping surveillance under this authority surveillance that increasingly puts Americans data in the hands of the NSA, Patrick C. Toomey, staff attorney with the ACLUs National Security Project, told Bloomberg. Despite that fact, this spying is conducted almost entirely in secret and without legislative or judicial oversight.

Related:NSAs Auroragold program spies on carriers to break into cell networks

The ACLU is calling for greater oversight for all three branches of government, originally filing the suit to bring to light the implications of an intelligence gathering executive order first issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Since then, it has undergone a variety of modifications, and gives the NSA the ability to gather information about U.S. citizens as a consequence of overseas data monitoring. By law, the agency cannot deliberately intercept messages from Americans, but these messages are often hauled in together with communications captured outside the country

For the NSAs part, it says that any data it shouldnt have is deleted as soon as its spotted. In its executive summary, the agency goes on to say that where illegal spying occurred it was largely due to a mistake on the part of one of its analysts rather than deliberate rule-breaking: The vast majority of compliance incidents involve unintentional technical or human error, reads the summary. NSA goes to great lengths to ensure compliance with the Constitution, laws and regulations.

One 2012 case, for example, shows an NSA analyst searching through her spouses personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting; that analyst has been advised to cease her activities, says the report. In another case an analyst mistakenly requested surveillance of himself rather than an individual identified through a foreign intelligence target report.

In another incident from 2012 an analyst ordered surveillance on a U.S. organization that he wasnt authorized to carry out. The analyst incorrectly believed that he was authorized to query [the data] due to a potential threat, reads the report, though nothing came of the surveillance. Any potential violations of NSA regulations are required to be reported to an oversight board as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and its reports to the latter office from 2001 to 2013 that have now been made public.

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NSA has been spying on Americans, new documents reveal

"The NSA and its UK accomplices show no respect for the rule of law": Julian Assange. Photo: AFP

Britain's intelligence-gathering agency spied on people who contacted WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website's founder Julian Assange claims.

Assange says new documents reveal the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was engaged in "hostile monitoring" of the publisher's website.

Information from national security whistleblower Edward Snowden detailed the spying efforts against WikiLeaks undertaken by GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA), he said.

A document dated 2012 revealed GCHQ spied on WikiLeaks and its readers, said Assange, who has been living at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since the summer of 2012 for fear of being extradited to the US.

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"WikiLeaks strongly condemns the reckless and unlawful behaviour of the National Security Agency," Assange said. "We call on the Obama administration to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSA's criminal activity against the media including WikiLeaks and its extended network.

"News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling. No less concerning are revelations that the US government deployed 'elements of state power' to pressure European nations into abusing their own legal systems, and that the British spy agency GCHQ is engaged in extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publisher's website and its readers.

"The NSA and its UK accomplices show no respect for the rule of law."

WikiLeaks said it was surprised at the "sweeping" scale of the monitoring as well as the "blatant" way information was gathered.

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NSA, GCHQ spied on WikiLeaks, says Julian Assange