(Guardian) The NSA serially violated its own restrictions on bulk surveillance, according to a report that puts further pressure on beleaguered intelligence chief James Clapper and strengthens claims by a leading Senate critic that a "culture of misinformation" exists at the agency.
The Washington Post reported, with information provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, that internal NSA audits found thousands of instances where the powerful surveillance agency collected, stored and possibly searched through vast swaths of information it is not permitted to acquire.
The revelations contradict repeated assurances this summer from senior Obama administration and intelligence officials that the NSA's programs to collect Americans' phone records and foreigners' communications in bulk contain adequate privacy protections.
Such inappropriate or unlawful retention ranged from what an administration official told the Post was human error, to seeming technological flaws, to collection efforts that inherently involved transgressing the few boundaries that have existed on NSA bulk collection since 2008, when Congress broadened a basic law of surveillance, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
In one such case, an unspecified "incident" led to the retention of 3,032 files that the secret Fisa court had ordered NSA to destroy. Another involved the diversion of international communications traffic passing over through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a "repository" for temporary "processing and selection" – something that the Fisa court in 2011 ruled a violation the fourth amendment of the US constitution.
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