Trust Us, We Have Internal Checks

The notion that the National Security Agency could police its own internet dragnet program with minimal oversight from a secret court has long drawn scoffs from observers. Now it appears that skepticism was completely justified.

[...]

[T]he Department of Justice informed the FISA Court, which oversees the NSA program, that the NSA had been collecting impermissible categories of data — potentially including content — for all five years of the program's [metadata collection and analysis to try and identify people emailing terrorist suspects] existence.

[...]

The Justice Department later told the court that "virtually every" internet dragnet record "contains some metadata that was authorized for collection, and some metadata that was not authorized for collection." In other words, in the more than 25 checks the NSA's general counsel should have done between 2004 and 2009, it never once found this unauthorized data.

[...]

Also, ODNI claims that the FISC-authorized internet dragnet has been shut down. [...] But during precisely the same weeks when NSA's general counsel was busy not finding the illegal data in virtually every internet dragnet record, NSA piloted a new program to permit its analysts to do the same kind of analysis on the metadata of U.S. persons collected under an executive order (Executive Order 12333). NSA expanded the program to all of NSA in early 2011, before NSA shut down the internet dragnet program.

That means there is a related dragnet program out there with nowhere near the level of oversight as the old one — the one that managed to compile five years of serious violations that the NSA never detected.

  The Week/Marcy Wheeler

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.