Newly published leaks show NSA's thousands of privacy violations
A report published Thursday evening in The Washington Post highlights top-secret documents that show the National Security Agency (NSA) collects unauthorized surveillance on Americans thousands of times per year.
The documents are a May 2012 audit that the NSA performed on its operations. Most of the privacy violations were unintended, the results of things like typographical errors by analysts and programming errors. Some were much more serious, including one that involved unauthorized use of data on more than 3,000 US citizens. In that incident, which occurred in February 2012, thousands of files containing telephone records were retained despite the fact that the NSA had been ordered to destroy them by a surveillance court.
Overall, the audit found 2,776 "incidents" in which the NSA broke its own privacy rules while collecting information. The report breaks out data about the first quarter of 2012, in which 195 violations occurred.
