From The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/nsa-snowden-breaking-the-rules-thousands-of-times.html
Posted by Amy Davidson
August 16, 2013
What does the National Security Agency consider a small or a big number? The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman has a report based on documents the paper got from Edward Snowden about an N.S.A. audit that found two thousand seven hundred and seventy-six “incidents” in 2012 in which it broke its own rules about spying on Americans, either accidentally or on purpose. That is seven times a day, which sounds less like a slip than a ritual. But to call those violations frequent, according to the agency, would be to misunderstand the scale of its operations: “You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day,” a senior N.S.A. official told the paper. “You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.” We spy so much that the math gets hard; even thousands of privacy and legal violations can’t really be held against us.
But how many thousands? As it turns out, there are numbers packed into the numbers. An “incident” can have affected multiple people—even multitudes. In a single one of the two thousand seven hundred and seventy-six cases, someone at the N.S.A. made a mistake in entering a number into a search request. As a result, instead of pulling information on phone calls from Egypt (country code 20) the agency got data on “a large number” of calls from Washington, D.C. (area code 202). How many, and what did they learn? There are more Egyptians than there are Washingtonians, but the N.S.A.’s mandate forbids it from spying on Americans, and singling out an area as politicized as Washington seems particularly unfortunate. Mistyping the country code for Iran could have left analysts looking at calls in North Carolina and Louisiana. Another incident involved “the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy…. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.” The Post said that it was not able to tell how many Americans were affected in all. Those two examples suggest that the number could be very, very big—even by the N.S.A.’s standards.
There are other ways the number multiplies. One incident involved someone the N.S.A. continued to target well after it confirmed that he had a green card, and was therefore off limits. There were four “selectors” associated with this person—these might be things like e-mail addresses or phone number—which led to requests for “881 cuts in NUCLEON,” a program that collects the contents of phone calls; thirty-two reports; and “serialized dissemination” of information to other parts of the government. There are many ways to get on a list; what seems hard is getting off of one.
Continue reading at: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/nsa-snowden-breaking-the-rules-thousands-of-times.html
