There's a Perfectly Good NSA Defense that the Obama Administration Isn't Making

[Valin]

The New Republic:

Benjamin Wittes

August 18, 2013

 

I cannot decide if I am more annoyed at the Washington Post or more annoyed at the Obama administration for the way this latest cache of Snowden-leaked NSA documents is playing. I have now gone through the documents with some care, and I find both the Posts formulation of the story and the administrations response to the leak mind-boggling.

 

(Snip)

 

Lets start with the audit report that supposedly shows thousands of violations of privacy rules and legal breaches. To be clear, not one of these 2,776 incidents (over a year at the NSAs headquarters) involves a decision by any NSA employee to engage in illegal surveillance against an American. They are nearly all inadvertent mistakes of a technical naturethe majority of a few discrete types (See pp. 5-6). The bulk are roamers, which take place when a valid foreign intelligence target happens to cross into the United States. The IG report notes that Roamer incidents are largely unpreventable, even with good target awareness and traffic review, since target travel activities are often unannounced and not easily predicted (emphasis added).

 

(snip)

 

But if the administration cant be troubled to defend it in a full-throated and serious way, why should anyone pause to ask whether were pervasively confusing minor technical mistakes with real civil liberties infringements and whether were confusing a remarkable big picture portrait of self-policing and intelligence collection under the law with a portrait of rampant spying on Americans?

[Draggingtree]

LOVEINT: Spies In The House Of Love

By Rod Dreher • August 24, 2013, 9:58 AM

When, exactly, are we going to get a new Church Committee to investigate just what the hell the NSA has been doing to the American people? From today’s Wall Street Journal:

 

National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.

 

The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.

 

Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of “INT,” such as “SIGINT” for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and “HUMINT” for human intelligence, or spying.

 

The “LOVEINT” examples constitute most episodes of willful misconduct by NSA employees, officials said

 

The NSA, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, say that it only happened a few times, and was dealt with. Maybe they’re telling the truth. I don’t believe them.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/spies-in-the-house-of-love-loveint/

[Valin]

LOVEINT: Spies In The House Of Love

By Rod Dreher • August 24, 2013, 9:58 AM

(Once again) What Do You Want to Do?

A New Church Committee...What Could Possibly Go Wrong?