NSA internal report shows the agency violated privacy laws thousands of times a year

  You can file this story in the is anyone surprised by this category: the NSA has concluded an internal investigation into its own domestic data-mining program and has concluded that the agency has violated privacy rules thousands of times per year. They have been violating our privacy? Who woulda thunk it?

  The NSA has admitted to various degrees of usurpation ranging from typos all the way up to not telling the FISA court what they were up to.

  On top of that:

The documents also indicated that employees are instructed to tone down or “remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”

In another instance “the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans” at all.

  The NSA was basically telling its employees to falsify the records it chose to report by couching the language, while urging others not to even bother reporting the violations. We can assume the lesser violations were made to look even less odious with language changes, while the more serious violations were the ones the employers were urged not to report.

  The NSA is defending itself thusly: because we are spying on millions of Americans thousands of violations is really just a small percentage. Well, that makes everything all right, doesn’t it?

  Of course the fact that this was an internal investigation and not a real investigation leads one to wonder if the NSA purposely downplayed exactly how many people were illegally spied upon, and according to anonymous sources in the NSA an accurate account would be much higher than what they are admitting:

The NSA claims that if the violations are put into perspective, they are only a fraction of the queries run by the agency. However, the agency only counts incidents that take place at their headquarters in Ft. Meade or facilities in the DC area. Three anonymous government officials told the WaPo “the number [of violations] would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.” 

  Because the NSA has no right whatsoever to collect data on domestic correspondence I would say the violations are not in the thousand range, but rather in the million range.