20 million queries here, 20 million queries there, pretty soon you’re talking about real numbers
by digby
I’m fairly sure they keep saying this intending to make people feel more comfortable and I cannot figure out why:
The top National Security Agency official charged with making sure analysts comply with rules protecting the privacy of Americans pushed back on Friday against reports that the N.S.A. had frequently violated privacy rules, after the publication of a leaked internal audit showing that there had been 2,776 such “incidents” in a one-year period.
The official, John DeLong, the N.S.A. director of compliance, said that the number of mistakes by the agency was extremely low compared with its overall activities. The report showed about 100 errors by analysts in making queries of databases of already-collected communications data; by comparison, he said, the agency performs about 20 million such queries each month.
WTH? Everybody comfortable with the government making 20 million queries of these databases a month? Good lord. We’re either on the verge of being invaded by terrorists from Mars or this is overkill of the highest order.
And the fact is that we don’t really know what those “incidents” of rule breaking represent. Those numbers are potentially very high as well. Amy Davidson at the New Yorker wrote:
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.
I guess we’re supposed to be “comfortable” with the fact that the US government collects massive amounts of information of virtually everyone on the planet, stores it into a gigantic database and then “queries” that database at least 20 million times a month. And who knows how much of that even follows the arcane and unaccountable legal structure they’ve allegedly set up to keep this practice from violating the US Constitution since everything is top secret.
The implication from these mind-boggling numbers is that the world as we know it is coming to an end. Either that or we have secret government programs employing new technology that virtually nobody understands and have taken on a life of their own. Since we have little evidence that we are dealing with an existential threat on the scale of a Martian invasion, the latter seems to be a bit more realistic.
Oh, and by the way, Senators Udall and Wyden issued a statement:
“The executive branch has now confirmed that the rules, regulations and court-imposed standards for protecting the privacy of Americans have been violated thousands of times each year. We have previously said that the violations of these laws and rules were more serious than had been acknowledged, and we believe Americans should know that this confirmation is just the tip of a larger iceberg.
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