14 DAY TRIAL // Another leak describing another NSA abuse leads to the agency again using the same excuses. What it did was legal and, even if it wasn't, it was by mistake and, even if it wasn't by mistake, it was with good intentions.
The fact that the agency would actually admit that it ignored the laws that regulate it because it had good intentions once again provides a glimpse into how far removed the NSA has become from the public it's supposed to be defending.
Best intentions never excuse illegal acts and making it OK for the NSA to break the law because it has good intentions assumes that the NSA and the US government will always have good intentions, which is something not even the most naive among us can believe.
But it gets better. Not only is the NSA digging its own hole by arguing that it's OK to ignore the law as long as you mean well, it's also admitting that the reason why it broke the law in the first place is that no one at the agency was able to fully comprehend the massive surveillance mechanism it had put together.
"These are some incredibly complicated systems that NSA was not able to fully and accurately articulate to the court, in large part because no one at NSA had a full understanding of how the program was operating at the time," Robert Litt, general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told reporters during a phone call.
Even if that were true, and it probably is, why would the NSA willingly admit this? Surely, the agency can't be so clueless that it hopes playing dumb will somehow excuse its actions. Because the fact that the spy agency can't understand its own systems anymore is just as good a reason to shut them down, if not a better one than the NSA purposefully misusing its tools.