14 DAY TRIAL // Once more, the NSA makes a fool of itself and comes up with some absurd excuses.
Following the forced declassification of hundreds of pages, leaders of the intelligence community in the United States tried to justify their actions.
The documents the EFF managed to get out of the NSA indicate the agency had completely disregarded an order given by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from 2006 which told the agency they could only collect information from about 2,000 individuals whose names were added to an Alert list. Of course, these were people that the court considered to be suspicious.
What the NSA did was discovered about three years later, in early 2009, when an audit indicated the agency had actually tracked about 15,000 people in the United States.
The case shows the NSA doesn’t really care about what the FISA court had to say or the privacy of the some 13,000 people it spied upon with no legal basis.
Director Clapper gave out a statement claiming no one at the agency actually understood what the FISA order said. This makes the entire situation even more alarming, because, honestly, who can believe such a thing?
The agency prides itself with hiring some of the most brilliant people, individuals who can contribute to building the NSA’s incredible surveillance power.
And yet, we are supposed to believe, in three years’ time no one spotted the errors? No one realized they weren’t supposed to track any other people aside from the allowed suspect list? That seems completely unlikely. The right answer is that, most likely, they simply didn’t care they were overreaching their boundaries.
Under the circumstances, how can United States citizens continue to trust the NSA? The rest of the world has long since lost its faith in the agency, but the adamant supporters were those the NSA wasn’t even supposed to spy on.
It seems every report about the NSA indicates it has done nothing but lie to the world and break the law to get its way.