Police State

NSA and FISA court release tons of documents thanks to EFF FOIA request.

Now our rulers are blaming ignorance and accident for the out of control NSA.

"The National Security Agency set it in motion in 2006 and the vast network of supercomputers, switches and wiretaps began gathering Americans' phone and Internet records by the millions, looking for signs of terrorism.
But every day, NSA analysts snooped on more American phone records than they were allowed to. Some officials searched databases of phone records without even realizing it. Others shared the results of their searches with people who weren't authorized to see them.
It took nearly three years before the government figured out that so much had gone wrong. It took even longer to figure out why.
Newly declassified documents released Tuesday tell a story of a surveillance apparatus so unwieldy and complex that nobody fully comprehended it, even as the government pointed it at the American people in the name of protecting them."

This is the new story they want to push - pretending they had good intentions - but it's baloney. The government has always spied on Americans with every tool possible. There's nothing new here except technology.

More lying from NSA.

"“The documents released today are a testament to the government’s strong commitment to detecting, correcting and reporting mistakes that occur in implementing technologically complex intelligence collection activities, and to continually improving its oversight and compliance processes,” Clapper said in a statement Tuesday."

This is ridiculous. The EFF had to go to court to obtain these documents.

"First, intelligence officials said they were releasing this information in response to the presidential directive on transparency surrounding the NSA. That statement is misleading. They are releasing this information because a court ordered them to as part of EFF's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed almost two years ago on the tenth anniversary of the Patriot Act."

The lies never end.

"The NSA apparently believed that it had the authority to search the telephone records database in order to obtain the 'reasonable articulable suspicion' required to investigate those numbers. Essentially, they were conducting suspicionless searches to obtain the suspicion the FISA court required to conduct searches.
Incredibly, intelligence officials said today that no one at the NSA fully understood how its own surveillance system worked at the time so they could not adequately explain it to the court. This is a breathtaking admission: the NSA's surveillance apparatus, for years, was so complex and compartmentalized that no single person could comprehend it."

The blatant illegality and depravity is almost comical.