[liberationtech] NSA Admits: Okay, Okay, There Have Been A Bunch Of Intentional Abuses, Including Spying On Love Interests | Techdirt

[Karel Bílek]

I secretly hoped that is an Onion article.

On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 6:46 AM, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
> LOVEINT!!!
>
> oh god this alone makes it all worth it,,, thank you Snowden!
>
> P.S. setup a bitcoin donation address.
>
> best regards,
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Yosem Companys <companys at stanford.edu> wrote:
>> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130823/18432024301/nsa-admits-okay-okay-there-have-been-bunch-intentional-abuses-including-spying-loved-ones.shtml
>>
>> NSA Admits: Okay, Okay, There Have Been A Bunch Of Intentional Abuses,
>> Including Spying On Love Interests
>>
>> from the and-we're-just-now-telling-congress dept
>>
>> So, this week, we wrote about the NSA quietly admitting that there had been
>> intentional abusesof its surveillance infrastructure, despite earlier claims
>> by NSA boss Keith Alexander and various folks in Congress that there had
>> been absolutely no "intentional" abuses. Late on Friday (of course) the NSA
>> finally put out an official statement admitting to an average of one
>> intentional abuser per year over the past ten years. The AP is reporting
>> that at least one of the abuses involved an NSA employee spying on a former
>> spouse. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal suggests that spying on love
>> interests happens somewhat more often:
>>
>> The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in
>> the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label:
>> LOVEINT.
>>
>> A handful is still significantly more than once. And it's a lot more than
>> the "zero" times we'd been told about repeatedly by defenders of the
>> program.
>>
>> While the NSA says it takes these abuses seriously, there's no indication
>> that the analyst was fired.
>>
>> Much more troubling is that it appears that the NSA only told its oversight
>> committee in the Senate about all of this a few days ago:
>>
>> The Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed this week on the willful
>> violations by the NSA's inspector general's office, as first reported by
>> Bloomberg.
>>
>> "The committee has learned that in isolated cases over the past decade, a
>> very small number of NSA personnel have violated NSA procedures — in roughly
>> one case per year," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who
>> chairs the committee, said in a statement Friday.
>>
>> Of course, this is the same Dianne Feinstein who, exactly a week ago, said
>> the following:
>>
>> As I have said previously, the committee has never identified an instance in
>> which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance
>> for inappropriate purposes.
>>
>> Yeah. Because apparently the NSA chose not to tell the committee until a few
>> days later, despite it happening for years.
>>
>> And, of course, they release this all on a Friday night, hoping that it'll
>> avoid the news cycle...
>>
>> In the meantime, the NSA just made Senator Feinstein look like a complete
>> fool. She's been its strongest defender in Congress for years, and has stood
>> up for it time and time again, despite all of this questionable activity.
>> Then, last week, it lets her tell lies about it without telling her
>> beforehand that there had been such abuses. At this point, it's abundantly
>> clear that Feinstein's "oversight" of the NSA is a joke. She's either
>> incompetent or lying. Either way, it appears that the NSA is running circles
>> around her, and isn't subject to any real Congressional oversight. At some
>> point, you'd think that maybe she'd stop defending it and actually start
>> doing her job when it comes to oversight. You'd think the fact that it let
>> her make a complete fool of herself by claiming there had been no
>> intentional abuses should make Feinstein realize that the NSA situation is
>> out of control. But, tragically, this seems unlikely. Even her statement
>> seems to want to minimize the seriousness of the fact that she -- the person
>> in charge of oversight -- was completely kept in the dark about very serious
>> intentional abuses. Senator Feinstein just got hung out to dry by the NSA.
>> You'd think she'd stop going to bat for it and its lies.
>>
>> Either way, we've now gone from General Keith Alexander and Feinstein
>> claiming "no abuses," to them saying no "intentional" abuses, to this latest
>> admission of plenty of intentional abuses, including spying on lovers.
>> Perhaps, instead of lying, it's time for the NSA to come clean and to get
>> some real oversight.
>>
>>
>> --
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>