NSA, a privacy-violating mess, Government out-of-control

Can the FISC Fix the N.S.A.? Not Alone. : The New Yorker: " . . . What does the metadata program look like in opinions expected to be secret? A 2009 FISC order and other documents declassified last week—the A.C.L.U. and Electronic Freedom Foundation had filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to get them—described “compliance incidents,” which was a way of saying that the manner in which the N.S.A. ran certain programs was a privacy-violating mess. It had used thousands of telephone numbers that it had no good reason to connect to terrorism to run queries with the metadata, and then explained the violation in a way that, as Judge Reggie Walton wrote, “strains credulity,” while “repeatedly submitting inaccurate descriptions” of what it was doing. Supposedly, those particular problems have been fixed. A senior intelligence official, briefing reporters about the documents, presented this chapter, according to the Times, as a series of mistakes: “There was nobody at N.S.A. who really had a full understanding of how the program was operating at the time.” So who does now?"

Nobody fully understood (even inside the NSA!) what the NSA was doing. Nobody was in charge. A secret Court was befuddled. A NSA out of control. Congressional oversight? LOL. And remember Obama's defense of the NSA when these revelations came to light? That's the kind of inept and incompetent government, unfortunately, we have in the US at present.

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