Obama Was Wrong: NSA Employees Have Deliberately "Abused" Their Power - Slate

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Obama Was Wrong: NSA Employees Have Deliberately "Abused" Their Power
By Ryan Gallagher | Slate
Posted Friday, Aug. 23, 2013, at 5:29 PM

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In recent weeks, government officials have insisted that Americans need not worry about NSA surveillance because there are no cases of the system being wilfully abused. But new details have emerged showing these assurances to be blatantly false—in yet another twist that is sure to undermine trust in the NSA oversight regime.

On Friday, Bloomberg reported that NSA analysts have “deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade.” According to Bloomberg, an average of one case of intentional abuse per year has been documented in internal reports. Given that the NSA intercepts billions of communications weekly, the number of reported deliberate abuses is small. However, that there are any documented cases at all is highly significant because of how this contradicts statements made by both current and former senior officials in the aftermath of a series of stories about vast NSA spy programs based on leaked secret documents.

NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander claimed at a New York cybersecurity conference earlier this month that “no one has wilfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy.” A similar statement was made by the head of the Senate intelligence committee tasked with conducting oversight of the NSA. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said on Aug. 16 that the committee had “never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes.”

In an Aug. 9 news conference, President Obama stated, too, that abuse had not been occurring. “All the stories that have been written, what you're not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and listening in on people's phone calls or inappropriately reading people's emails,” Obama said. Two days later, this statement was enthusiastically reiterated by former NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden, who appeared on Face of the Nation. “There have been no abuses under him <President Obama> or under his predecessor <President Bush>,” Hayden insisted.

According to the Bloomberg report...

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More: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg_report_nsa_employees_have_deliberately_abused_their_power.html