Christmas surprise from the NSA: If you want to release something that no one will pay attention to, what better timing than Christmas Eve? At least, that seems to be the reasoning of the US National Security Agency, which last night released detailed reports detailing every illegal espionage that they did to American citizens. Ho Ho Ho!
The occult papers were circulated in response to a lawsuit filed by the US Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act. Many of these privacy violations have been reported in the past, but these documents show new details. A series of annual and quarterly reports from 2001 to the second quarter of 2013 are now available to every citizen (PDF), and cover some of its greatest successes NSA:
Spying on service partners, more information about the practice called LOVEINT, mistakes targeting US citizens for espionage, database queries that returned non-target US citizens, storing stolen data on servers, and access by people without security controls .
In fact, with the documents provided by the agency, it is difficult to judge how often these privacy violations occur, although previous reports show that they happen thousands of times a year as TheVerge reports.
Promotions e-mail between agents and to “unauthorized recipients” containing US citizen identities, making the identities available in “unauthorized chatrooms,” and making classified information available to those who were not authorized to see it, are just a few of the themethe ones included in the NSA Christmas gift.