My Friday column begins like so:
The Washington Post‘s Bart Gellman was one of the reporters who received stolen classified documents from Edward Snowden and who simultaneously, with Glenn Greenwald, broke the news about the National Security Agency’s PRISM system back in June. Gellman published another Snowden-based article on Thursday, also based on a top secret Snowden document, with the headline: NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds.
Gellman’s document contained information about 2,776 errors made by both NSA analysts and computers during three-quarters of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. The infractions included “operator error,” “computer error,” “typographical errors” and so forth. Inexplicably, Gellman jumped to the unverified conclusion that this occurs “thousands of times each year” even though the document only covers a one-year span, and he mentioned that one official “declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.” Interesting. Some Greenwald-style hyperbole right there.
More importantly, this was an internal audit, which means… oversight! It turns out, yes, obviously, NSA has multiple layers of oversight and exhaustive internal audits of the agency and its analysts as a means of both weeding out problems and mitigating violations. The elephant in the room is that the purpose of Gellman’s document, presumably from NSA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), is to keep detailed tabs on the agency. But Gellman never explicitly mentions the OIG, just that the document is an “audit.” But it’s a fair to reach such a conclusion since internal audits are performed by the OIG within all government agencies and departments.
We’ve been led to infer by Greenwald and others that NSA is a rogue, reckless agency without any oversight; operating in total secrecy and with limitless impunity. That’s simply not the case, and the existence of this document, as well as Gellman’s article, proves it… [CONTINUE READING]