New NSA reports show spy agency routinely collected intel on Americans — RT USA
Hundreds of pages of reports previously classified top-secret were
released by the National Security Agency on Christmas Eve. They reveal
dozens of instances of the NSA unlawfully spying on United States
citizens over the last decade.
The cache of files — a collection of quarterly and annual reports
sent from the NSA’s inspector general to the president’s
Intelligence Oversight Board dating back to 2001— were published on Wednesday this week, pursuant to
a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that has
compelled the agency to provide public copies, albeit highly
redacted ones, of the IG’s past findings.
A cursory glance though the documents shows NSA analysts
wrongfully targeted US citizens for surveillance many times a
year, and regularly collected signals intelligence, or SIGINT, on
innocent Americans.
One document [PDF], a quarterly report compiled for the
president’s Intelligence Oversight Board in early 2012, reveals
that an NSA agent even routinely spied on her spouse for upwards
of three years.
“In an interview,” the report reads in part, “…the
analyst reported that, during the past two or three years, she
had searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without
his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for
targeting.”
