Only two days after Independence Day, The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and associates have published news indicating that the information disclosures by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden are much more extensive than previously thought.
In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are
Files provided by Snowden show extent to which ordinary Web users are caught in the net
In today’s Washington Post, an analysis of data samples showing the exact nature of data collected by the NSA, and it includes a tremendous amount of information about ordinary U.S. citizens that the Federal government has repeatedly denied it is collecting.
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
The entire story can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html
The constant, ongoing release of the Snowden information trove is bad news for the Administration and National Intelligence Community, as nearly every release shows them to be either outright liars and prevaricators, or unaware of what’s going on directly under their noses (other than the substances they are apparently inhaling, of course).
The Administration seems bent on destroying its credibility entirely. From trumped up boards of inquiry to ongoing and repeated denials of illicit spying on American citizens, and inept, ill considered spying on allies, the Administration seems unable to read the writing on the wall and to come clean to the American people. In the midst of all the denials, one thing the Administration hasn’t denied is the authenticity of the Snowden documents.