Trust Us ~ It Was Just A "Glitch"

Ill: Micah Wright/Propaganda Remix
http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html

Your Demon has completely lost her capacity to be surprised, even when what was unthinkable not so long ago when she was an idealistic little Demonette in law school is now, apparently, par for the course.

Exhibit A: Not only does our own government spy on us, they do it so sloppily and badly that who-knows-what gets caught in their fishing nets. An "episode" that occurred in 2006 comes to light only now, as a result of that heretic liberal organization Electronic Frontier Foundation's work.

In the NYT today:

"F.B.I. officials blamed an 'apparent miscommunication' with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.
[...]
"The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

"The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government’s wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

"But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: 'It’s inevitable that these things will happen. It’s not weekly, but it’s common.'

"A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

"Bureau officials said they did not have updated public figures but were preparing them as part of a wider-ranging review by the inspector general into misuses of the bureau’s authority to use so-called national security letters in gathering phone records and financial documents in intelligence investigations.

"In the warrantless wiretapping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, technical errors led officials at the National Security Agency on some occasions to monitor communications entirely within the United States — in apparent violation of the program’s protocols — because communications problems made it difficult to tell initially whether the targets were in the country or not.

"Past violations by the government have also included continuing a wiretap for days or weeks beyond what was authorized by a court, or seeking records beyond what were authorized. The 2006 case appears to be a particularly egregious example of what intelligence officials refer to as 'overproduction' — in which a telecommunications provider gives the government more data than it was ordered to provide.

"The problem of overproduction is particularly common, F.B.I. officials said. In testimony before Congress in March 2007 regarding abuses of national security letters, Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau’s general counsel, said that in one small sample, 10 out of 20 violations were a result of 'third-party error'” in which a private company 'provided the F.B.I. information we did not seek.'
"The 2006 episode was disclosed as part of a new batch of internal documents that the F.B.I. turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocates for greater digital privacy protections, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the group has brought. The group provided the documents on the 2006 episode to The New York Times.

"Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the privacy foundation, said the episode raised troubling questions about the technical and policy controls that the F.B.I. had in place to guard against civil liberties abuses.

'“How do we know what the F.B.I. does with all these documents when a problem like this comes up?' Ms. Hofmann asked.

"In the cyber era, the incident is the equivalent of law enforcement officials getting a subpoena to search a single apartment, but instead having the landlord give them the keys to every apartment in the building. In February 2006, an F.B.I. technical unit noticed 'a surge in data being collected' as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal bureau report.

"An Internet provider was supposed to be providing access to the e-mail of a single target of that investigation, but the F.B.I. soon realized that the filtering controls used by the company 'were improperly set and appeared to be collecting data on the entire e-mail domain' used by the individual, according to the report.

"The bureau had first gotten authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the e-mail of the individual target 10 months earlier, in April 2005, according to the internal F.B.I. document. But Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, said in an interview that the problem with the unfiltered e-mail went on for just a few days before it was discovered and fixed. 'It was unintentional on their part,' he said.

Well, your Demon should be relieved to know that the FBI actually deigned to recognize the FISA Court's authority, even if she has lingering doubts whether the FBI's characterization of the little mess as "unintentional" makes her feel any better.

Not really.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/washington/17fisa.html