

US admits NSA illegally collected thousands of emails - frank_boyd
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23790912

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amirmc
_" The court, whose rulings are normally kept secret, said the NSA may have
violated US law for collecting as many as 56,000 emails on an annual basis
between 2008 and 2011.

But intelligence officials speaking to reporters anonymously say the scooping
of emails was unintentional, blaming it on a technological problem."_

Aside from the whole mass-spying thing, that it took _years_ to uncover and
deal with such a major (& illegal) problem doesn't say much for their
technical prowess. How much stuff is going wrong right now that they haven't
found yet?

~~~
spullara
You mean like Google collecting all the Wifi packets they saw with their
street view vehicles?

[http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/05/17/google-
admits-s...](http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/05/17/google-admits-
street-view-wifi-sniffing/1)

I'm not really defending it but it does seem like big, smart, technical
organizations make blindingly bad mistakes.

~~~
frank_boyd
That was not a mistake. Things like these need features that need to be
developed and budgets that need to be approved. Somebody did that. But that's
for another discussion.

~~~
spullara
I'm don't think you work for a company that develops software at scale. An
individual did that, yes, but did Google as an organization decide to do it
explicitly? Probably not.

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dalek_cannes
Here's an odd question: For a country whose founding principles say "ALL human
beings are endowed with inalienable rights...", why is the outcry only over
collecting _domestic communications_? Do the rights not apply to foreigners?

~~~
gonvaled
Because we are not complete human beings! I mean, you don't assume that a non-
american has the same human dignity as an american, do you? Foreigners are all
terrorists anyway ...

------
frank_boyd
> [...] illegally gathered up to 56,000 personal emails [...]

Let's not be fooled, it's not about "a couple" of emails. It's the whole
surveillance apparatus that is the real issue.

> Government officials said that the court rulings had been declassified to
> show that eavesdropping programmes at fault had been found and fixed,
> highlighting its oversight measures.

It's very likely that they'll resort to throwing us a few bones, counting on
us to go back to sleep again after that.

EDIT: Post was taken off the front page(s).

