The NSA Searches Ten Times as Much of the Internet as It Said It Does

The National Security Agency assured Americans that it only surveils a tiny percentage of the web data it collects. But it turns out the NSA screwed up the math, and that percentage was off by an order of magnitude.

That error is in a document released by the agency on the heels of the President's speech announcing measures to review NSA surveillance. The NSA said it only looked at .00004% of the world's data traffic, but this was the result of a miscalculation by one decimal place, or ten times more surveillance than they claimed. The NSA also claim it makes 20 million data queries each month, which turns out to be seven queries a second, according to Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum, who also spotted the decimal mistake. After a series reviewing the math, he came up with and 7.5 privacy violations per day, a significant number resulting from a seemingly tiny fraction.