More Mistakes at NSA

[Commentary] A fresh trove of previously classified documents released provides further evidence — as if any more were needed — that the National Security Agency has frequently been unable to comprehend, let alone manage, its vast and continuing collection of Americans’ telephone and Internet records.

The documents, made available by the agency in response to lawsuits by two advocacy groups, revealed that in 2009 a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court severely reprimanded the agency for violating its own procedures for gathering and analyzing phone records, and then misrepresented those violations to the court. The judge in the case, Reggie B. Walton, sharply rebuked the agency not only for violating its own rules but for failing to fix the problem. Although the agency said it had retrained its analysts, he pointed out that many of them continued to repeat the error, some because they had not installed proper software and others, apparently, without even realizing it. The violations were both so frequent and so systemic, Judge Walton found, that the privacy safeguards the court ordered “never functioned effectively.” Alarmingly, the agency itself acknowledged that “there was no single person who had a complete technical understanding” of the system its analysts were using.