On December 24, the NSA released its redacted quarterly and annual Reports to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU. Only Bloomberg News covered the reports on the day of their release, though other media outlets (WSJ, PBS, and others) subsequently reported the release of the documents. While most of the media coverage merely rehashed last year’s LOVEINT revelations, it appears that there is substantially more to this story.
All of the quantitative metrics have been redacted. Each type of violation appears as a single line item irrespective of how many times the violation occurred during the period in question, leaving the reader unable to determine the frequency with which the violation occurs. There would not seem to be any legitimate reason to redact all of the numbers in the report, yet none of the media outlets have mentioned the possibility that this was done to spare the NSA the embarrassment of revealing that violations are more common than believed.
Even a brief glance at the most recent reports also reveals seemingly far more serious violations that have not yet been reported in the media. In one fully redacted incident covered in the FY20131Q report:
”[REDACTED] NSA verbally notified the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight of this issue
…
"NSA has obtained approval from the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence [REDACTED]"
”NSA/CSS does not anticipate that this [REDACTED] will have any effect on national security or international relations.”
In the FY20124Q report, NSA admits that:
”[REDACTED] NSA/CSS notified the Congressional intelligence committees about an overcollection of FAA 702 upstream collection as well as collection under other authorities. [LONG REDACTION]. NSA has deployed a short-term solution to address the problem and is continuing to work on a long-term solution.
In the same report:
”The NSA OIG is investigating an allegation that activity associated with a [REDACTED].”
These incidents, generally falling in the “Other” categories of violations, seem to be more serious and worthy of thorough coverage. Also, the media and the ACLU should push for the release of the redacted quantitative metrics.