Americas...:NSA Describes Surveillance Programs As Lawful

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The United States' National Security Agency insisted its activities were lawful as it comes under increasing international and American pressure over the surveillance programs that monitor communications and internet activity of American and non-American citizens, governments, and European missions.

The intelligence agency held a rare conference call with reporters to justify its violation of privacy and to calm the rage over documents disclosed by Snowden on Thursday and published by the Washington Post that show that the NSA had overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008.

"These are not willful violations, they are not malicious, these are not people trying to break the law," John DeLong, NSA director of compliance, told reporters.

"The committee has never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said.

For his part, representative Mike Rogers, a Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described errors reported in the Post as "human and technical," which he said were "unfortunately inevitable in any organization and especially in a highly technical and complicated system like NSA."

As for DeLong, he said that willful violations were "extremely rare" and that mistakes can lead to the removal of database access for an NSA employee.

Most of the breaches, according to the audits published by the Post, ranged from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of US emails and telephone calls.

The documents included a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance, the daily mentioned.

In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Moreover, The Post reported that the NSA audit, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications.

Source: News Agencies, edited by website team