Oops:
The spying agency crossed referenced a selected list of some 16,000 phone numbers against databases which contained millions of records, thus violating the law, two senior intelligence officials told Bloomberg
Several times I've seen the claim that the NSA is looking for a needle in a haystack. But apparently instead of whittling down that haystack the NSA just kept making it bigger and bigger.
And then complained they lacked the resources to do the job.
Even though the host of right wing dangers in this country act blatantly and with impunity. Making them easy to find, if they had ever bothered looking.
Instead quilting grandmothers and Quakers trying to avert war and bloodshed seem to be those the security arm set their sites on. Aside from all the corporate spying the NSA does.
In some cases the NSA was distributing the sensitive phone records by email to as many as 189 analysts, while only 53 were approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to see them, a Justice Department lawyer reported later in 2009.
The NSA notified the court of the violations only in January 2009, the documents show. In turn, the court asked the spying agency to seek approval for each case before running the query on an individual number. In September 2009 these procedures were revised and the court allowed the surveillance program to remain.
I'm not against them using tools but if you use a bulldozer to mow the lawn when the grass gets too high and then lie to the homeowner wondering what happened to their yard you don't get to keep your job.
And neither should the NSA without a thorough housecleaning.