National Security Agency releases reports on its surveillance practices

The US National Security Agency (NSA) published transparency reports on its web page at 1:30 pm on Christmas Eve, Wednesday.

Time span of the reports is from the fourth quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2013. The reports were released after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a Freedom of Information Act request for the information.

The multiple reports have detailed 12 years of improper conduct in order to reveal how NSA agents have consistently violated US law and its own internal regulations over the past decade.

The heavily redacted accounts reveal many incidents of misuse, both accidental and deliberate, of the NSA's Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) systems.

The reports show how NSA employed tactics like electronic spying to dig through innocent civilian's personal information while they were busy looking the other way.

The NSA officials have carried out a range of illegal activities, which include stockpiling data that the agency is required by law to delete, continuing surveillance against targets after they have been found to be USP and 'disseminating' data acquired from surveillance against USP to other government agencies and entities.

An example of an accidental violation would be someone requesting information on a target they did not know they were unauthorized to target, or simply clicking on the wrong data field in the course of a day's work. Another example would be analysts sending information to other analysts when the information should not have been shared.

The NSA still records calls and reads emails of civilians. They are still stealing the contents of Google's servers.

So, if anyone wants to change, true, systematic shifts in United States policy towards international and domestic surveillance, donate to privacy advocate groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU.