The shockingly heavily redacted “declassification” of certain trivial details of the NSA program (including one page where literally everything but the page number was blacked out) admits to numerous “compliance programs” with the letter and spirit of the law.
The surveillance program has swept up metadata on materially all of the phone calls of all Americans, with the documents claiming that is conceivably “relevant” to terrorism probes, though even that incredibly broad standard saw a number of violations of the limitations theoretically in place.
Despite repeatedly not complying with the letter or spirit of the rules, the document insists that the NSA believes none of them amount to “bad-faith” violations, though the next paragraph is then predictably blacked out.
NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander sought to downplay the violations as well at a Las Vegas conference on information security, insisting that “technical limitations” kept the NSA from doing anything too bad. Alexander was not well received, with conference-goers loudly accusing him of “lying.” Alexander conspicuously didn’t mention XKeyscore during his talks, another major revelation out of the Edward Snowden leaks.
"the NSA believes that none of them amount to "bad faith" violations" so in words they're just really bad at obeying the law, but they meant to. So then they resigned when they realised how incompetent they were right?
I saw the video clip on TV last night of Alexander's response to an admonition shouted from off-screen that he should read the Constitution, claiming he had read it and that the questioner should also…evidently reading and comprehending are skills he hasn't mastered yet. Of course, if you've convinced yourself that what you're doing is legal and good, then other people's opinions and legal reasoning are irrelevant.