Spies at America's electronic eavesdropping centre
are breaking laws against carrying out unauthorised
surveillance on the public thousands of times a year,
a secret inquiry has found.

An internal audit of the National Security Agency, the
US equivalent of Britain's GCHQ, concluded that
officials repeatedly overstepped their legal limits
after being given sweeping new powers in 2008.
Its breaches included intercepting data on a "large
number" of telephone calls made from Washington
after mistakenly monitoring 202, the dialling code for
the US capital, rather than 20, the code for Egypt.

The report was given to The Washington Post by
Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor whose
leak of top-secret documents has left the American
intelligence establishment reeling.
Its findings challenge firm claims by President Barack
Obama last week that a "whole range of safeguards"
was in place to prevent the NSA and other agencies
from overstepping their boundaries.
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairman
of the intelligence committee, told the newspaper
officials "can and should do more to independently
verify that NSA's operations are appropriate".
"When NSA makes a mistake in carrying out its
foreign intelligence mission, the agency reports the
issue internally and to federal overseers - and
aggressively gets to the bottom of it," the agency
said in a statement.

The NSA, America's largest spying agency, is
supposed to monitor electronic communications
around the world to bolster US intelligence, but is
banned by law from spying on Americans on home
soil.
Its audit, dated May 2012, found that in the
preceding year the agency had 2,776 unauthorised
incidents, such as improperly collecting data or
giving the wrong officials access to sensitive
material.

Many were caused by accidental programming
errors, such as the unfortunate collection of
information about calls from Washington.
Most seriously, it is accused of scooping up many
American emails along with foreign messages while
harvesting large volumes of data from fibre-optic
cables in the US, and storing these data for future
use.

In October 2011 even the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, a secret body accused of rubber-
stamping most NSA work, said the programme was
"deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds".
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects
Americans from "unlawful searches and seizures".
When NSA lawyers told the court that filtering the
emails of Americans was not practical, the court
ordered them to put the scheme in line with the law
or abandon it altogether.

Another incident in February 2012 saw the unlawful
retention by the NSA of 3,032 files that the
surveillance court had ordered officials to destroy,
according to the audit later that year.
The agency has been accused of using loopholes and
legal acrobatics to gather data that push its legal
authority to the limit - and of going to great lengths
to avoid disclosing details of its mistakes.
The interception of the records of an American while
targeting a foreigner is deemed "incidental" by the
NSA's internal guidelines and "does not have to be
reported" in its quarterly update to Congress.
In a rare public statement on the court's activities,
Reggie Walton, the chief judge of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, distanced the body
from the NSA's wrongdoing.
"The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the
information that is provided to the court," Judge
Walton said. "The FISC does not have the capacity to
investigate issues of noncompliance."

Mr Snowden, who fled an NSA listening station in
Hawaii, has been granted temporary asylum in
Russia. He has been charged with three felonies,
including violations of the US Espionage Act.
Announcing concessions last week, Mr Obama said
the US intelligence apparatus would be reviewed by a
panel of external experts . A "devil's advocate" may
also be brought into FISC cases to challenge
government requests.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10247824/NSA-broke-privacy-laws-thousands-of-times-a-year-according-to-documents-leaked-by-Ed-Snowden.html