Remember when Obama said the NSA wasn’t “actually abusing” its powers? He was wrong.

[ProSense]

1. Actually,

"Remember when Obama said the NSA wasn’t “actually abusing” its powers? He was wrong."

...he wasn't. Here's the key part:

Members of Congress may read the unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room and are not allowed to take notes. Fewer than 10 percent of lawmakers employ a staff member who has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their meaning and significance.

The limited portions of the reports that can be read by the public acknowledge “a small number of compliance incidents.”

Under NSA auditing guidelines, the incident count does not usually disclose the number of Americans affected.

“What you really want to know, I would think, is how many innocent U.S. person communications are, one, collected at all, and two, subject to scrutiny,” said Julian Sanchez, a research scholar and close student of the NSA at the Cato Institute.

The documents provided by Snowden offer only glimpses of those questions. Some reports make clear that an unauthorized search produced no records. But a single “incident” in February 2012 involved the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy, according to the May 2012 audit. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.

They're still talking about metadata, not all the searches produce records, inadvertently targeting U.S. persons may or may not be the reason for the compliance problems (the report doesn't say), and it appears the minimization procedures work (records destroyed).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023469108#post8