NSA releases documents confirming a decade of illegal spying on Americans

NSA releases documents confirming a decade of illegal spying on Americans
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On Christmas Eve, the NSA released redacted documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the ACLU that confirm that the agency illegally spied on Americans for more than a decade. In addition to monitoring Americans' overseas communications, the NSA inappropriately and insecurely shared and stored data it collected about U.S. citizens.

While past NSA revelations have shown agents intentionally misusing their spying power for personal gain — like the case of an employee who monitored his foreign girlfriend's phone calls for a month — this report also includes at least one noteworthy tale of incompetence: An NSA agent spied on himself when he accidentally requested surveillance "of his own personal identifier instead of the selector associated with a foreign intelligence target."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.