The NSA released their first ever transparency report last week. Many privacy and human rights advocates were excited to see what would be published. But along with top VPN provider IAPS Security, they were disappointed.
First NSA Transparency Report
The first NSA Transparency Report was supposed to give us all details on how many people were targeted by the NSA for surveillance. But the report was couched in terms that made it confusing and evaded the real issues. For one thing, IAPS Security notes, they only provided numbers on spying activities conducted within a few years. Another problem is that only a small percentage of all the data gathered and stored is on legitimate foreign targets.
The way that the NSA used the word target was discovered to mean an individual, a group, a company or even an entire country. And only 0.002 percent of this data, which was gathered with the use of various programs like the one called MUSCULAR, was pertinent to current investigations that they were authorized to conduct. Only one order was used for all the NSA data gathering, they say, which is under FISA, specifically Section 702.
The report detailed that the NSA had requested for data from companies like AOL and Yahoo 38,832 times in 2013. This is a very large number of requests. And the details only cover one year. Then the report says that only 248 targets were monitored. There were also details on numbers of targets. 319 targets came under FISA, and 1,767 additional orders for direct surveillance were applied to 1,144 targets.
