Landis Vinchattle

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_print.html

“You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day,” he said. “You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.”

That statement is supposed to make us feel BETTER about their activities? This is another organization ripe for some crippling budget, staff, and jurisdiction cuts. I think the NSA has a few talented individuals that provide some benefit in a limited sector of defense, but scope creep has derailed them from being anything but a domestic surveillance blanket.

Put simply, there just aren’t enough talented people to review the volume of data they are working with… or even to properly capture the data given the vast array of sources they are capturing from. The NSA has both a quantity problem and a quality problem: They have too much data for their top notch engineers to review, and too few top notch engineers reviewing data that they shouldn’t possess to begin with.