"There was no single person who had a complete technical understanding," The NSA machine: Too big fo

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The NSA machine: Too big for anyone to understand
http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-machine-too-big-anyone-understand-071323221--politics.html

More yahoo woo for the masses...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The surveillance machine grew too big for anyone to understand.

The National Security Agency set it in motion in 2006 and the vast network of supercomputers, switches and wiretaps began gathering Americans' phone and Internet records by the millions, looking for signs of terrorism.

But every day, NSA analysts snooped on more American phone records than they were allowed to. Some officials searched databases of phone records without even realizing it. Others shared the results of their searches with people who weren't authorized to see them.

It took nearly three years before the government figured out that so much had gone wrong. It took even longer to figure out why.

Newly declassified documents released Tuesday tell a story of a surveillance apparatus so unwieldy and complex that nobody fully comprehended it, even as the government pointed it at the American people in the name of protecting them.

"There was no single person who had a complete technical understanding," government lawyers explained to a federal judge in 2009.

The only people who did not understand what was going on was Congress and The American People. The techno gear heads in charge knew what was going on. The people setting this up new what was going on. It is ridiculous to think government lawyers were being honest when they said: "There was no single person who had a complete technical understanding,"

That is complete Bullshit. The spooks in charge knew exactly what they were creating.