Vast majority of NSA spy targets are mistakenly monitored

Philadelphia News.Net Sunday 6th July, 2014

WASHINGTON, DC - A report by the Washington Post has alleged that as many as ninety percent of individuals being monitored by the NSA are ordinary Americans and not foreign surveillance targets.

According to the Washington Post, innocents were "caught in a net the National Security Agency had cast for somebody else" and much of the information gathered, most of it highly personal, was retained despite offering little to no intelligence value.

The information was provided to the newspaper by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Some 160,000 emails and instant-messages and 7,900 documents from 11,000 online accounts, gathered by the NSA between 2009 and 2012, have been examined by the Washington Post, which alleges that nine out of ten of the account holders were not the intended targets.

According to the report, the information gathered provides a startling insight into the lives of ordinary Americans, but is not of any intelligence value.

The information gathered tells a story of "love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes", says the report.

However, the other ten percent of gathered data reportedly contains "discoveries of considerable intelligence value", suggesting the striking collateral damage to individuals' privacy is seen as a necessary evil by the US government, but one US President Barack Obama has been unwilling to fully address.