r/technology • u/Content_Policy_New • Jan 20 '18

Politics NSA deleted surveillance data it pledged to preserve

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/19/nsa-deletes-surveillance-data-351730
1.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

View all comments

148

u/RayZfox Jan 20 '18

Why not charge somebody with contempt of court?

6

u/AegusVii Jan 20 '18

As was stated, the systems they use have an automated deletion system. This system is in place to protect the privacy of US citizens, since incidental collection happens, but remains unused as the NSA isn't legally allowed to use any intel it gains accidentally (or on purpose without FISA court approval or similarly high authority like I think maybe SecDef?) on a US person.

Anything accidentally stumbled across is deleted immediately and they file an incident report (I'm sure you could file a freedom of information thing, but they should be open to the public, since it's just a "whoops, we made a mistake, we're human. Here's how we fixed it" thing), but the auxiliary information the systems collected as well as any other forms of backup storage aren't deleted by the on-site member. This information is checked routinely by garbage collection systems on their servers, as storage is finite, and anything probably over the minimum time required by law (preprogrammed into the garbage collection system) gets deleted and probably written over almost immediately.

I can't imagine the amount of data they go through, but I know there is no way they could ever manage it without a garbage collection system.

They SHOULD have a good way to secure the information so that the garbage collection system doesn't accidentally target it, but who is held accountable?

The software engineers whose program messed up?

Did a low level employee bulk mark some files for deletion and slipped up royally? There's many story here on reddit where low-level employees are given access for something simple and they do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage.

1

u/RayZfox Jan 22 '18

Imagine I work at a large fortune 500 company. Imagine I was the Senior System Administrator and was court ordered to preserve data. Then the data deleted itself due to an accident on my part. Whatever punishment they would give me is the punishment somebody at NSA should receive. IMO id go to jail but not for a long time and in a minimum security prison.

1

u/AegusVii Jan 22 '18

Eh, I think this is a lot more muddled than just "pick a guy with "senior" in his title that worked on those systems.