The federal government has released the NSA’s first transparency report

This morning the Director of National Intelligence released a report detailing its use of various legal authorities in 2013 to execute surveillance, and the number of targets impacted by each method. The move was hinted at in March of this year, when NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett said that the government was “actually working on a proposal right now to be transparent and to publish transparency reports in the same way the Internet companies do.” According to the report, the information that it includes was declassified four days ago. At issue in the data is an incredibly wide definition of the word “target” for the included FISA-related data, which as defined in the document could “be an individual person, a group, or an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information that the U.S. government is authorized to acquire by the above-referenced laws.”

The feds issued nearly 20,000 national security letters last year according to the Director of National Intelligence in a report released this morning. The document is being touted as the NSA’s first ever transparency report made available to the public. The report is extensive. President Obama ordered the U.S. intelligence community to declassify as much information as possible on the extremely sensitive surveillance programs. The goal was to strike a balance between protecting national security investigations and addressing the public’s right to access certain details about intelligence gathering. The report’s release “is a good thing,” a former intelligence official said in an interview with VentureBeat. “It ups the ante.” Obama ordered the release after revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden of the NSA’s massive global metadata collection programs both inside the States and abroad. The NSA is forbidden by Congress to spy internally, but the law was amended after the terror attacks of 9-11 to allow the agency and federal law enforcement exceptions in the interests of national security. The word “targets” has multiple meanings, according to the document. The reports identifies targets thus: “For example, “target” could be an individual person, a group, or an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information that the U.S. government is authorized to acquire by the above-referenced laws.”