Well, it seems that in typical Obama Administration style, the people over at the National Security Agency have just been busy little bees writing the wrong queries and catching up on spies who aren’t really spies.  The 19 no longer TOP SECRET pages released in a PDF on Christmas Eve this year, gives us a glimpse of a federal spy agency that is negligent at best and downright incompetent at worst.

Kevin Williamson of National Review put it this way, “agents of the National Security Agency, the spookiest spooks in all our vast spookocracy, are a bunch of stalkers, using the effectively boundless surveillance powers of their organization to spy on husbands and wives, overseas girlfriends, and sundry romantic partners.”  After reading through the documents, I wouldn’t go THAT far.  The main mention of an NSA employee stalking a loved one was toward the end of the cache and all she did was look through her husband’s phone records.  (Anyone else wonder if she found a divorce lawyer in there?)  All this tells us is that the people at the NSA are just as human as the rest of us.  If there was one such incident, there are bound to be others.

However, the broader implications of the memoranda from three years ago, which are more or less a list of lapses that need to be corrected, are disturbing:

• The National Security Agency has access to anything it wants, where ever it wants, any time it wants.
• Agents are not always super careful with their queries and catch a lot of data in the fishnet that they really have no need to know.
• Supervision appears to be somewhat lax if these incidents of too broad queries are happening with such frequency.
• The documents in question are heavily redacted, but do demonstrate that employees are not careful about how they do their jobs.

Does this really make anyone feel more safe?  Yeah, me neither.  And the worst part is that these people really can’t be fired.

Life in America.