Stupid News-From NSA: Revealing how many Americans we’ve spied on would violate their privacy

In a letter (PDF) recently sent to Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Inspector General explains that he cannot provide an estimate of how many Americans the agency has spied on, because doing so would “would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”

While it’s not surprising that an NSA official would simply refuse to respond to any and all questions from Congress — they typically do — it is unusual for the agency to claim that a basic oversight function like estimating how many Americans have been spied on is effectively too great a task for them to even attempt, and may actually be beyond the purview of the Inspector General.

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