The Washington Post released a string of eye popping leaked documents revealing the National Security Agency has inadvertently intercepted the communications of a large number of individuals it’d no right to spy on. The narrative below is in a variety of ways the precursor to that hit disclosure.

The NSA, as intelligence historian Matthew Aid reveals, gathers info that is so much online that its errors are tremendous. Each day, it actively assesses the rough equivalent of what is inside the Library of Congress and “touches,” to make use of the bureau’s term, another 2,990 Libraries’ worth of information. With this kind of tremendous catch, even the most infrequent of malfunction rates — one in a hundred thousand, say — still generates terabytes and terabytes of improperly- information that is picked. It means a large number and thousands of individuals are mistakenly captured in the surveil driftnet.

The NSA’s defenders will point to the various times the bureau’s intelligence analysts got things right, and followed the rules. But that misses the point; no one anticipates the systems they use, or these analyzers, to be perfect. The issue is that the surveillance internet is not so very small that even the most miniscule of imperfections can have outsized impact.

Play up how essential that observation is to stopping terrorist attacks — and the electronic secret agents at the National Security Agency have tried recently to play down the quantity of Internet traffic they scrutinize. Neither one of these arguments is not completely false. Yes, the NSA maintained in a recently published white paper that it “reaches” just 1.6 percent of the planet’s on-line information, but the agency failed to notice that this is approximately equal to the Library of Congress’s whole textual set, scrutinized 2,990 times every day. But this investigation of on-line communications has also been essential to U.S. spying on areas like Syria, Libya, China, and Iran.

The value of the Web as an intelligence source for the NSA is unable to be underestimated. The NSA might have made its Cold War name intercepting radio and telephone traffic; it is about the Internet these days. Based on information collected from interviews with three former or presently serving U.S. intelligence officials ran over the previous month, the NSA is now creating high grade intelligence information on a multitude of national and transnational objectives at levels never before reached in the bureau’s history. Here are a couple of instances of the intelligence apparently derived from NSA’s intercepts of the contents of e-mails and other Internet-based communications systems:

* According to a recently retired U.S. intelligence analyst, much of what the U.S. intelligence community knows, or believes it understands, about the Iranian atomic system is based largely on intercepted on-line communications.

* The NSA’s capability to use e-mail traffic, both plaintext and encrypted, has proved to be a critically important tool enabling the U.S. intelligence community to monitor military actions around the world, especially in certain key states in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Far East.

* Intercepted e-mails and text messages were also important to the success of Gen. David Petraeus’s Baghdad “upsurge” operation in Iraq in the spring and summer of 2007.

Working in close conjunction with its English-speaking partners in New Zealand, and Britain, Canada, Australia, the NSA is now engaged in two Internet-connected SIGINT group software.

The first includes the group of Internet metadata — how and who communicates with whom. The national component of the application, which began soon after 9/11, included AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint supplying the NSA with huge quantities of Internet use information for all their subscribers in the United States and international. This plan was formally terminated in December 2011 after Sen. Mark Udall and Sen. Ron Wyden questioned whether the application was generating adequate intelligence to warrant continuing to finance it. Whether the NSA keeps the huge database of Internet metadata is not known. However, the bureau is not in the custom of throwing things away.