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204 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

made from phones originating outside the United States by known
foreign jihadists. If these calls were made to individuals inside, the
NSA was now authorized to retrieve the billing records of the per-
son called and those people whom he or she called. These traces were
then supplied to the FBI. The new duties also increased the NSA’s
need to create new bureaucratic mechanisms to monitor its compli-
ance with FISA court orders. Rajesh De, the NSA’s general counsel at
the time of the Snowden breach, described the NSA as becoming by
2013 “one of the most regulated enterprises in the world.” Grafted
onto its intelligence activities were layers of mandated reporting to
oversight officials. Not only did the NSA have its own chief compli-
ance officer, chief privacy and civil liberties officer, and independent
inspector general, but the NSA also had to report to a different set
of compliance officers at the Department of Defense, the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Justice.
Additionally, the Department of Justice dispatched a team of lawyers
every sixty days to review the results of “every single tasking deci-
sion” approved by the FISA court.

According to De, just assembling these reports involved thousands
of hours of manpower. In addition, the president’s Oversight Board
required that the NSA’s Office of the General Counsel and inspec-
tor general supply it every ninety days with a list of every single
error and deviation from procedure made by every NSA employee
anywhere in the world, including even minor typing errors. These
requirements, according to De, inundated a large part of the NSA
legal and executive staff in a sea of red tape. Yet this regulation could
not undo surveillance programs such as the one Snowden revealed
of Verizon’s turning over the billing records of its customers to the
NSA, because the NSA was in compliance with the FISA court order
(even though, as it turned out in 2015, the FISA court might have
erred in interpreting the law).

The NSA’s focus on surveillance might have led to the neglect of
its other mission: protecting the integrity of the channels through
which the White House, government agencies, and military units
send information. This task had been made vastly more difficult
by the proliferation of computer networks, texting, and e-mails.
To protect government networks from cyber attacks, the Penta-

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