This holiday season, the NSA participated in a longstanding media tradition—dumping a large bit of news during a busy period of time when many likely weren't paying attention.

The US spy agency responded to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union by quietly releasing 12 years worth of internal reports on Christmas Eve. Several included reports were previously withheld illegally, and they became the subject of the FOIA lawsuit in 2009.

The new trove of information has inspired a different breed of headlines, such as "Highlights From Newly Released NSA Oversight Reports Reveal Bumbling Ineptitude But No Evidence Of Systematic Abuse" from Forbes. The newly discovered errors ran the gamut, including American data being e-mailed to unauthorized recipients, data being kept on unsecured computers, and sensitive information being sent to the wrong printer.

Bloomberg highlighted a few specific incidents such as an NSA analyst that “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting” in 2012 and an analyst that “mistakenly requested” surveillance “of his own personal identifier instead of the selector associated with a foreign intelligence target” in 2013.

So though heavy portions of the documents are redacted, early indications suggest this particular set of revelations leans more towards human mistakes than intentional law sidestepping. That's in stark contrast to the trove of information that became public in the majority of the Snowden leaks, where even some of the most egregious acts were justified by a vague piece of legislation known as Executive Order 12333.