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The mantra from NSA chief Keith Alexander has been constant from the start: We are subject to oversight from all branches of government. New details of the agency's privacy violations reveal just how hollow that defense is.

"We are overseen by everybody," Alexander told a hacker conference in 2012, drawing out the last word in the sentence. It is a claim he repeated at the end of last month, after the Edward Snowden leaks, to another such convening.

I think it’s important to understand the strict oversight that goes into these programs because the assumption is that people are out there just wheeling and dealing, and nothing could be further from the truth. We have tremendous oversight and compliance in these programs, auditability.

"I think this is a standard for other countries," he continued, "because we have the court overseeing it, we have Congress overseeing it, we have the administration, and I’ll go into all the different parts of the administration that oversees it."

Thursday's reports from The Washington Post and new revelations about a depleted intelligence advisory panel would suggest otherwise.

The court

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Post's reporting was the assessment provided by Judge Reggie Walton, presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret body tasked with authorizing the NSA and FBI's requests for data collection.

"The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court," [Walton] said in a written statement to The Washington Post. "The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders."

At the same time, the Post reported that the NSA had, on several occasions, withheld information that it was supposed to provide. Such as when the agency made a mistake with telephone area codes.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

And then there's the document leaked by Edward Snowden to the Post that instructs analysts on trimming down the rationales for searches that are provided to oversight agencies. "While we do want to provide our FAA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments] overseers with the information they need," it reads, "we DO NOT want to give them any extraneous information." That extraneous information includes the logic that led up to the request.