A report published Thursday evening in The Washington Post highlights top-secret documents that show the National Security Agency (NSA) collects unauthorized surveillance on Americans thousands of times per year.

The documents are a May 2012 audit that the NSA performed on its operations. Most of the privacy violations were unintended and resulted from things like typographical errors by analysts and programming errors. Some were much more serious, including one that involved unauthorized use of data on more than 3,000 US citizens. In that incident from February 2012, thousands of files containing telephone records were retained despite the fact that the NSA was ordered to destroy them by a surveillance court.

Overall, the audit found 2,776 "incidents" in which the NSA broke its own privacy rules while collecting information. The report breaks out data about the first quarter of 2012 in which 195 violations occurred.

Of those violations, 72 were a result of computer error, including 67 incidents where a computer system didn't recognize a "roamer," or a foreigner bringing a mobile phone into the US. "Operator error" accounted for the other 123 incidents and included 60 incidences where an operator had a "workload issue" such as inaccurate research. Meanwhile, in 39 incidents, the operator didn't follow operating procedures, and in 21 incidents, typographical errors or "overly broad search terms" led to illegal data collection. The report stated that of the 195 incidents in that quarter, 185 of them were a result of "unintentional collection."

Was that a call to Cairo or Columbia Heights?

In one incident, a programming error mistook the US area code (202) which serves Washington, DC, for +20, the international dialing code for Egypt. As a result, a "large number" of domestic American phone calls were "intercepted," according to The Post. The Post later clarified that by "intercepted" it was referring to call logs of "metadata," not the actual contents of the phone calls.

In what may be the most serious incident, the NSA mixed together US and foreign e-mails that it collected from tapping into a fiber-optic cable that passes through the United States. However, NSA lawyers told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that it couldn't filter out which e-mails belonged to Americans. In October 2011, the FISC responded that the e-mail collection effort must stop, and it was "deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds."

The audit that provides the basis for The Post's report is one of many documents that were provided to the paper a few months ago by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. It's essentially a catalogue of the NSA's mistakes only intended to be seen by the NSA's top leadership. Even Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, didn't get a copy until she was asked about the audit by The Post.

The paper reports that less than 10 percent of members of Congress have a staff member with the security clearance to read such reports and advise lawmakers on them. Members of Congress themselves may read the documents unredacted, but they must do it in a "special secure room, and they are not allowed to take notes."

The Post has made the full report available online with a few redactions. Other documents include:

A copy of the top-secret "SSO News" article which noted that the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court found the NSA in violation of privacy rules in 2011.

A slide used in NSA training telling analysts what to do when they accidentally, or intentionally, collect US personal data they shouldn't have.

A document telling NSA analysts how to explain their "target rationale" to the Department of Justice and Director of National Intelligence, which warns them not to provide too much information to their "overseers."

The Post has some of the same documents that Snowden leaked to The Guardian in the UK. In a tweet on Thursday evening, Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian reporter who has published the most information based on Snowden's leaks, acknowledged he still has more documents. He wrote, "I'm actively working on them every day."

Civil libertarians immediately chastised the government and its spy agencies for these legal violations.

“The number of ‘compliance incidents’ is jaw-dropping. The rules around government surveillance are so permissive that it is difficult to comprehend how the intelligence community could possibly have managed to violate them so often,” said Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union's deputy legal director, in a statement. “Obviously it’s important to know what precisely these compliance incidents involved, and some are more troubling than others. But at least some of these incidents seem to have implicated the privacy of thousands or millions of innocent people.”

Note: According to a correction published in The New York Times, The Post was inaccurate when it stated that calls to Washington, DC, were "intercepted," implying they were recorded. Rather, the NSA had mistakenly gathered logs of "metadata" about the calls. The calls were not recorded.