Why did the NSA breach privacy protections?

National Security Agency analysts under the Obama administration improperly searched Americans' information, but the searches were conducted largely out of error, according to a review of publicly available intelligence documents reported on by Circa last week.

The website reported that Obama's NSA violated privacy protections by searching a subset of intelligence for Americans' information. The story draws in part from a partially declassified April 2017 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion, which says that the NSA repeatedly and inappropriately queried, or searched, "U.S. person identifiers" within a swath of data. The data was collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, meaning that it targeted a foreigner, on foreign soil, for a foreign intelligence purpose.

The NSA at the time was not allowed to search a chunk of intelligence, known as "upstream," using U.S. person identifiers (like an American's email address)—but it did, and "with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed" to the FISC. Upstream data is obtained from "providers that control the telecommunications "backbone" over which telephone and Internet communications transit," according to an independent government oversight agency.

Of this, Circa wrote:

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.