The NSA has published its first ever “transparency report”, and surprise, surprise – it’s anything but ‘transparent’.

The report supposedly reveals the number of ‘targets’ the agency has spied upon, although the NSA’s confusing definition of the word “transparency” makes it somewhat difficult to understand the data it provides.

“Within the Intelligence Community, the term ‘target’ has multiple meanings,” the report states. “For example, ‘target’ could be an individual person, a group, or an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information that the U.S. government is authorized to acquire by the above-referenced laws.”

To muddle things even further, the report reveals that the NSA issued just one order in 2013 under Section 702 of FISA, which allowed it to spy on some 89,138 targets as defined above – but doesn’t break these down by number of individuals, companies or nation states, so the true number of ‘targets’ is as clear as mude. Aside from this, an additional 131 orders were issued under “FISA Pen Register/Trap and Trace (Title IV of FISA)”, affecting 319 targets. Finally, there were 1,767 FISA orders issued due to “probable cause”, which were used against 1,144 targets.

The NSA also reports information about the Government’s use of the FISA Business Records provision (Title V) separately, because “this data can be used in two ways – the collection of business records to obtain information about a specific subject and collection of business records in bulk.” In total, there were 178 applications under Title V over the last year, with 423 search selectors approved to be queried under its telephony metadata collection program, and 248 people “known or presumed US persons” targeted under the business records search procedures.

Finally, the report also covers the number of national security letters issued – essentially, these are the subpoenas from the FBI that, until Snowden dropped his bombshell, tech companies weren’t allowed to reveal to targeted customers. According to the report, 19,212 such letters and 38,832 requests for information were sent out last year. That’s a huge amount of applications, and also slightly worrying when one considers the limited nature of Google and other firm’s transparency data.

Google reported receiving between zero and 999 national security letters in its most recent transparency report – this would seem to suggest that a large majority of the requests it does receive are of a secretive nature.

photo credit: burge5k via photopin cc