Employees of NSA Spying on Love Interests, Spouses, and Lovers

What is LOVEINT?

NSA employees were spying on their significant others by using the NSA's "eavesdropping programme." The agency itself jokingly referred to these violations as LOVEINT — a play on the operation names for HUMINT (human intelligence) and SIGINT (signal intelligence).

How many LOVEINT cases were there?

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the NSA told her committee about a set of "isolated cases" that had occurred about once a year for the last 10 years. The spying was not within the US — it was carried out when one of the lovers was abroad. One employee was disciplined for using the NSA's resources to track a former spouse, the Associated Press reported.

NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong said on a conference call with reporters that there had been "a couple" of willful violations in the past decade. The Wall Street Journal estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — significantly more than "a couple," but still far fewer than what critics feared.

What about the 3,000 violations?

A separate report revealed more than 3,000 violations of privacy rules by NSA employees in a one-year period — but those were violations overall, the overwhelming majority unintentional (over-collection, misapplied rules, and the like). The LOVEINT cases were only the tiny willful slice of that number. DeLong's "a couple" was meant to cover just the intentional abuses.

Why did this matter?

The admission appeared to contradict public statements from high-ranking officials. NSA Director Keith Alexander had said on August 8, 2013, that "no one has willfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy." And Feinstein had said on August 16 that her committee had "never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes." The LOVEINT revelations forced both to revise that record.

Edward Snowden, who had sought asylum in Russia, had revealed the extent of NSA spying on its citizens — and LOVEINT became the punchline that made the surveillance state personal.

Reason: NSA surveillance abuses