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204 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS made from phones originating outside the United States by known foreign jihadists. If these calls were made to individuals inside, the NSA was now authorized to retrieve the billing records of the per- son called and those people whom he or she called. These traces were then supplied to the FBI. The new duties also increased the NSA’s need to create new bureaucratic mechanisms to monitor its compli- ance with FISA court orders. Rajesh De, the NSA’s general counsel at the time of the Snowden breach, described the NSA as becoming by 2013 “one of the most regulated enterprises in the world.” Grafted onto its intelligence activities were layers of mandated reporting to oversight officials. Not only did the NSA have its own chief compli- ance officer, chief privacy and civil liberties officer, and independent inspector general, but the NSA also had to report to a different set of compliance officers at the Department of Defense, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Justice. Additionally, the Department of Justice dispatched a team of lawyers every sixty days to review the results of “every single tasking deci- sion” approved by the FISA court. ) According to De, just assembling these reports involved thousands © of hours of manpower. In addition, the president’s Oversight Board required that the NSA’s Office of the General Counsel and inspec- tor general supply it every ninety days with a list of every single error and deviation from procedure made by every NSA employee anywhere in the world, including even minor typing errors. These requirements, according to De, inundated a large part of the NSA legal and executive staff in a sea of red tape. Yet this regulation could not undo surveillance programs such as the one Snowden revealed of Verizon’s turning over the billing records of its customers to the NSA, because the NSA was in compliance with the FISA court order (even though, as it turned out in 2015, the FISA court might have erred in interpreting the law). The NSA’s focus on surveillance might have led to the neglect of its other mission: protecting the integrity of the channels through which the White House, government agencies, and military units send information. This task had been made vastly more difficult by the proliferation of computer networks, texting, and e-mails. To protect government networks from cyber attacks, the Penta- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 204 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019692