Do NSA compliance reports point to an unknown classification compartment?
(UPDATED December 9, 2017) On July 12, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published two Top Secret NSA compliance reports, which were obtained after declassification under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). Here we will take a look the classification marking of these reports, of which one part has been redacted: Both documents are quarterly reports from the NSA to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on compliance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which governs both the PRISM and the Upstream collection efforts. One of the reports is from March 2014 , the other one from March 2015 . More about the content of these two compliance reports can be found in this article by The Hill, as well as in this posting on the weblog EmptyWheel.net. Here we will take a look at the classification of these reports. Classification marking The classification line of both reports is: TOP SECRET//[...]/SI//ORCON/NOFORN , which stands for: - TOP SECRET: the highe