More Mistakes at the N.S.A. A fresh trove of previously classified documents released on Tuesday provides further evidence - as if any more were needed - that the National Security Agency has frequently been unable to comprehend, let alone manage, its vast and continuing collection of Americans" telephone and Internet records. The documents, made available by the agency in response to lawsuits by two advocacy groups, revealed that in 2009 a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court severely reprimanded the agency for violating its own procedures for gathering and analyzing phone records, and then misrepresented those violations to the court. The agency gathers data on billions of telephone calls. But to examine a specific phone number it must have "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the number is connected to terrorism. The agency keeps an "alert list" with about 18,000 phone numbers it suspects may be linked to terrorism, and it compares new call data to numbers on the list. But while agency lawyers told the court that all the numbers on the list met the required legal standard of suspicion, only about 10 percent of the numbers on the list actually did so. The judge in the case, Reggie B. Walton, sharply rebuked the agency not only for violating its own rules but for failing to fix the problem. Although the agency said it had retrained its analysts, he pointed out that many of them continued to repeat the error, some because they had not installed proper software and others, apparently, without even realizing it. The violations were both so frequent and so systemic, Judge Walton found, that the privacy safeguards the court ordered "never functioned effectively." Alarmingly, the agency itself acknowledged that "there was no single person who had a complete technical understanding" of the system its analysts were using. Intelligence officials insist that "technologically complex" surveillance activities will always be prone to human error. But that is precisely the problem - indeed a problem greatly multiplied - when the government collects personal information on such a vast scale. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said that while he welcomed the release of the documents, they showed "systemic problems" and that the bulk collection program should be stopped. Senator Leahy is right, particularly given that the intelligence court has no adversarial process and is at the mercy of the government's competence at ferreting out its own incompetence. As Judge Walton told The Washington Post in August, the court "is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided" to it. President Obama has said he welcomes an open debate on the balance between protecting national security and preserving civil liberties, but how can that debate ever be truly open when the government insists on policing itself and hiding the results? While the recent declassifications are a step toward greater openness, it is still hard to accept the claim made on Tuesday by James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, that the "handful of compliance incidents" that have happened each year since 2009 are "the result of human error or provider error" and not because of "systemic misunderstandings." In a statement released Tuesday, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall said "significant information" regarding violations of the bulk e-mail collection program still remains classified. Judge Walton anticipated as much when he wrote in his 2009 ruling that he saw "little reason to believe that the most recent discovery of a systemic, ongoing violation ... will be the last."