> What seems odd to me is that this "investigation" takes more than a few minutes. How is a system that allows easy auditing and checks and balances also the sa

> What seems odd to me is that this "investigation" takes more than a few minutes. How is a system that allows easy auditing and checks and balances also the same system that takes weeks or months to determine who accessed specific records. I agree with regards to viewing the data. But that would imply it was a matter of asking NSA to check the audit trail. With a topic so politically charged, I would hope that they would instead get an independent committee with proper security clearances to get access to the data in their SCIF and be able to ask questions to fully understand each action taken and assure it is all above board. I do not have direct knowledge of how such an investigation would work, but my point is that retrieving the audit trail is probably an easy aspect of a longer process.