Ken Dilanian and Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times’s Washington Bureau have some more important context for the extravagant claims made by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. According to their report, security analysts say Snowden’s claim that he could “wiretap anyone,” up to and including the President, is a “complete and utter falsehood.”

Analysts said that Snowden seems to have greatly exaggerated the amount of information available to him and people like him.

Any NSA analyst “at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere,” Snowden told the Guardian. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.”

Robert Deitz, a former top lawyer at the NSA and CIA, called the claim a “complete and utter” falsehood. “First of all it’s illegal,” he said. “There is enormous oversight. They have keystroke auditing. There are, from time to time, cases in which some analyst is [angry] at his ex-wife and looks at the wrong thing and he is caught and fired,” he said.

According to the Times, analysts are under “stringent” internal supervision, to the point where some complain that the many levels of oversight and technical limits make it difficult to do their jobs.

“It’s actually very difficult to do your job,” said a former senior NSA operator, who also declined be quoted by name because of the sensitive nature of the case. “There are all these checks that don’t allow you to move agilely enough.”

For example, the former operator said, he had go through an arduous process to obtain FISA court permission to gather Internet data on a foreign nuclear weapons proliferator living abroad because some of the data was passing through U.S. wires.

“When he’s saying he could just put any phone number in and look at phone calls, it just doesn’t work that way,” he said. ” It’s absurd. There are technical limits, and then there are people who review these sorts of queries.”