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FISC Chief Judge: We Can't Effectively Oversee the NSA
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Washington Post: 'The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government's vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government's surveillance breaks the court's rules that aim to protect Americans' privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government's assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes.' President Obama said in June, 'We also have federal judges that we've put in place who are not subject to political pressure. They've got lifetime tenure as federal judges, and they're empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren't being abused.' Not so much, Mr. President."
I have finally figured out why the statue holding 'the scales of justice' wore a blindfold! ;-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Translation: The whole thing is a monumentally tragic, Constitution-violating fuck up, brought to you by two successive Administrations and a Congress that couldn't give a flying fuck about the Constitution.
What a pathetic situation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Change You Can Believe In"!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
we haven't had checks and balances in our government since the Gore V Bush decision, when Bush's dad's appointed supreme court ruled it's more important to abide by Florida's arbitrary date to count their votes than to count all the fucking votes using as much time as is necessary to insure an accurate count. why the fuck would anyone trust the US courts now? especially after the "corporations are people" decision.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Obama delivered on the Transparency though, can see right through him
Can we wantonly spy on your Internet activities?
YES WE CAN!
Can we store your email and search it at our leisure?
YES WE CAN!
Can we create a judicial overview process so flimsy and one-sided that there's almost no chance of any request being turned down?
YES WE CAN!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So, your honor, please tell us why you didn't bring these concerns to our attention before somebody with more guts than you'll ever have brought the matter up?
Hell, you probably could have brought these concerns up without even revealing anything classified, or breaking any rules. They probably didn't remember to make it a state secret that you have no oversight powers worth mentioning, so it would have been entirely licit for you to complain about that.
We might as well be honest here: Every day that you knew you had no oversight; but remained as a FISC justice, much less chief justice, you knowingly operated as a rubber stamp and a pitiful facade of rule of law. A rubber stamp for a program that you cannot have been stupid enough to think was entirely on the up-and-up. Unimpressive. Cowardly. Unworthy of your office.
"represtitive government"
Is that a portmanteau of "repressive representative" government?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
They should just appoint a special investigator.
They could give the investigator over-arching extra-legal authority, just like the agency he'd be investigating.
I hear Edward Snowden has some experience in this area, and is currently in need of a job...
Oh, I'm sure they'll pick someone from the NSA who will report to the NSA, and the report will be sealed and we'll get to watch a press conference where the President intones very seriously "I won't comment on the contents of the report, but suffice to say you can trust me and there's nothing to worry about."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm not, because Congress long ago abandoned a key role as a check on the Executive in favor of near constant partisan bickering. The end result is little more than a bitching chamber, where the party on top pushes its agenda, the other party consumes itself in trying to fuck up that agenda and get to the top. They are basically blind to all other considerations, and a pure political animals, squared off into two warring tribes, who have no sense of civic duty, no sense of morality or any sense of their purpose.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This isn't partisan hackery. Plenty of people who thought that Obama was going to make things better have been thoroughly disillusioned.
The NSA has worked out fusion?! Excellent, at least then some of the dollars spent might have a useful offshoot... if only we could get them to declassify it.
The DoD worked out fusion quite nicely about 65 years ago. The energy yields of the reactors are truly impressive---their best experimental reactor had an output of something like 60 petajoules from negligible input power. (The Soviets built an even bigger reactor with close to 200 PJ). It's the containment facility that's been giving us problems since then. Work out that little detail, and you're sitting on a gold mine.
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