EFF Wins Release of Secret Court Opinion: NSA Surveillance Unconstitutional

mspohr writes "For over a year, EFF has been fighting the government in federal court to force the public release of an 86-page opinion of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Issued in October 2011, the secret court's opinion found that surveillance conducted by the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act was unconstitutional and violated 'the spirit of' federal law."

Comments

From TFA

[mcgrew]

The documents showed that the problems were relatively small when compared with the vast scale of N.S.A. surveillance conducted from the United States on noncitizens abroad. The ruling estimated that the agency intercepts more than 250 million communications that way each year. And the N.S.A. fixed the problems to the courtâ(TM)s satisfaction, the documents showed.

Interesting...

I should have finished reading before posting

[mcgrew]

But the documents also revealed further problems. In particular, Judge Bates portrayed the issue, which the N.S.A. had brought to the secret surveillance courtâ(TM)s attention after discovering that it had been happening for several years, as part of a broader pattern of misleading the oversight court about its domestic spying activities.

âoeThe Court is troubled that the governmentâ(TM)s revelations regarding N.S.A.â(TM)s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,â he wrote.

There need to be penalties. Someone should be brought up on charges.

Re:Accountability

[darkmeridian]

Did you read the decision? It sounds like you based your comment on a quick read of the summary. The decision focused on a very specific issue:

The ruling focused on a program under which the N.S.A. has been searching domestic Internet links for communications â" where at least one side is overseas â" in which there are âoestrong selectorsâ indicating insider knowledge of someone who has been targeted for foreign-intelligence collection. One example would be mentioning a personâ(TM)s private e-mail address in the body of an e-mail.

Most of the time, the system brings up single communications, like an e-mail or text message. But sometimes many messages are packaged and travel in a bundle that the N.S.A. calls âoemulti-communication transactions.â A senior intelligence official gave one example: a Web page for a private e-mail in-box that displays subject lines for dozens of different messages â" each of which is considered a separate communication, and only one of which may discuss the person who has been targeted for intelligence collection.

While Judge Bates ruled that it was acceptable for the N.S.A. to collect and store such bundled communications, he said the agency was not doing enough to minimize the purely domestic and unrelated messages to protect Americansâ(TM) privacy. In response, the N.S.A. agreed to filter out such communications and store them apart, with greater protections, and to delete them after two years instead of the usual five.

In short, the court was okay with most of the spying program and the intelligence architecture. The court was not that happy about specific details. That's kind of scary, isn't it, that a court thinks this program is mostly okay?

Re:Impeach Obummer!

[Darkness404]

The thing that makes Obama different than Bush is that Obama promised stuff like protection for whistleblowers and attacked the NSA's wiretapping.

Candidate Obama said that The Bush administration puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.

That is quite different than what President Obama is saying now.

This is very much like George Bush Sr.'s "Read my lips: no new taxes" line.

Nowhere did Candidate Bush nor President Bush vow to end illegal wiretapping. But Obama did.

Re:Tipping point

[LourensV]

We have 2 political parties in this country. They dictate the issues. The write the rules governing how you create a party, how you get on a ballet. Nearly everyone in the media belongs to one of the two parties. The parties control the message. You basically can not vote for anyone if they do not belong to one of the parties. You can write in a name, but the fact of the matter is it's nearly impossible to co-ordinate a write-in voting effort.

I'm not from the US, but given all that's happened in the past 15 years it seems to me that at this point voting either Republican or Democrat in any federal election should be considered treason. A vote for either of these parties is a vote for a government of the people, by the elite, for the corporations, and as I understand it, that wasn't quite the idea of your country. Perhaps a write-in or third party vote is a wasted vote, but at least you're not actively voting for this abomination.

As for alternatives besides your current third parties, in the most recent elections in Italy (which had similar issues) the Five Star Movement got almost a third of the vote in what was previously a two-party (or two-coalition) system, with a strictly online and on-the-streets campaign (they're boycotting the Berlusconi-controlled mainstream media). They're promoting amongst others more direct (e-)democracy, limited terms in both houses of congress filled by ordinary people who take a few years out of their lives to serve the country, and reduction in campaign spending.

It's certainly not perfect: they are having issues with disagreements within the party, it turns out online voting doesn't work too well technically, and some of their other policy ideas probably wouldn't work in the US. You'd need your own version of such a party for sure, fix some things, and then it still will be a struggle to make it work. But it shows that it's not impossible to break a two-party system even if it controls the mainstream media, and it's worth a try. Even inexperienced and/or somewhat incompetent representatives would be an improvement over what you currently have as long as they're at least honestly trying to represent the people.