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How Secret Partners Expand NSA's Surveillance Dragnet
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance. But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as "third-party partners," are playing an increasingly important role – by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables. The NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners "provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment." This allows the agency to covertly tap into "congestion points around the world" where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.
The way they operate (at least within ECHELON a.k.a. "five eyes" / AUSCANNZUKUS) is that we spy on their citizens while they spy on ours, and then information is exchanged after the fact, thereby avoiding any country "spying on its own citizens." It's essentially a loophole in the 4th amendment and its counterparts in those countries.
The Supreme Court is pretty cowardly about that stuff. They have, time and again, utterly failed to rule that if the government is prohibited from doing X, and doing Y achieves the same goal, then Y is also prohibited. Example: the federal government has no power to set a national drinking age. It is specifically given to the states in the amendment that repealed Prohibition. So they threaten to withhold highway funds unless states do it for them, and that goal is achieved.
One's opinion on the issue shouldn't be relevant: the effect of this is that Congress has done something that they are in fact not allowed to do. The mechanism is irrelevant to a thinking person. Yet the Supreme Court had no problem with this, and of course since it only affected young people nobody in the US stood up for it. Now we have this massive spying problem going on, using much the very same logic, and you expect the Supreme Court to apply proper logic to it? I very much doubt it.