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."

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:Impeach Obummer!

[Anonymous Coward]

"WIRED first reported on such an eavesdropping installation in 2007 when a former AT&T technician provided documents outlining eavesdropping technology used by AT&T. Both the government and AT&T have declined to confirm the documents’ authenticity."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/nsa-tapping-internet/

Re:From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

We do not need an amendment, there is no provision allowing for a Secret Court in the Federal Constitution and therefore can not be constitutionally valid. Why do we some how become ignorant to the point and continually forget if the authority or power is NOT EXPLICITLY granted to the Federal Government it doesn't exist. No branch of the Federal Government can grant itself new powers via the constitution as all their authorities & power is derived from it. It is our laziness, fear fullness, ignorance that we the people allow this ridiculous behavior to continue. Law is explicit and implicit, not assumed nor implied. Get off your rear end and educate yourself about common law principles and hold all your representatives in all branches accountable, take no bullshit from them.

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:Impeach Obummer!

[Anonymous Coward]

The federal government was responsible for the failure of the levies. Louisiana and New Orleans government officials were responsible for the people of their city and state.

The head of FEMA, Mayor Nagan and the Governor Blanco should have been jailed for malfeasance.

Re:Impeach Obummer!

[AK Marc]

For stupid definitions of "is" yes. And for the stupid definitions Clinton was ordered to answer under, he gave the only truthful answer. But the conservative media trimmed the full question down to make people assume the "normal" definition, then he was impeached for answering a stupid question truthfully.

Well, he was impeached for Contempt of Conservative, they just managed to find a different excuse to make it look legal.

Re:Farce royale

[quacking duck]

You at the other side of the pond have generated a farce beyond fantasy

An amazing statement considering recent events in the UK with respect to the Snowden story. Hubris.

Nice deflection attempt. Knee-jerk "you're no better!" defensiveness, and it wasn't even aimed at "you" but at USA the country.

The US claims to be better than the rest, including its western allies, yet it can't even set the proper standard for itself nor own up to its obvious current failures.

Re:Romney wouldn't have. Maybe a Bush did?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Then again, Romney gave away 30% of his income, which is very UNLIKE Clinton and suggests he may be a man of character.

Giving money to your own social clubs like the mormon church and its affiliates like Brigham Young University, or the George W Bush Library, or the private school where 5 of his kids attended isn't charity, it's tax-deductible self-interest.

Before I posted I went and read up on his tax returns, just to make sure that my assumption of self-interest was true. That he hadn't made a liar out of me and my cynicism by really giving the bulk of his donations to organizations that would not benefit himself in one way or another. In the process I found out some interesting "character" related points:

1) His 2010 tax return showed only 11% of his income went to non-profit deductions. The mormon church directly gets 10% straight off the bat as tithing, leaving 1% for everything else. In fact, his own 20-year summary shows he averaged less than 12.6% until the 30% spike in 2011 brought the average up to just under 13.5%. Why such an outlier in 2011 when he had roughly half the income that he did in 2010? Seems to me that once he won the party primary his donations went up.

2) In 2011 he did not claim the maximum allowed tax deductions for his donations. He only claimed a deduction for $2.25 of the $4 million that was eligible. Why would he do that? Well, the guy who runs Romney's family trust said it helped to keep his campaign promise of paying at least 13% in income tax every year. Here's my question, now that he lost the election, did he go back and file an amended return to claim the entire $4M? We will probably never know, maybe a real man of character would not. A real republican would be happy to over-pay his taxes without a complaint, right?

My source for those two points is this article at The Blaze [theblaze.com] - I figured I'd go with a conservative news source to give Romney the benefit of the doubt in the reporting.

This is not to say the Clintons' donations weren't similar self-serving, that's not my point at all. I'm saying you are drawing a questionable conclusion based on a narrow reading of the facts.

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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:From TFA

[LoyalOpposition]

Yeah sorry dude but there hasn't been a judge, founding father, legislator or even constitutional clause since foundation thats actually said this. This is a fantasy of the tea party whackys.

Does Chief Justice Marshall count? He once said, "This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it, would seem too apparent, to have required to be enforced by all those arguments, which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted." I'm pretty sure he's not a tea party whacky. How about Chief Justice William Rehnquist? He's the one who wrote the majority opinion when striking down the Gun Free School Zone Act in United States v. Lopez.

~Loyal