Natasha Lennard | Salon | Social Reader | November 19, 2013
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
Newly declassified (although heavily redacted) government documents revealed for the first time last Monday how the secretive FISA court enabled the NSA to begins its vast dragnet program surveilling Americans’ online metadata.
The FISA files illustrate how the spy agency’s mass surveillance practices were inscribed into law, but also highlight how even the FISA judges were concerned and surprised by the extent of the dragnet spycraft. Court orders also released Monday show that the NSA “systematically” skirted the rules by engaging in consistent “overcollection.”
One court document published shows how a FISA judge ruled, along with a single 1979 Supreme Court decision on which the NSA still relies, that metadata should enjoy no Fourth Amendment protection. This, despite the fact that technologists have agreed that metadata provides an immense amount of information on persons and their networks.
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