GOP Delayed Reauthorization of Patriot Act After Court Ruling Against NSA

This aerial photo shows the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters building in Fort Meade, Maryland. (photo: Handout/Reuters)

 

Dan Roberts and Sabrina Siddiqui | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | May 9, 2015

US appeal court rules NSA bulk data collection illegal under old law. Senate Republicans scramble for short-term fix on surveillance.

 

enate Republicans have conceded they may have to temporarily suspend plans for a long-term reauthorisation of the Patriot Act after a court ruling against its use by the National Security Agency dramatically turned around the prospects for surveillance reform in Washington.

Three US appeal court judges threw the existing plan – to extend the NSA’s power to collect bulk metadata from American phone records for five years – into chaos on Thursday when they ruled that it was unlawful even under the old legislation.

Now, with the relevant section of the Patriot Act due to expire at the end of the month, Republican leaders in Congress are scrambling to find a shorter-term fix to keep the programme alive as it looks likely that the court ruling will prevent them from securing the necessary votes for a full extension in the remaining six days of this legislative session.

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Court Rules NSA Bulk Spying Illegal: New Vindication for Snowden, and Uncertainty for PATRIOT Act

Democracy Now | May 8, 2015

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers around the country and the world. A federal appeals court has ruled the national security agency’s bulk collection of million of American’s phone records is illegal. The program was first exposed in 2013 by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And the ACLU filed its lawsuit based largely on Snowden’s revelations. In a unanimous decision, Thursday, a three-judge panel, a second circuit court of appeals in New York, called the bulk phone records collection unprecedented and unwarranted. Judge Gerald Lynch wrote, “the government does not even suggest that all of the records sought or even necessarily any of them are relevant to any specific defined inquiry. In a concurring opinion, Judge Robert sack wrote, “considering the issue of advocacy in the context of deliberations involving alleged state secrets, and more broadly, the ‘leak’ by Edward Snowden that led to this litigation, calls to mind the disclosures by Daniel Ellsberg, that gave rise to the legendary ‘Pentagon Papers’ litigation.”

AMY GOODMAN: Thursday’s ruling comes as Congress faces a June 1 deadline to renew part of the patriot act that authorizes the NSA’s bulk data program. Another measure called the USA Freedom Act would lead to limited reforms of some NSA programs if passed. For more, we turn to Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU which filed the case challenging the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. His new article for Slate is called, “Flip the Patriot Act’s Kill Switch: Let the Worst Parts of the Law Die.” Well, Jameel, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of the court ruling.

JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, it is a very important ruling. It is something that we have been looking for now for almost two years since the first Snowden disclosures. This is a lawsuit relating to the call records program which is a program under which the NSA is collecting information about essentially every phone call made in the United States. Every time you pick up the phone the NSA has a record of who you called and how long you spoke to them and at what time you called. And that is an immense amount of information. They are collecting and not only about suspected terrorists and criminals, but about everybody, everybody in the country. So we challenged that program right after the first Snowden disclosures back in June of 2013, and it has been winding its way through the courts. And yesterday, we got this decision from a unanimous federal appeals court in New York and the opinion essentially says that the call records program isn’t authorized by the statute that the government is relying on. The Patriot Act is very broad, but even that has limits. The government has gone beyond the limits. So it’s a great ruling and it’s significant, not only because if the ruling stands, if it’s not overturned, it will end the call records program, but also because the same legal theory that the government is relying on to justify the call records program, it’s relying on to justify many other mass surveillance programs as well. So this ruling is going to require the government to reconsider some of those other programs as well.

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Billion Dollar Bracket Data Mining Scheme

The Switch: Government privacy board members say shifting NSA data to third parties is a bad idea

Andrea Peterson | Washington Post | Trove | January 23, 2014

 

Every member of a government board responsible for advising the government on balancing civil liberties with national security seems to think moving the National Security Agency’s (NSA)’s massive database of domestic call records into the hands of a third party — one of the major changes to the program proposed by President Obama last week — is a bad idea.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent executive branch agency modeled on a 9/11 Commission recommendation, released its report Thursday on the NSA’s domestic phone records collection program. A three-person majority of the five-person group recommended shutting down that program, which they describe as being without grounding in Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, the statute upon which it is based.

Although the board shared its conclusions with Obama before his NSA speech, the president did not agree with the group’s primary recommendation of ending the program altogether. Instead, Obama announced changes to the nature of the program, including moving telephony metadata out of government hands. While the exact details of that proposed arrangement remain murky, today’s report and remarks by the board members signal that none of them think it’s a good idea.

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The Latest to Disclose Government Requests, Yahoo Reveals the Least

VINDU GOEL | New York Times | June 17, 2013

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, Yahoo disclosed late Friday some broad data about the number of requests that American law enforcement authorities had made for data about its users.

From Dec. 1, 2012, to May 31, 2013, the Internet company received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests from the government, related to everything from local crimes to terrorism investigations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations,” the company said in a post on Tumblr, the blogging platform it recently acquired.

Unlike the other companies, which have been criticized for disclosing too little information, Yahoo did not specify how many users were included in the 12,000 to 13,000 requests.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders Proposes Limits on Surveillance

Reader Supported News | June 17, 2013

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation to put strict limits on sweeping powers used by the National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation to secretly track telephone calls by millions of innocent Americans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

“We must give our intelligence and law enforcement agencies all of the tools that they need to combat terrorism but we must do so in a way that protects our freedom and respects the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches,” Sanders said.

The legislation filed late yesterday would put limits on records that may be searched. Authorities would be required to establish a reasonable suspicion, based on specific information, in order to secure court approval to monitor business records related to a specific terrorism suspect.

Sanders’ bill would put an end to open-ended court orders that have resulted in wholesale data mining by the NSA and FBI. Instead, the government would be required to provide reasonable suspicion to justify searches for each record or document that it wants to examine.

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Not Just the NSA: Politicians Are Data Mining the American Electorate

John Nichols | The Nation | June 11, 2013

As long as we’re opening a discussion about data mining, might we consider  the fact that it’s not just the government that’s paying attention to our  digital entanglements?

There’s a reason the National Security Agency was interested  in accessing the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk,  AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. When you’re mining, you go where the precious  resources are, and technology companies have got the gold.

Data is digital gold. Corporations know that. They’re big into data  mining.

But it’s not just profits that data can yield.

Data is also mined by those who seek power.

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On NSA Spying, What’s With the Silence of the Lambs?

Peter Laarman | LA Progressive | June 11, 2013

Please, let us have no more talk of “freedom-loving Americans.” That phrase is now completely inoperable. We might note that the Leader of the Free World spent the weekend in broiling Palm Springs trying to find an opening to plead with Mr. Xi about good behavior in cyberspace.

Our politics are so thoroughly polarized that the Left, including the Religious Left, is now extremely leery of speaking out against the breathtaking scope of surveillance taking place in the name of national security. The denunciatory words that flowed so freely during the reign of Bush the Younger now curdle in the throat.

But I still want to say that we cannot afford to sit this one out, even though speaking out against the NSA’s activities at this time may well give a slight bump to conservative whining about an intrusive (more like clueless) IRS. The issue of Orwellian-scale data mining absolutely requires active, unbuttoned critique and protest.

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Details of secret Internet data collection program declassified

Daniel Strauss and Brendan Sasso | The Hill | June 8, 2013

The head of U.S. intelligence released  new details on Saturday about the federal government’s secretive program to  monitor Internet users.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied that the program,  called PRISM, “unilaterally” obtains information from the servers of U.S.  Internet companies.

“PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program,” Clapper said  in a statement. “It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate  the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence  information from electronic communication service providers under court  supervision, as authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence  Surveillance Act (FISA).”

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White House Plays Down Data Program

JONATHAN WEISMAN and DAVID E. SANGER | New York Times | June 8, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration tried Saturday to marshal new evidence in defense of its collection of private Internet and telephone data, arguing that a secret program called Prism is simply an “internal government computer system” designed to sort through court-supervised collection of data, and that Congress has been briefed 13 times on the programs since 2009.

After rushing to declassify some carefully selected descriptions of the programs, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, conceded for the first time that the Prism program existed. But in a statement, after denouncing the leak of the data to The Guardian and The Washington Post, Mr. Clapper insisted it was “not an undisclosed collection or data mining program.” Instead, he said it was a computer system to “facilitate” the collection of foreign intelligence that had been authorized by Congress.

Mr. Clapper also insisted that the government “does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers” of telephone and Internet providers, saying that information is turned over only under court order, when there is a “documented, foreign intelligence purpose for acquisition” of the data.

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