Extended Ruling by Secret Court Backs Collection of Phone Data

Official portrait of NSA director Keith B. Alexander. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CHARLIE SAVAGE | New York Times | September 17, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday offered its most extensive public explanation for why it has allowed the government to keep records of all Americans’ phone calls, releasing a previously classified opinion in which it said the program was constitutional and did not violate Americans’ privacy rights.

While the once-secret call log program has been periodically reapproved by the court since 2006, it has come under criticism from members of Congress of both parties and civil libertarians since its existence came to public light in June after leaks by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

In a 29-page opinion that quoted the N.S.A. director, Keith Alexander, as saying the leaks had caused “significant and irreversible damage” to national security, Judge Claire V. Eagan, a federal judge in the Northern District of Oklahoma, declared that the program was lawful. So, she wrote, any decision about whether to keep it was a political question, not a legal one.

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Secret Spy Court Demands Surveillance Transparency From Feds

English: NSA chart as of 2001 Français : Organigramme de la NSA en 2001 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

David Kravets | Wired | Reader Supported News | September 15, 2013

The secret spy court at the center of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks today ordered the government to begin declassifying its opinions involving the Patriot Act.

The court, set up in 1978, said the move “would contribute to an informed public debate” (.pdf) by shedding light on interpretations of a surveillance law that requires the nation’s phone carriers to hand over to the NSA metadata associated with every call in the United States.

Today’s order by Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) means the government likely will have to make public opinions surrounding the court’s legal interpretations of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

As one of the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, the section allows the FISC to authorize broad warrants for most any type of “tangible” record, including those held by banks, doctors and phone companies.

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ACLU: NSA Surveillance Program Violates the Constitution

National Security Agency (Photo credit: Scott Beale)

Karen McVeigh | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | August 29, 2013

In a detailed court motion filed Monday as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the NSA, ACLU says program has ‘chilling effect.’

The National Security Agency’s mass tracking and collection of Americans’ phone call data violates the constitution, has a chilling effect on first amendment rights and should be halted, accord to a court motion filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on Monday.

In a detailed, legal critique of the NSA programme, the ACLU warned that such long-term surveillance “permits the government to assemble a richly detailed profile of every person living in the United States and to draw a comprehensive map of their associations with one another.”

The motion is part of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in June, one of several against the NSA following the Guardian’s disclosures via whistleblower Edward Snowden, of the agency’s mass surveillance of US citizens. Documents from Snowden revealed a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order directing Verizon to give the NSA all call detail records or “metadata” relating to every domestic and international call for three months, in a court direction that is renewed on an ongoing basis.

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Snowden Files: NSA Paid Millions to Cover Prism Compliance Costs for Tech Companies

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Ewen MacAskill  | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | August 23, 2013

• Top-secret files show first evidence of financial relationship
• Prism companies include Google and Yahoo, says NSA
• Costs were incurred after 2011 Fisa court ruling

The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency’s activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court.

The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA’s inability to separate purely domestic communications from foreign traffic violated the fourth amendment.

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Judge Found NSA Ran Roughshod Over the FISA Court for Years

Seal of the United States Department of Justice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Charlie Savage and Scott Shane | The New York Times | Reader Supported News | August 22, 2013

A  federal judge sharply rebuked the National Security Agency in 2011 for repeatedly misleading the court that oversees its surveillance on domestic soil, including a program that is collecting tens of thousands of domestic e-mails and other Internet communications of Americans each year, according to a secret ruling made public on Wednesday.

The 85-page ruling by Judge John D. Bates, then serving as chief judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, involved an N.S.A. program that systematically searches the contents of Americans’ international Internet communications, without a warrant, in a hunt for discussions about foreigners who have been targeted for surveillance.

The Justice Department had told Judge Bates that N.S.A. officials had discovered that the program had also been gathering domestic messages for three years. Judge Bates found that the agency had violated the Constitution and declared the problems part of a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court.

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Secret Court Rebuked N.S.A. on Surveillance

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE | New York Times | August 21, 2013

WASHINGTON — A federal judge sharply rebuked the National Security Agency in 2011 for repeatedly misleading the court that oversees its surveillance on domestic soil, including a program that is collecting tens of thousands of domestic e-mails and other Internet communications of Americans each year, according to a secret ruling made public on Wednesday.

The 85-page ruling by Judge John D. Bates, then serving as chief judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, involved an N.S.A. program that systematically searches the contents of Americans’ international Internet communications, without a warrant, in a hunt for discussions about foreigners who have been targeted for surveillance.

The Justice Department had told Judge Bates that N.S.A. officials had discovered that the program had also been gathering domestic messages for three years. Judge Bates found that the agency had violated the Constitution and declared the problems part of a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court.

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Obama Is Starting to Understand Why People Are So Upset About NSA Spying

Barack Obama (Photo credit: jamesomalley)

Matt Berman & Brian Resnick | The Atlantic | Washington Post | August 12, 2013

During a Friday afternoon press conference in the dead of summer, President Obama announced major proposals to change how his administration carries out national-security policy. The president laid out four goals:

1. Reform the Patriot Act program that collects telephone programs.
2. Work with Congress to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to introduce an “independent voice” that would “make sure the government’s position is challenged by an adversary.”
3. Increase transparency. The Department of Justice will make public the legal rationale for the collection of data. A website will also be created as “a hub” for further transparency.

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NSA Surveillance Needs More Than Window Dressing Reform

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Leighton Woodhouse | Reader Supported News | August 11, 2013

Yesterday, President Obama repeated what has become a familiar routine: after two months of bad press on a controversial issue, he made a grand gesture of conceding that his critics may have a point, even while largely holding to his increasingly untenable position, and announced a series of “reforms” that amount, at the end of the day, to window dressing. It was an even less persuasive version of his performance than his pretense of holding Wall Street accountable for the crimes that led to the economic meltdown.

Obama’s declared reforms of the massive and opaque government surveillance programs that have dramatically expanded on his watch are as follows:

• Set up a toothless committee to make non-binding recommendations months in the future, once it’s safe to ignore them.
• Hire a privacy officer in the NSA whom few in the agency will take seriously, possibly including the privacy officer him/herself.
• Appoint a privacy advocate to the FISA Court, and pretend that he/she is a reasonable stand-in for a truly adversarial court system.

None of these measures will come close to dealing with the serious Constitutional issues at stake in the continued existence of the government’s surveillance regime. Short of scrapping the NSA and the FISA Court altogether, nothing less than an about-face on the administration’s position on the public’s right to challenge the legal basis of the surveillance programs will even begin to bring government spying into line with the Constitution.

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Piercing the confusion around NSA’s phone surveillance program

Dana Priest | The Washington Post | August 9, 2013

On the third floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in downtown Washington, judges assigned to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court place their palms on a biometric hand scanner mounted next to the entrance door. Then the judges and their staff enter a code into door’s electronic cipher lock.

Inside a secure vault — one impenetrable to any sort of technical eavesdropping — the judges review some of the Justice Department’s most sensitive requests for access to private communications information, including the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, a collection that has generated significant criticism since it was disclosed in June.

The court is staffed year-round, and on an emergency basis, to authorize surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community. Although much attention has been focused on the court’s approval of the NSA’s so-called metadata phone records program, interviews with intelligence officers and experts, public statements and recently declassified documents indicate that the authorization marks the beginning of a long — and, U.S. officials say, carefully regulated — process.

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Broader Sifting of Data Abroad Is Seen by N.S.A.

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CHARLIE SAVAGE | New York Times | August 7, 2013

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

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