Re:October 3, 2011 FISC Opinion Holding NSA Surveillance Unc...
by dragonwriter on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @04:46PM
(#6253200)
Yeah, I think the major revelation here is that the Administration clearly had a pattern of withholding and misrepresenting what was doing in order to get the FISC to approve it. Aside from the obvious negative aspects, there is a minor positive aspect here: clearly, the court wasn't seen as a "rubber stamp".
And this clearly takes the program out of the realm of honest attempts to protect security within the law where perhaps there are disagreements, major or minor, about the boundaries; a regular pattern of misrepresentation to the court overseeing surveillance erases any grounds to claim that the surveillance effort did not involve deliberate, conscious illegality and deliberate, conscious efforts to conceal that illegality.
Re:October 3, 2011 FISC Opinion Holding NSA Surveillance Unc...
by interurban on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @03:57PM
(#6252941)
In reference to the required standards for querying by the NSA:
The Court concluded that this requirement had been 'so frequently and systematically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall.. regime has never functioned effectively.'
edit: from Pg. 16, footnoote 14
Re:October 3, 2011 FISC Opinion Holding NSA Surveillance Unc...
by discostrings on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @03:58PM
(#6252944)
The first of the instances mentioned in footnote 14 involves the NSA running overly broad queries on telephone records that violate the court's allowances. The second is fully redacted. Sounds pretty serious!
> The Court is troubled that the government's revelations regarding NSA'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.
On Page 17, the revelation that the NSA were acquiring Internet transactions before the Court's approval of Section 702:
> The government's submissions make clear not only that NSA has been acquiring Internet transactions since before the Court's approval of the first Section 702 certification in 2008, but also that NSA seeks to continue the collection of Internet transactions.
On Page 71, the revelation that data acquired via upstream interception pales in comparison to that acquired directly from Internet service providers:
> Nor do these disclosures affect NSA's collection of Internet communications directly from Internet service providers [redacted], which accounts for approximately 91% of the Internet communications acquired by NSA each year under Section 702.