Re:Federal Prosecutors, in a Policy Shift, Cite Warrantless ...
by codex on Sunday October 27, 2013 @01:55PM
(#6622726)
I should be clearer: I don't think Obama wants to end foreign surveillance (totally constitutional), or even metadata surveillance (declared constitutional by SCOTUS).
It's the unintentional collection of data on U.S. citizens that is politically damaging. However, he can't kill that part of the program himself as it totally hobbles the NSA's foreign surveillance capabilities--it's very hard for them to correctly screen out U.S. citizens. To achieve a 0% false positive rate, they'd probably have to throw away 99% of traffic with today's techniques.
So he'd either like the courts to do it for him, or for them to validate the approach (as you say). Showing that NSA data is being used to prosecute a terrorist is a political win, either way.
It's the unintentional collection of data on U.S. citizens that is politically damaging. However, he can't kill that part of the program himself as it totally hobbles the NSA's foreign surveillance capabilities--it's very hard for them to correctly screen out U.S. citizens. To achieve a 0% false positive rate, they'd probably have to throw away 99% of traffic with today's techniques.
So he'd either like the courts to do it for him, or for them to validate the approach (as you say). Showing that NSA data is being used to prosecute a terrorist is a political win, either way.