A look at the laws which the administration (to include NSA, DOJ, etc.) use to justify the mass hoovering of phone & internet data of the entirety of the citizenry.
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of legal and lexicographical legerdemain to go from the black & white of the (already permissive) laws to the totalitarian level of collection revealed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.html?pagewanted=2&_r=4&ref=opinion&pagewanted=all&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29&The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.
Even in the fearful time when the Patriot Act was enacted, in October 2001, lawmakers never contemplated that Section 215 would be used for phone metadata, or for mass surveillance of any sort. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and one of the architects of the Patriot Act, and a man not known as a civil libertarian, has said that “Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations.” The N.S.A.’s demand for information about every American’s phone calls isn’t “targeted” at all — it’s a dragnet. “How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?” Mr. Sensenbrenner has asked. The answer is simple: It’s not.
The government claims that under Section 215 it may seize all of our phone call information now because it might conceivably be relevant to an investigation at some later date,
Like the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government very broad surveillance authority. And yet the Prism program appears to outstrip that authority. In particular, the government “may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.”
The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.
How could vacuuming up Americans’ communications conform with this legal limitation? Well, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC, the N.S.A. uses the word “acquire” only when it pulls information out of its gigantic database of communications and not when it first intercepts and stores the information.
If there’s a law against torturing the English language, James Clapper is in real trouble.
Leave aside the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act for a moment, and turn to the Constitution.
The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.
The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.
The original laws were already overbroad. The executive and the legislature have ignored any codified legal limitations and gone hog wild under the veil of secrecy.
I think the time has come where we can no longer tolerate
any level of secrecy when it comes to domestic surveillance.
And let there be no doubt: this is domestically-directed, no matter the "51% level of confidence of foreignness."(1) These operations and courts and procedures simply must be made open, as we have seen that our gov't is not worthy of our trust. They have shown what they will do when unobserved and they need a chaperone when playing with taxpayer-funded spook toys.
1. A foreign focus.
2. A domestic surveillance model that relies more on "patrol and presence" than "ambush." The smart terrorists have already gone the tor & encrypted comms route. They even have their own encryption software packages. "Jihadicom Version 2.3: Now with automated darknet access!"
3. No more immigration from muslim countries. Immigration policy ought to be based on what is best for the citizens, not foreigners. We can get by just fine without any muslim immigrants. We absolutely must get over the "Invade the world, invite the world" mental illness.
Disturbing thought of the week:
NSA collects all this phone & net data and stores it away. Eventually most data & docs become declassified and subject to FOIA. (Even when FOUO tricks are played.) Will you be happy to know your telephone & web browsing habits will eventually be subject to FIA requests?
(1) "We certify your breakfast cereal to be at least 51% grains and 49% rat droppings."
