The FISA Court Knew the NSA Lied Repeatedly About Its Spying, Approved Its Searches Anyway

[kpete]

Shockingly, the court notes on page 30 that the NSA "acquires more than two hundred fifty million Internet communications each year persuant to section 702, but the vast majority of these communications are obtained from Internet service providers and are not at issue" in this case. (The ISPs are redacted.)

From there, the court notes that the NSA's own review of its collected data included hundreds of communications that involved solely domestic recipients, which is wholly illegal even under the broad surveillance powers decreed by Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. A pair footnotes from page 35 explain:





We've learned in the past few months that the NSA has been conducting domestic surveillance for years, which is entirely illegal under the laws granting it power for warrantless surveillance in the first place. But what's truly shocking is that the secret court tasked with overseeing the legality of the NSA's operations knew it had conducted overly-broad operations and had lied about it.

Yet even though the FISC wrote that it's concerned, it writes in its conclusion on page 78 that the "government's proposed application of NSA's targeting and minimization procedures to MCTs is consistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment."



Read more: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-fisa-court-knew-the-nsa-lied-repeatedly-about-its-spying-approved-its-searches-anyway#ixzz2cjWXX8Nv
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[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. .

[Cali_Democrat]

4. Who watches the people watching the watchmen?

Who watches the people watching the watchmen watchers?

[Wilms]

7. Who can take you seriously?

[RetroLounge]

2. K&R

RL

[rhett o rick]

3. k&r thanks for posting. nm

[Catherina]

5. K&R! n/t

[backscatter712]

6. I think oversight of the three-letter agencies needs to be moved to regular federal courts.

The argument is that because regular courts can't deal with Uber-Secret information, they need an Uber-Secret-Special Court, namely, the FISA Court, to deal with judicial issues related to spooky stuff.

Bullshit.

Courts have managed to deal with and protect sensitive information virtually since courts were invented.

And the standard District, Circuit and Supreme Courts are more than capable of dealing with secret information.

Oh, but the judge doesn't have a security clearance? Why not? He's a federal judge. He's got significant authority. If he's the kind of person that is to be trusted with the authority to change or wreck people's lives, surely, they can be trusted with a security clearance. If there's some reason they're not to be trusted, they shouldn't be judges.

Not only should the judges have the clearance to look at the secret stuff, but there should be a pool of US attorneys, defense attorneys and civil-suit attorneys that also have security clearances, and thus can peek at the Uber Secret stuff.

The judges, BTW, should have the power not just to look, but to rule on whether something should be secret at all. Secrecy laws were meant to protect genuinely sensitive information: identities of CIA agents, nuclear launch codes, that sort of thing. Secrecy laws damned well should not be used to conceal criminal activity and persecute those blowing the whistle on said activities. If judges see such activities, they should order evidence of criminal activities declassified, and those responsible should face the music in the courtroom like other criminals.

That's why we have three branches of government, and our system of checks and balances. I say it's time to get our judicial branch doing their job and providing a check and balance, and some oversight on executive branch agencies that have absolutely no checks on their shenanigans.