N.S.A. Plan To Log Calls Is Renewed By Court - NYT

[WillyT]

N.S.A. Plan to Log Calls Is Renewed by Court
By CHARLIE SAVAGE - NYT
10/18/13

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WASHINGTON — The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court released a new legal opinion on Friday that reauthorized the once-secret National Security Agency program that keeps records of every American’s phone calls. The opinion also sought to plug a hole in a similar ruling made public last month.

In the six-page opinion, which was signed on Oct. 11, Judge Mary A. McLaughlin said she was personally approving for the first time the extension of the call log metadata program, which must be approved every 90 days. But she wrote that she endorsed a lengthy legal opinion written by a colleague, Judge Claire V. Eagan, who was the previous judge to approve extending it.

Judge Eagan’s opinion, which was made public last month, held that the N.S.A. could lawfully collect the bulk data about all Americans’ calls without warrants, in part because of a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland. In that matter, the Supreme Court held that call records were not protected by the Fourth Amendment because suspects had exposed that metadata to their phone companies and had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Judge Eagan’s opinion has been criticized, in part, because she made no mention of a landmark privacy case decided by the Supreme Court in 2012. That case, United States v. Jones, held that it was unconstitutional for the police to use a G.P.S. tracking device to monitor a suspect’s movements without a warrant.

Although the Supreme Court decided the case on narrow grounds...

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More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/us/nsa-plan-to-log-calls-is-renewed-by-court.html?_r=0

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1. N.S.A. Plan to Log Calls Is Renewed by Court

Well, it is again legal for the National Security Agency to collect the bulk data about all Americans’ calls without warrants.
This ruling is bound to cause significant resistance as Americans more than ever demand their calls be fully private.

In order to make the decision more palatable to citizens it should be possible to launch a nationwide campaign to sell the reasons for again making effective the ruling, which should be to exclusively monitor communications by U.S. citizens in the United States, with the specific aim to capture and neutralize threats to U.S. national security.

The United States cannot cease to monitor threats through any means available, as this has been cataloged a top priority since 9/11.