NSA Gave 2-3 ‘Daily Tips’ To The FBI For 3 Years - FDL/ArsTechnica/ODNI
NSA Gave 2-3 ‘Daily Tips’ To The FBI For 3 YearsBy: DSWright -FDL
Tuesday January 21, 2014 8:30 am
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So about that whole not spying on Americans thing, it seems the NSA has been having quite an exchange with domestic law enforcement. According to recently declassified FISA documents the NSA has been tipping off the FBI at least two to three times per day going back at least to 2006.
The legal rationale for the surveillance is a novel interpretation Section 215 of the Patriot Act, something that even the author of the law does not necessarily agree with.
Why is the NSA so involved in this, I thought they just did foreign intelligence? Every one of these daily “tips” is just about foreigners? Or, could it be, that any barriers between foreign intelligence and domestic spying on American citizens have been destroyed?
For those with short memories, the DEA was also caught having an inappropriate relationship with the NSA. The NSA supplied the DEA with intelligence information used to “make non-terrorism cases against American citizens.” The information the NSA supplied helped the DEA make drug and other organized crime cases that had nothing to do with terrorism. Apparently the FBI was also getting in on the action.
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More: http://news.firedoglake.com/2014/01/21/nsa-gave-2-3-daily-tips-to-the-fbi-for-3-years/
The ArsTechniica Piece: http://tinyurl.com/m7wm7a8
The Documents: http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/73652799309/dni-clapper-declassifies-additional-documents
= new reply since forum marked as read
... specifically war criminals, traitors, mass murderers and warmongers.
of anything but merely adopts an outraged tone and provides links that don't seem to support the claims -- a habit that eventually produces loss of credibility and exhausts the public, who inevitably then lose interest
The opening sentence of the FDL piece references "that whole not spying on Americans thing" but so far as I can discern, the article is ultimately (though very loosely) based on various FISC documents declassified by DNI Clapper last week
OK. So I downloaded and skimmed the first four documents in that collection: none seem to reference spying on Americans; all four reference FBI authority to request certain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States citizen, which (in this case) seems to be telephony metadata
So there seems to be no big smoking gun there. Pieces like this from FDL are simply counter-productive. In reality, actually winning this particular fight would require rather more careful boring grunt work, and rather less hyperventilation, than we have seen to date
A similar footnote from a November 2006 court order refers to “two telephone numbers.” The “three” figure was continued until documents from March 2009, when the specific language changed to simply “information.” That month appears to have been a turning point between intelligence agencies and the FISC.
As we reported after the August 2013 release of declassified court documents, Judge Reggie Walton lambasted the government’s mistakes on the business records metadata collection program.
According to his newly released March 2009 FISC order (PDF), the court required the NSA to only access the vast metadata archive when there is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion [RAS] that the telephone identifier is associated with [REDACTED]” as of February 2009. (Presumably that association has something to do with a terrorism or national security threat.)
That same 2009 FISC order says that the government had not lived up to the court’s requirements.
Link at OP.
