these are documents that government officials have repeatedly insisted Edward Snowden would never ha

[WillyT]

What’s more, these are documents that government officials have repeatedly insisted Edward Snowden would never have been able to access.

Regardless of the government’s denials, Snowden did have these documents, and now we know at least some of what they contained. So does Congress.

From: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025232515

[grasswire]

1. yeah, NSA director said Snowden would never be able to access...

.....things that we know he obtained.

The question: Why do they continue to lie?

[Uncle Joe]

2. Because the truth is too damning. n/t

[Aerows]

3. I have a shocking revelation

James Clapper tells the least untruthful statement he can make, and so does his department.

He lies through his teeth to Congress, to the American people and to the entire world. He's the least truthful person I've ever seen be respected ... by being an acknowledged liar. He should be in jail for perjury before Congress.

As my grandmother would have said, "He's as full of stuffing as a Christmas turkey". If you believe a man that lies, you will believe a man that steals from you. A man that lies to you will steal from you without regret the same way that he damages your trust through lies.

[Downwinder]

4. How many NSA statements are left to be refuted?

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. they create new boxes of lies

to keep up with their last box of lies

[Electric Monk]

6. (kick)

[Octafish]

7. We knew about Congreff, but NSA even lied to the Supreme Court.

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA's dragnet. Why?

Trevor Timm
theguardian.com, Saturday 17 May 2014

If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here's what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the FISA Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have "standing" – in other words, that the ACLU couldn't prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn't challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden's historic whistleblowing to prove it.

SNIP...

Lawyers before the supreme court are under an ethical obligation to correct the record if they make false statements to the Court – even if they are unintentional – yet the Justice Department has so far refused. As ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer explained, the Justice Department has corrected the record in other cases where it was much less clear-cut whether it had misled the court.

The government's response, instead, has been to explain why it doesn't think these statements are lies. In a letter to Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall that only surfaced this week, the government made the incredible argument that the "about" surveillance was classified at the time of the case, so it was under no obligation to tell the supreme court about it. And the Justice Department completely sidestepped the question of whether it lied about notifying defendants, basically by saying that it started to do so after the case, and so this was somehow no longer an issue.

But there's another reason the government wanted any challenge to the Fisa Amendments Act dismissed without being forced to argue that it doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment: it has an extremely controversial view about your (lack of) privacy rights, and probably doesn't want anyone to know. As Jaffer wrote here at the Guardian earlier this week, the government has since been forced to defend the Fisa Amendments Act, and it's pretty shocking how they've done it. Here's what the government said in a recent legal brief:

The privacy rights of US persons in international communications are significantly diminished, if not completely eliminated, when those communications have been transmitted to or obtained from non-US persons located outside the United States

CONTINUED...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/government-lies-nsa-justice-department-supreme-court