ACLU: Negotiating spying on U.S. citizens in secret...

[Luminous Animal]

FISA Amendments Act is Back
By Michelle Richardson, Washington Legislative Office at 10:28am

The good news is that Congress had the foresight to subject this sweeping surveillance authority to a sunset provision, and it is scheduled to expire in its entirety at the end of the year. More concerning though is that, according to press reports, this afternoon the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence will be secretly approving legislation to extend that law. No public hearings; no public oversight; no thorough debate about how this law has been used and how it has affected Americans.

While the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees have been receiving classified reports, it’s time for a public vetting of the FAA and for meaningful amendments to better protect our privacy. Even Sens. Ron Wyden (OR) and Mark Udall (CO), with their secret briefings and cleared staff, don’t understand how this sweeping surveillance law is affecting everyday Americans. And when they asked, the DNI said it isn’t even ‘reasonably possible’ to estimate how many Americans are swept up in the NSA’s expansive dragnet.

Read the Obama administration’s explanation of the law here and the ACLU’s letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee here. You can also read more about our lawsuit challenging the law here.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/fisa-amendments-act-back

ACLU Sues As DOJ Ignores Surveillance Transparency Law
By Avinash Samarth, Human Rights Program

Today the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to force the government to release statistics about its use of powerful electronic surveillance tools that law enforcement can use against any American simply by stating to a judge that it’s relevant to an investigation. The Department of Justice is required to disclose these statistics to Congress each year, yet routinely fails to do so. Today’s suit is an effort to compel the DOJ to follow the law (here are our complaint and our FOIA request).

The surveillance tools at issue are called pen registers and trap and trace devices. Originally these devices were designed to eavesdrop on the old analog telephone network, but now they refer to a broader type of electronic eavesdropping. Using these methods, the Justice Department has claimed the authority to reveal:

• The phone numbers you call and that call you
• The time each call is made
• The length of each call
• The email addresses of the people you send emails to and who email you
• Your IP address and the IP addresses of computers you connect with (IP addresses can reveal physical location)
• The web addresses of the websites you visit

The Supreme Court decided in 1979 that pen registers and trap and trace devices were not covered by the Fourth Amendment because the “non-content information” the police monitored, like the numbers the caller dialed, were “voluntarily disclosed” to the telephone company. But Congress was not entirely comfortable with such a carte blanche granted to the executive branch, and so in 1986 it passed the Pen Register Act, which laid out restrictions that were, though minimal, intended to provide oversight onlaw enforcement’s use of these invasive surveillance methods.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/aclu-sues-doj-ignores-surveillance-transparency-law