Want proof that NSA snooping thwarts terror plots? Stand by, Senator Feinstein says

[DirkGently]

59. Except you're wrong about that, as you know.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/07/justice-department-prism_n_3405101.html

WASHINGTON -- Mere hours after President Barack Obama said Friday morning that he welcomes a debate on the federal government's highly classified surveillance programs, his Department of Justice tried to squash the release of a secret court opinion concerning surveillance law.

A 2011 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruling found the U.S. government had unconstitutionally overreached in its use of a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The National Security Agency uses the same section to justify its PRISM online data collection program. But that court opinion must remain secret, the Justice Department says, to avoid being "misleading to the public."

The DOJ was responding to a lawsuit filed last year by the Electronic Frontier Foundation seeking the release of a 2011 court opinion that found the government had violated the Constitution and circumvented FISA, the law that is supposed to protect Americans from surveillance aimed at foreigners.

(snip)

The part of the FISA law addressed in the opinion in question, Section 702, is the same one the NSA is now using to scoop up email and social media records through its PRISM program.

This is a specious argument based on the false assertion that all of this was settled when FISA was set up. That's not the case. We're now dealing with new activities under the Patriot Act and unknown "interpretations" of the various laws.

Besides the fact the PRISM law was being interpreted and used unconstitutionally through 2011, we don't know where the programs have gone from there, or what the administration is and is not telling the court, or how it's interpreting, for example, how it can use data that it "legally" collects.

No one can know for certain what's being done that is or isn't legal, or constitutional, or morally supportable, because it's all in secret.

This is the problem.