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

[DirkGently]

115. That's a mile of copypasta that says we have a FISA law.

Which, again, is not the issue. We don't know how the law is being interpreted. Well, we know the NSA thinks that, by its own reckoning if it theoretically aims for "51%" of the information it gathers to be "foreign," it's doing the right thing.

We don't know how it "tries" for "51%." We don't know how successful it is in doing that. We don't know that "51%" is a reasonable interpretation in the first place. We don't know how the NSA failed to do that in 2011, or what it's doing different now.


We don't know how that court itself found the administration was behaving unconstitutionally as to the PRISM law as late as 2011.

You have grasped on to a tiny, irrelevant component and declared it to be the entire issue.

You write out the entire Fourth Amendment as though its existence automatically means it's being complied with.

Laws don't work that way. They are not self-executing or self-interpreting, or self-enforcing. That's why we have multiple checks and balances.

What you are leaping over entirely is the fact that we already know that even with the 4th Amendment, even with FISA courts, the law can be broken, privacy rights trampled. It's already happened.


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.

Your entire argument boils down to the theory that if we have laws and courts everything is fine. By that reckoning, no Constitutional rights have ever been violated. No Executive has ever abused surveillance powers. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

No one thinks that.