Greenwald: Fisa court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process

[reusrename]

52. Yes, I think you have it exactly right, but I think there's more, much more.

As many others in this thread have noticed, the manner in which the information is being leaked is also interesting, and this can be used to draw some more conclusions.

Snowden/Greenwald seem to be sincerely trying to educate the public. In the propaganda age, this is a very challenging proposition.

As Monkie noted in post #34 above, Snowden/Greenwald seem to be very focused on exposing the lies of others. This is a very good method of teaching in this instance, using the falsification principle, because it is less susceptible to propaganda.

Even brain-dead sycophants can't turn a lie into the truth, and this is important to the success of this undertaking. No one believes that James "least untruthful answer" Clapper didn't commit a crime when he lied to Congress about "collecting data" on Americans. So this becomes a teaching moment, as the saying goes.

I believe the next big lesson for the public will be to push back about the claims of oversight. That's where the Congressional hearings and the Administration's comments are heading. "-- We know this stuff is sensitive so we have many layers of oversight to ensure the public is properly protected from abuses. -- " This looks like a place the conversation might coalesce around.

If this is the case, then the next leak of classified material might be more information on how these analysts can look at anything in their database (which includes recordings of all our conversations and emails) with little or no oversight. I think it works something like this:

Yes, they do need a separate warrant in order to access content of individual phone calls/emails.

Yes, the analyst has legal authority to access content of individual phone calls/emails of anyone, on his own, without first getting a separate warrant.

These are consistent statements. The FISA law allows 72 hours after the fact to seek the warrant.

The truth is, the analyst has access, on his own, once he has been verbally authorized by either the Attorney General or the Director of National Intelligence. I think they only need fill out a form in order to take a peek.

At least this is my understanding of the law and the policy. These analysts, once verbally approved, might might be compared to the robosigners we found in the banking fraud.

There is one important difference; unlike the illegal robosigners for the banks, Congress, the Adminstration, and the Courts all seem to have made this perfectly legal.

From there the conversation may move to whether or not this stuff is really all that important anyways, it's just sensitive material, there's nothing actually dangerous going on here. And so on and so on...