Snowden Mentioned ‘Direct Access’ In Interview With The Guardian

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17. No, I don't know anything about what has rained down on them.

As for the robosigning, it's all there in the information that has been released. The analysts simply fill out a form or template and they have immediate access to the contents of emails and phone calls.

The template or form drives all of the computer modules that compile all the information needed for requesting a warrant from the FISA court. This ensures that the requirements for the warrant are complied with.

Then, sometime during the following 72 hours, the warrant request is sent to the FISA court. It is automatically approved since all the "legal" requirements have been met when the analyst completes the form or template that starts the process. I imagine thousands of communications can be requested by a single warrant.

Any analyst is authorized to obtain the content of any voice or email record, on his own authority, if he has been verbally authorized to do so by either the Attorney General or the Director of National Intelligence.

It's all covered in the FISA law itself, and then made crystal clear by the document releases that Snowden made. The laws were already known, Snowden explains the policy used to implement the law, which I never heard anything about before his disclosures.

If you are familiar with how robosigners were used to flout legal hurdles in the home repossession scandals, then you have to understand that this system of having the analysts become robosigners is done for exactly the same purpose. The only difference being that in the NSA spying case the robosigning has been made the official policy, which I think makes it legal, even though it violates the spirit of the law.

The policy could be ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, but no one has been able to argue the case there because all Americans lack legal standing.

One of the documents that Snowden released was the Verizon warrant which should provide legal standing to Verizon customers since they can now prove to the court that they are being targeted. In the past the court denied standing to everyone because no one could really know whether or not they were on a list since it was all secret.


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So what's been raining down on them?



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