What the "Snowden is a traitor" crowd don't get

[pnwmom]

49. Who says we're "spying on innocent citizens of other countries"?

Why would we waste American resources doing that?

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/prism-isnt-data-mining-NSA-scandal


However, targeting is not done willy-nilly. The system is subject to review by the judiciary, the Congress, and the executive branch. Both the attorney general and the director of the N.S.A. must make a determination that they “reasonably believe” a person they wish to target is, in fact, a foreign national outside the country whose activities raise national-security concerns for the United States. That standard, of course, is lower than probable cause, which is a small part of why any information obtained can’t be used in a criminal case.

Courts established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act review these determinations and must approve the targeting. (Much has been made of the fact that these approvals appear to be given frequently, with some saying the F.I.S.A. courts are just rubber stamps. I disagree; given the requirements for prior review and assessment at the top of the executive branch, a high approval rate for subpoenas would be expected. I’d be more concerned if they were frequently rejected, because that would signal the executive branch was probably attempting to abuse the system.)

Now, anyone who discusses this process without also mentioning minimization procedures is also either very uninformed or intentionally hyping the story. Minimization is a term of art in the world of NSA intercepts which essentially means “stay out of American citizen’s business.” If information about specific Americans (or even foreigners inside the United States) is captured, those details must be removed from all records and cannot be shared with any other entity in the government unless it is necessary to understand and interpret related foreign intelligence or to protect lives from criminal threats. But passing intelligence information to criminal investigators requires several layers of review and is not easily approved; minimization procedures are meant to insure that information collected by the NSA isn’t used in routine criminal investigations.

In other words, the NSA doesn’t give a damn about you swapping recipes with your Aunt Edith—or even your decision to email your drug dealer (foolish as that might be.) And the NSA doesn’t get to establish the minimization procedures on its own—those, too, have to be approved by the FISA courts.

In the past, some minimization procedures bordered on the absurd: for example, pre–9/11, the rules said that the name of companies based in the United States could not be used in communications transmitted from the N.S.A. to other intelligence or law-enforcement bodies. So, suppose the N.S.A. learned through signals intel that a known terrorist was flying at noon on June 20 from Frankfurt to New York on Delta flight no. 2012. Any communication could identify the terrorist, locations, date, and time; however, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. couldn’t be told they were flying in on Delta. Based in Atlanta, you see.

As for the purported secrecy of this program—folks haven’t been listening. Section 702 was widely debated and parsed through by the Congress before its adoption in 2008 (under the Bush administration). It was widely debated and parsed through by Congress before its re-authorization in December 2012 (under the Obama administration). Any supposed expert who feigns surprise here is, once again, either uninformed or hyping.

SNIP