Greenwald’s Outrage Sandwich: NSA Analysts Can Analyze NSA Intelligence [View all]

[flamingdem]

http://thedailybanter.com/2013/07/greenwalds-shocking-bombshell-nsa-analysts-can-analyze-intel-collected-by-the-nsa/

Greenwald’s Shocking Bombshell: NSA Analysts Can Analyze NSA Intelligence

by Bob Cesca

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It gets sillier. The following Greenwald statement could be referred to as an outrage sandwich: two outrageous claims surrounding a throw-away mention of delicious, meaty truth that mitigates the outrageousness of the two claims.

“It’s done with no need to go to court, no need to get approval. There are legal constraints for spying on Americans, you can’t target them without going to the FISA court. But it allows them to listen to whatever e-mails they want, telephone calls, browsing history, Microsoft Word documents.”
Put another way: No need for court oversight! (But there’s court oversight and warrants.) They can listen to whatever they want! In the midst of inciting outrage, these mitigating news blips manage to pop up in nearly every article. But the blips are considerably out-gunned by all of the bloated hyperbole preceding and following each one.

Whenever the government determines there’s probable cause for targeting American citizens or “U.S. persons” with surveillance, requests are submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Court (FISC or “FISA Court”) and warrants are issued. This is standard operating procedure as sanctioned by Congress. Warrants are likely the “policy protections” that Snowden hedged about in his online Q&A. But the hyperbole has led many Americans, and even members of Congress, to believe that NSA is eavesdropping on all of us without cause or judicial oversight.

In other words, what Snowden said in his Hong Kong video interview about his “authorities” to read the president’s email apparently had to do with his illegal, extrajudicial ability to do so. Snowden and others could evidently use this software (to be revealed this week) to hack into the president’s email, for example. Yet these analysts would be doing it outside the purview of American law since the president is an American citizen and targeting him for eavesdropping requires a warrant as well as this mysterious “technical protection” or “filter” (maybe Greenwald will tell us about the filter, but I’m not holding my breath). Likewise, NSA analysts must attain warrants and surmount the mystery filter in order to listen to your calls or to read your emails; not unlike various legal requirements that any law enforcement official must satisfy. It’s sad that we have to remind Greenwald’s disciples that from low-level deputies on up, the law requires similar orders in order to conduct a search, per the Fourth Amendment, and those orders can only be attained if there’s a suspicion that an American citizen might be breaking the law.

But you’ll never hear it described this way by Glenn Greenwald because it renders his bombshells impotent.