Greenwald’s Outrage Sandwich: NSA Analysts Can Analyze NSA Intelligence

[JDPriestly]

8. Actually, the NSA can get what they want based on your metadata.

And what they want is to scare you as you investigate issues, the news, problems in your personal life and as you correspond with friends and family on the internet.

It is about intimidation, and frightening you so that you will not exercise a whole group of rights that the Constitution is supposed to protect because they are supposed to be inherent not just in your citizenship or residency here but in your very humanity.

I wish that I could unrecommend the OP in this thread. It is extremely misleading.

Anyone who has ever seen a phone bill knows who revealing it can be. Imagine having a list of all the websites your server has visited, all the e-mail addresses that contact yours and some details about all your internet searches.

And getting a warrant from the FISA court is obviously not that hard. If it were really difficult that court would have refused a greater percentage of the requests than it has.

From Mother Jones:

"The FISA system is broken," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Journal. "At the point that a FISA judge can compel the disclosure of millions of phone records of US citizens engaged in only domestic communications, unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence…there is no longer meaningful judicial review."

But according to Timothy Edgar, a top privacy lawyer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council under Bush and Obama, it's not quite as simple as the FISC rubber stamping nearly every application the government puts in front of it.

The reason so many orders are approved, he said, is that the Justice Department office that manages the process vets the applications rigorously... [S]o getting the order approved by the Justice Department lawyers is perhaps the biggest hurdle to approval. "The culture of that office is very reluctant to get a denial," he [told the Journal].

. . . .

This post has been corrected. A commenter pointed out that a previous version stated that the FISA court has rejected .0003 percent of all government surveillance requests. The correct percentage is .03. Apologies for the bad math.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request