Read (and continue) to weep:
“For the first time, the government has now advised the
court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is
fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” John D.
Bates, then the surveillance court’s chief judge, wrote in his Oct. 3, 2011,
opinion.
* OK... LET'S BACK UP...
For several years, the NSA unlawfully gathered tens of
thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as
part of a now-revised collection method, according to a 2011 secret court
opinion.
The redacted 85-page opinion, which was declassified by
U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, states that, based on NSA estimates,
the spy agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 “wholly domestic”
communications each year.
In a strongly worded opinion, the chief judge of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressed consternation at what he saw
as a pattern of misleading statements by the government and hinted that the NSA
possibly violated a criminal law against spying on Americans.
* AND HERE WE ARE, FOLKS... FULL CIRCLE. THE EXECUTIVE
BRANCH LIED... NOT JUST TO CONGRESS... NOT JUST TO CONGRESS AND THE AMERICAN
PEOPLE... BUT TO THE VERY FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE COURT (FISA) WHICH
WAS SUPPOSED TO PROVIDE THE NECESSARY CONSTITUTIONAL BLESSING UPON THE NSA's
ACTIVITIES.
(*SHRUG*)
Bates’s frustration with the government’s lack of candor
extended beyond the program at issue to other NSA surveillance efforts.
“The court is troubled that the government’s revelations
regarding NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in
less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial
misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,” Bates
wrote in a scathing footnote.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
The Washington Post reported last week that the court had
ruled the collection method unconstitutional. The declassified opinion sheds
new light on the volume of Americans’ communications that were obtained by the
NSA and the nature of the violations, as well as the FISA court’s
interpretation of the program.
The release marks the first time the government has
disclosed a FISA court opinion in response to a Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit. The lawsuit was brought a year ago by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a privacy group.
“It’s unfortunate it took a year of litigation and the
most significant leak in American history to finally get them to release this
opinion,” said foundation staff attorney Mark Rumold, “but I’m happy that the
administration is beginning to take this debate seriously.”
* YEP. IT TOOK GETTING CAUGHT TO GET EVEN THIS MINOR
COOPERATION!
The pressure to release the opinion was heightened by a
series of recent revelations about government surveillance based on documents
leaked to The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
* IN OTHER WORDS, SNOWDEN RELEASED INFORMATION ON THE
EXISTENCE OF INFORMATION THE GOVERNMENT SHOUDN'T HAVE HAD IN THE FIRST PLACE...
THAT EXECUTIVE BRANCH OFFICIALS HAD LIED NOT JUST TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
ABOUT... NOT JUST LIED TO CONGRESS ABOUT... BUT LIED ALSO TO THE FISA COURT
ITSELF!
Over the past two-and-a-half-months, those revelations
have reignited a national debate on the balance between privacy and security,
and President Obama has promised to assuage concerns about government
overreach, in part through more transparency.
* REMEMBER, FOLKS, THE BAR HAS BEEN SET SO LOW BY THE
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION THAT SIMPLY NOT LYING TO THE FISA COURT WOULD COUNT AS "MORE
TRANSPARENCY!"
The document was released along with several others
related to a controversial collection program approved by Congress in 2008
under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. Through that program, the NSA may
target for collection the e-mails and phone calls of foreigners “reasonably
believed” to be overseas.
* NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS ON AMERICAN SOIL!
Under Section 702, the NSA collects more than 250 million
Internet communications each year, the opinion said. The vast majority — 91% —
are obtained from Internet providers such as Google, Yahoo and AOL through a
program code-named PRISM.
* OK... FOLKS... THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS WHERE THINGS GET
COMPLICATED. (READ AND RE-READ IF NECESSARY!)
At issue here was the less voluminous “upstream”
collection that takes place as communications flow across Internet hubs — not
from service providers such as Google. Under that program, the NSA diverted
international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into
a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and
for the selection of foreign communications, rather than domestic ones. But in
practice, because of technological difficulties, the NSA was unable to filter
out the “wholly domestic” communications between Americans.
* BUT IN PRACTICE, BECAUSE OF TECHNOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES,
THE NSA WAS UNABLE TO FILTER OUT THE "WHOLLY DOMESTIC" COMMUNICATIONS
BETWEEN AMERICANS.
* UH-HUH.
* SO... UNLESS AND UNTIL THE CONSTITUTION IS AMENDED... EVEN
IF OUT OF THE BEST OF INTENTIONS... THE NSA WAS DELIBERATELY BREAKING THE LAW
AND TRAMPLING ON AMERICANS' CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS. (AT LEAST THAT'S HOW I READ
IT!)
Officials stressed that it was the NSA that brought the
collection method to the court’s attention as part of its regular reporting
process. “This was not in any respect an intentional or wholesale breach of
privacy of American persons,” Robert S. Litt III, the general counsel for the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told reporters Wednesday.
* OF COURSE IT WAS INTENTIONAL! THEY KNOW THE TECHNOLOGY
WASN'T THERE! THEY WENT AHEAD ANYWAY!
Still, Bates noted that it was not until May 2011 —
several years after Section 702 was approved — that the NSA told the court that
its upstream collection of Internet communications may contain entire Internet
“transactions” not related to the target.
* TWO-AND-A-HALF YEARS... RIGHT...?!?!
In other words, the agency may be collecting e-mails
between two Americans or people inside the United States in violation of FISA.
* WAS! HAD TO BE! THE TECHNOLOGY WASN'T THERE TO AVOID
IT!
In June 2011, the NSA informed Bates that an Internet
transaction may be a single communication or it may include “multiple discrete
communications,” including those that are not to, from or about a target. That
means instead of one e-mail, a string of Americans’ e-mails could be inadvertently
picked up. “That revelation fundamentally alters the Court’s understanding of
the scope of the collection conducted pursuant to Section 702,” Bates said.
* ONE WOULD THINK!
“By expanding its Section 702 acquisitions to include the
acquisition of Internet transactions through its upstream collection, NSA has,
as a practical matter, circumvented the spirit of [the law],” Bates wrote.
“NSA’s knowing acquisition of tens of thousands of wholly domestic
communications through its upstream collection is a cause of concern for the
court.”
* CAUSE FOR CONCERN... UH-HUH...
(*HEADACHE*)
Bates ordered the collection to stop until the NSA could
propose an acceptable remedy.
* AND DID IT...???
In November 2011, Bates signed an order approving the
fix, which included a new technical means to segregate transactions most likely
to contain U.S. persons’ communications and reducing the retention period from
five to two years.
In April 2012, the NSA decided to conduct a purge of all
upstream data collected since Section 702’s inception in 2008...
(*SCRATCHING MY HEAD*)
* A GOOD FAITH MOVE... OR... DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
The newly released opinion also reflects Bates’s
frustration with the court’s inability to independently verify the NSA’s
assertions, a sentiment underscored in a recent statement made to The Post by
the current chief judge, Reggie B. Walton.
* SEE HERE!
* NOW... BACK TO BATES...
Because of the “sheer volume” of transactions acquired by
the NSA, “any meaningful review of the entire body of the transactions” was
not feasible, Bates wrote. “As a result, the court cannot know for certain the
exact number” of wholly domestic communications but was reliant on the NSA’s
samples of data. “Even if the court accepts the validity of conclusions derived
from statistical analyses, there are significant hurdles in assessing NSA’s
upstream collection,” he wrote.
Bates also stated in a footnote that the government’s
revelations about the scope of the NSA’s upstream collection “implicate” a law
that criminalizes unauthorized electronic surveillance. He said that he would
address that issue in a separate order.
In another footnote, he also noted that in March 2009 the
court concluded that its authorization of the NSA’s bulk collection of
Americans’ phone-call records was “premised on a flawed depiction of how the
NSA” uses the data.
* HE'S SAYING THE NSA LIED TO HIM AND THE COURT.
* NOTE THE DATES, FOLKS... THEY'RE IMPORTANT. MARCH
2009... OBAMA WAS PRESIDENT... THE NSA WAS "OBAMA'S NSA."
Bates also wrote: “This misperception by the FISC existed
from the inception of its authorized collection in May 2006, buttressed by
repeated inaccurate statements made in the government’s submissions, and despite
a government-devised and court-mandated oversight regime.”
* BUSH! "BUSH'S NSA."
* AND, FOLKS... RECALL... MAY 2006... REPUBLICANS STILL
CONTROLLED BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS.
(*SHRUG*)
* OUR PRESIDENTS - REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRAT... OUR
CONGRESSES - REPUBLICAN-CONTROLLED, DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED,
HOUSE-GOP/SENATE-DEM... IT SEEMS THE BATTLE CRY REMAINS "F--K THE CONSTITUTION!"
In that program, which was disclosed through a document
leaked by Snowden...
* WHO SEEMS NOT TO HAVE SIGNED ON TO THE ABOVE-NOTED
BIPARTISAN BATTLE CRY OF "F--K THE CONSTITUTION."
...to the Guardian, the NSA amasses a database of
hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone-call records. That includes numbers
dialed and the time and duration of calls — also known as metadata — but no
content.
* HOW'BOUT EMAILS...???
Bates continued: “Contrary to the government’s repeated
assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of the metadata using
querying terms that did not meet the required standard. . . . The
Court concluded that this requirement had been ‘so frequently and
systematically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element
of the overall . . . regime has never functioned effectively.’ ”
(*PURSED LIPS*)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued after Sen. Ron
Wyden (D-Ore.) got the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to
acknowledge in July 2012 that the NSA’s surveillance had at least once violated
the Constitution.
* AND, YET... HAS ANYONE GONE TO JAIL FOR THESE
PURPOSEFUL VIOLATIONS? NO. BUT THE GOVERNMENT "GOT" MANNING TODAY!
(AIN'T YA PROUD?!)
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