NSA Declassifies Documents Revealing Unconstitutional Spying On U.S. Emails
color me shocked.
not
It reads to me like we can finally lay to rest who got right from the beginning, and who got it wrong.
Would we be "knowing" any of this butfor the efforts of those villians GG/Snowden is what I'd like to know.
The National Security Agency on Wednesday declassified three previously secret court rulings related to its domestic surveillance programs, including one revealing a massive unconstitutional collection of Americans’ emails.
While heavily redacted in some portions, the rulings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are the most in-depth look into the NSA programs first revealed this summer to be gathering information from Americans. In one document, related to an April 2011 petition from the government to continue its collection of internet communications, FISC judge John Bates expressed his concern that the Court was only just learning of the extent of the collection process, which “exceeded the scope of collection previously disclosed by the government and approved by the Court.” This led the Court to realize that it had been operating under false pretenses in judging whether government actions are legal under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.
At the heart of the FISC’s concern was the NSA’s “upstream collection” — constituting approximately 9 percent of the more than 250 million internet communications the NSA acquires yearly under Section 702 — which siphons off international data passing through U.S.-based cables into a repository where it could be stored for later analysis. This is separate from the discrete Internet communications acquired under the PRISM program, which it gets from Internet service providers. The transactions in question are effectively unable to be sorted between foreign and domestic traffic and further unable to distinguish between a single discrete communication and multiple communications which may or may not have been about the target the NSA analyst was searching for. As a result, thousands of solely domestic email conversations were swept up in the process.
The outcome was a ruling from the Court that the collection was unconstitutional, requiring the NSA to revamp its methods and purge all domestic communications from its databases in 2012. Despite the change in procedures, one footnote in the 2011 ruling spotlights the extent to which the administration had previously misled the Court over the breadth of the NSA’s programs: http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/08/21/2506621/nsa-declassifies-documents-revealing-unconstitutional-spying-on-us-emails/
