Secret Court allows NSA to continue bulk data collection

[Chris0nllyn]

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency may temporarily resume its once-secret program that systematically collects records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk.

The program lapsed on June 1, when a law on which it was based, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, expired. Congress revived that provision on June 2 with a bill called the USA Freedom Act, which said the provision could not be used for bulk collection after six months.

But, complicating matters, in May the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled in a lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. that Section 215 of the Patriot Act could not legitimately be interpreted as permitting bulk collection at all.

Congress did not include language in the Freedom Act contradicting the Second Circuit ruling or authorizing bulk collection even for the six-month transition. As a result, it was unclear whether the program had a lawful basis to resume in the interim.

After President Obama signed the Freedom Act on June 2, his administration applied to restart the program for six months. But a conservative and libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks, filed a motion in the surveillance court saying it had no legal authority to permit the program to resume, even for the interim period.

In a 26-page opinion made public on Tuesday, Judge Michael W. Mosman of the surveillance court rejected the challenge by FreedomWorks, which was represented by a former Virginia attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican. And Judge Mosman said the Second Circuit was wrong, too.

“Second Circuit rulings are not binding” on the surveillance court, he wrote, “and this court respectfully disagrees with that court’s analysis, especially in view of the intervening enactment of the USA Freedom Act.”

The bulk phone records program traces back to October 2001, when the Bush administration secretly authorized the N.S.A. to collect records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk as part of a broader set of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts.

The program began on the basis of presidential power alone. In 2006, the Bush administration persuaded the surveillance court to begin blessing it under of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which says the government may collect records that are “relevant” to a national security investigation.

The program was declassified in June 2013 after its existence was disclosed by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/u...ulk-data-collection.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

 

[GURPS]

how has this directly affected you ...

if you are not engaged in anything illegal ....

 

[Inkd]

More hyperbole.

 

[Amused_despair]

how has this directly affected you ...

if you are not engaged in anything illegal ....

Do I really need to quote Major Frank Burns one more time?

 

[Chris0nllyn]

how has this directly affected you ...

Besides being a Verizon customer, and more than likely a victim of this broad overreach of powers created out of thin air by the messiah President?

 

[Ken King]

Besides being a Verizon customer, and more than likely a victim of this broad overreach of powers created out of thin air by the messiah President?

Who is that? Bush, he was the President when the PATRIOT Act became operational, never heard him called the Messiah before.

I seriously don't see what the problem is that some have over something they don't even own. You have never and will never own the metadata associated with your account.

 

[PJay]

More hyperbole.

 

[Chris0nllyn]

More hyperbole.

You should look up the definition of hyperbole.

Who is that? Bush, he was the President when the PATRIOT Act became operational, never heard him called the Messiah before.

I seriously don't see what the problem is that some have over something they don't even own. You have never and will never own the metadata associated with your account.

So Bush is like Obama now? Things just happen while he's President and they have no influence on those things?

There's plenty on here that simply fail to place blame on Bush for what he did. That's why I jokingly (sorta) said "messiah...".

You don't see the problem with the NSA scooping up just about every American citizen's metadata? No problem that this secret program got secret authorization by a secret court and was founded on the same Presidential powers (phone and a pen) that Obama uses (and people here go ape#### when he does)? All of this without a warrant. This all happened for 12 YEARS before anyone knew about it, and the only reason they did was because of Snowden. Otherwise we'd still not know about this program.

 

[glhs837]

Who is that? Bush, he was the President when the PATRIOT Act became operational, never heard him called the Messiah before.

I seriously don't see what the problem is that some have over something they don't even own. You have never and will never own the metadata associated with your account.

Don't own the words that come out of my mouth, but don't want the govt collecting them just in case.

 

[Ken King]

Don't own the words that come out of my mouth, but don't want the govt collecting them just in case.

The Hell you don't. They are your words, aren't they.

 

[glhs837]

The Hell you don't. They are your words, aren't they.

I'm responsible for them, and stand behind them, but would not expect the government to record them even in public, barring some reason to suspect me of wrongdoing. And ot me that's the key to why this is wrong, ,orally, if not legally. To vaccum up all of the data and store it away speaks to a basic distrust by the govt towards it's citizens, and that bothers the crap out of me.

 

[tblwdc]

I'm responsible for them, and stand behind them, but would not expect the government to record them even in public, barring some reason to suspect me of wrongdoing. And ot me that's the key to why this is wrong, ,orally, if not legally. To vaccum up all of the data and store it away speaks to a basic distrust by the govt towards it's citizens, and that bothers the crap out of me.

What information of yours did the government collect?

 

[PeoplesElbow]

Unless you own the network entirely you can't expect privacy. Verizon would sell everything you ever did on the internet to marketers if it was valuable.

 

[GURPS]

I'm responsible for them, and stand behind them, but would not expect the government to record them even in public, barring some reason to suspect me of wrongdoing. And ot me that's the key to why this is wrong, ,orally, if not legally. To vaccum up all of the data and store it away speaks to a basic distrust by the govt towards it's citizens, and that bothers the crap out of me.

A Gov should be afraid of its citizens, citizens should never be afraid of their gov

 

[BigBlue]

You should look up the definition of hyperbole.



So Bush is like Obama now? Things just happen while he's President and they have no influence on those things?

There's plenty on here that simply fail to place blame on Bush for what he did. That's why I jokingly (sorta) said "messiah...".

You don't see the problem with the NSA scooping up just about every American citizen's metadata? No problem that this secret program got secret authorization by a secret court and was founded on the same Presidential powers (phone and a pen) that Obama uses (and people here go ape#### when he does)? All of this without a warrant. This all happened for 12 YEARS before anyone knew about it, and the only reason they did was because of Snowden. Otherwise we'd still not know about this program.

LOL Obama ,Bush ???? Look wack job this #### has been going on since Kennedy created NSA because he couldn't trust the FBI or the CIA so to your blame Obama for it all BS ...eff off.

 

[glhs837]

What information of yours did the government collect?

Don't know, do I? Can't find out, can I? By all accounts, they got all the metadata. Including mine. Now, to be honest, given my position and history, they most likely should be looking over that stuff. But not for regular citizens. Just isn't right.

Unless you own the network entirely you can't expect privacy. Verizon would sell everything you ever did on the internet to marketers if it was valuable.

And that's fine, if I didnt read the big Gs or Verizons TOS and that happened, that's my fault. That's me and another private entity in a private contract. Govt is a different ballgame.

 

[Chris0nllyn]

LOL Obama ,Bush ???? Look wack job this #### has been going on since Kennedy created NSA because he couldn't trust the FBI or the CIA so to your blame Obama for it all BS ...eff off.

You have reading comprehension issues.

 

[Ken King]

You should look up the definition of hyperbole.



So Bush is like Obama now? Things just happen while he's President and they have no influence on those things?

There's plenty on here that simply fail to place blame on Bush for what he did. That's why I jokingly (sorta) said "messiah...".

You don't see the problem with the NSA scooping up just about every American citizen's metadata? No problem that this secret program got secret authorization by a secret court and was founded on the same Presidential powers (phone and a pen) that Obama uses (and people here go ape#### when he does)? All of this without a warrant. This all happened for 12 YEARS before anyone knew about it, and the only reason they did was because of Snowden. Otherwise we'd still not know about this program.

It isn't your metadata, you do not own it and you have never had any ownership of it. It isn't yours, mine, or any other persons, it is owned by carrier companies and the PATRIOT Act (and I am sure there are some other previous enacted laws) that let the government obtain it via a specified request process subject to judicial review. To access that stored data of a United States person a warrant would be required. Gathering and storing metadata isn't accessing it. Is there potential for abuse, sure, but have you seen any? I know I haven't and I knew it was being collected long before Snowden's disclosure.

 

[Ken King]

I'm responsible for them, and stand behind them, but would not expect the government to record them even in public, barring some reason to suspect me of wrongdoing. And ot me that's the key to why this is wrong, ,orally, if not legally. To vaccum up all of the data and store it away speaks to a basic distrust by the govt towards it's citizens, and that bothers the crap out of me.

That is what I call "owning them".

But metadata isn't words, it is a set of data containing the phone numbers of caller and recipient; the unique serial number of the phones involved; the time and duration of each phone call; and potentially the location of each of the participants when the call happened. None of your words are within that data set.

 

[glhs837]

It isn't your metadata, you do not own it and you have never had any ownership of it. It isn't yours, mine, or any other persons, it is owned by carrier companies and the PATRIOT Act (and I am sure there are some other previous enacted laws) that let the government obtain it via a specified request process subject to judicial review. To access that stored data of a United States person a warrant would be required. Gathering and storing metadata isn't accessing it. Is there potential for abuse, sure, but have you seen any? I know I haven't and I knew it was being collected long before Snowden's disclosure.

I thought there were a couple of documented cases where NSA folks were caught doing just that. And I might be wrong on that. Sorry, but the all-seeing eye thing smacks of the STASI to me. "Sure,we dont need to know where all the citizens are 100% of the time, but lets go ahead and gather that data just in case..... " Same thing as ALPRs, just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.