FISA Court renews phone metadata program, declassifies order Posted by Ali Watkins on October 21, 2013

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced late last week that it would declassify the recent court order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that renewed the National Security Agency's hotly-contested telephone metadata collection program.

The program, which was the subject of the first documents leaked by former defense contractor Edward Snowden and operates under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, collects domestic telephony metadata from third party telecommunications companies. This metadata includes time and duration of calls, along with the number dialed. Content of communications and location data is not included, officials have said.

Despite a wave of public outcry against the NSA's surveillance program after its unauthorized disclosure in June, the court order cited congressional oversight and previous court interpretations as the grounds for the program's renewal. The program was due to expire on October 11, 2013.

The ODNI's declassification of the FISA court order in the immediate aftermath of the program's renewal signals a bow to growing calls for transparency in the wake of Snowden's leaks. The expired court order that had previously authorized the program was not declassified until months after the bulk metadata collections were revealed in June.

The new order renews the program for less than three months, and is due to expire on January 3, 2014. It's likely that some kind of legislative changes to the NSA and the FISA Court will come from Congress before the new order expires.

Via: McClatchy 

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Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/21/205970/fisa-court-renews-phone-metadata.html#storylink=cpy

A government looking for witches will find them

While the nation’s political class has been fixated on a potential government shutdown in Washington this week, the NSA has continued to spy on all Americans and by its ambiguity and shrewd silence seems to be acknowledging slowly that the scope of its spying is truly breathtaking.

The Obama administration is of the view that the NSA can spy on anyone anywhere. The president believes that federal statutes enable the secret FISA court to authorize the NSA to capture any information it desires about any persons without identifying the persons and without a showing of probable cause of criminal behavior on the part of the persons to be spied upon. This is the same mindset that the British government had with respect to the colonists. It, too, believed that British law permitted a judge in secret in Britain to issue general warrants to be executed in the colonies at the whim of British agents.

General warrants do not state the name of the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized, and they do not have the necessity of individualized probable cause as their linchpin. They simply authorize the bearer to search wherever he wishes for whatever he wants. General warrants were universally condemned by colonial leaders across the ideological spectrum -- from those as radical as Sam Adams to those as establishment as George Washington, and from those as individualistic as Thomas Jefferson to those as big-government as Alexander Hamilton. We know from the literature of the times that the whole purpose of the Fourth Amendment -- with its requirements of individualized probable cause and specifically identifying the target -- is to prohibit general warrants.

And yet, the FISA court has been issuing general warrants and the NSA executing them since at least 2004.

Via: Fox News

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