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Galileo Galilei
06-23-2013, 11:43 PM
Glenn Greenwald: 80 page decision from FISA court says NSA is bulk collecting phone calls of Americans (VIDEO)

On Meet the Press, Glenn Greenwald talked about the FISA court decision that say what the NSA is doing is illegal - the NSA is bulk collecting the transmissions, the conversations of millions of Americans not involved in terrorism. The FISA court says this is a violation of the 4th Amendment and is illegal. This all comes from documents shown to Greenwald by Snowden.

WATCH VIDEO HERE:

http://nomorecocktails.com/post/2013/06/23/Glenn-Greenwald-80-page-decision-from-FISA-court-says-NSA-is-bulk-collecting-phone-calls-of-Americans.aspx

:mad:

Galileo Galilei
06-24-2013, 09:21 AM
This is explosive, the FISA court already ruled that the NSA is breaking the law!

Elias Graves
06-24-2013, 09:31 AM
This is explosive, the FISA court already ruled that the NSA is breaking the law!

Silly peasant! Laws don't apply to the crown!

ghengis86
06-24-2013, 09:32 AM
Yeah, from the President on down they're all lying to the public since this story broke.

69360
06-24-2013, 09:36 AM
Nobody will care. The Obama administration has never operated under the rule of law.

As crazy as it sounds, they are going to claim the fisa court doesn't have jurisdiction because nsa wasn't spying on suspected terrorists or something like that. Fisa courts only are supposed to handle intelligence against foreign agents.

tod evans
06-24-2013, 09:37 AM
This is explosive, the FISA court already ruled that the NSA is breaking the law!

Syria, didn't you get the memo?

This weeks focus is Syria...........If you don't like that then ***** are popular....

Darguth
06-24-2013, 10:11 AM
Have the documents with the FISA ruling been released somewhere we can read them, and if so does anyone know where?

whippoorwill
06-24-2013, 10:24 AM
bump.

Galileo Galilei
06-24-2013, 10:26 AM
Have the documents with the FISA ruling been released somewhere we can read them, and if so does anyone know where?

not released yet, Greenwald has them. It is an 80-page ruling that declares that the NSA "program" exceeds the scope of the 4th amendment and federal statues. That means all the BS by Obama that the program is legal is a lie.

HOLLYWOOD
06-24-2013, 11:34 AM
2009... Glen Greenwald ;)
http://www.salon.com/2009/01/15/fisa_14/

Thursday, Jan 15, 2009 09:57 PM UTC Today’s FISA ruling: a case study in 8 years of lying and ignorance (http://www.salon.com/2009/01/15/fisa_14/)

Right-wing Bush followers and ignorant journalists combine to create a completely false storyline to defend Bush's policies

By Glenn Greenwald (http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/) Topics: Washington, D.C. (http://www.salon.com/topic/washington_dc), Politics News (http://www.salon.com/category/politics/)
(updated below – Update II - Update III – Update IV)
Ever since The New York Times, on December 16, 2005, first reported that President Bush ordered spying on Americans without the warrants required by FISA, the clear illegality that was unveiled — FISA said that X was a felony and Bush admitted to doing X — was continuously obscured by a combination of deceit on the part of Bush followers and ignorance, sloth and confusion on the part of the media. Beginning within the first days of the controversy (http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/purposely-misquoting-fisa-to-defend.html), Bush followers who literally had no idea what they were talking about offered factually false claims and even distorted quotations from the statute to justify what was done. Today is a perfect example illustrating how completely misinformed and/or deliberately deceitful right-wing advocates inject blatant falsehoods into these debates.
Earlier today, The New York Times‘ Eric Lichtblau (one of the NYT reporters who originally broke the NSA story yet often mindlessly recites false Bush claims even on this issue (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/10/lichtblau/)) wrote a story which reported (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/washington/16fisa.html?hp) that the FISA Court of Review had issued a decision “validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a specific court order.” From start to finish, Lichtblau’s description of the ruling was muddled and contradictory, even nonsensical in some places.
Nonetheless, it was crystal clear even from Lichtblau’s poorly written story that the court’s ruling had nothing whatsoever to do with whether Bush acted legally or properly when he ordered warrantless eavesdropping on Americans from 2001-2006, when warrantless eavesdropping was a felony under FISA. To the contrary, as I explained earlier today (here (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/#postid-updateB2)) — and as Talk Left’s Armando (http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/1/15/9533/54420) and Anonymous Liberal (http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2009/01/from-department-of-bad-legal-reporting.html) (both lawyers) also detailed – the FISA court was addressing a totally different and much narrower question: namely, whether the warrantless eavesdropping which Congress authorized in the 2007 Protect America Act was prohibited by the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

Mother Jones Reporting on Unconstitutional FISA spying
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/justice-department-electronic-frontier-foundation-fisa-court-opinion
Politics (http://www.motherjones.com/politics) → Civil Liberties (http://www.motherjones.com/topics/civil-liberties), Congress (http://www.motherjones.com/topics/congress), Courts (http://www.motherjones.com/topics/courts), Foreign Policy (http://www.motherjones.com/topics/foreign-policy), Top Stories (http://www.motherjones.com/topics/top-stories)

Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance

Government lawyers are trying to keep buried a classified court finding that a domestic spying program went too far.
—By David Corn (http://www.motherjones.com/authors/david-corn)
| Fri Jun. 7, 2013 12:22 PM PDT
More on the NSA's electronic surveillance program.


NSA Spying: An Obama Scandal? (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/nsa-spying-obama-scandal)
The Domestic Surveillance Boom, From Bush to Obama (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/timeline-nsa-domestic-surveillance-bush-obama)
Judge at Center of NSA Spying Controversy Attended Expenses-Paid Terrorism Seminar (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/fisa-judge-nsa-seminar)
What Is the NSA Doing With All Those Phone Records? (http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/what-nsa-doing-all-those-phone-records)

In the midst of revelations that the government has conducted extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records (http://swampland.time.com/2013/06/06/obama-administration-declassifies-phone-records-seizures-condemns-leaks/) and internet communications (http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html), the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.
This important case—all the more relevant in the wake of this week's disclosures—was triggered after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, started crying foul in 2011 about US government snooping. As a member of the intelligence committee, he had learned about domestic surveillance activity affecting American citizens that he believed was improper. He and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), another intelligence committee member, raised only vague warnings about this data collection, because they could not reveal the details of the classified program that concerned them. But in July 2012, Wyden was able to get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify two statements (http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/07/2012-07-20-OLA-Ltr-to-Senator-Wyden-ref-Declassification-Request.pdf) that he wanted to issue publicly. They were:
* On at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
* I believe that the government's implementation of Section 702 of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion.

For those who follow the secret and often complex world of high-tech government spying, this was an aha moment. The FISA court Wyden referred to oversees the surveillance programs run by the government, authorizing requests for various surveillance activities related to national security, and it does this behind a thick cloak of secrecy. Wyden's statements led to an obvious conclusion: He had seen a secret FISA court opinion that ruled that one surveillance program was unconstitutional and violated the spirit of the law. But, yet again, Wyden could not publicly identify this program.
"When the government hides court opinions describing unconstitutional government action, America’s national security is harmed," argues the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Enter the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest group focused on digital rights. It quickly filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Justice Department for any written opinion or order of the FISA court that held government surveillance was improper or unconstitutional. The Justice Department did not respond, and EFF was forced to file a lawsuit a month later.
It took the Justice Department four months to reply. The government's lawyers noted that they had located records responsive to the request, including a FISA court opinion. But the department was withholding the opinion because it was classified.
EFF pushed ahead with its lawsuit, and in a filing in April, the Justice Department acknowledged that the document in question was an 86-page opinion the FISA court had issued on October 3, 2011. Again, there was no reference to the specific surveillance activity that the court had found improper or unconstitutional. And now the department argued that the opinion was controlled by the FISA court and could only be released by that body, not by the Justice Department or through an order of a federal district court. In other words, leave us alone and take this case to the secret FISA court itself.

This was puzzling to EFF, according to David Sobel, a lawyer for the group. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union had asked the FISA court to release an opinion, and the court had informed the ACLU to take the matter up with the Justice Department and work through a district court, if necessary.
So there was a contradiction within the government. "It's a bizarre catch-22," Sobel says. On its website, EFF compared this situation to a Kafka plot: "A public trapped between conflicting rules and a secret judicial body, with little transparency or public oversight, seems like a page ripped from The Trial."

Before EFF could get a ruling on whether this opinion can be declassified and released, it had to first sort out this Alice in Wonderland situation. Consequently, last month, it filed (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/EFF-takes-fight-against-secret-law-to-FISC) a motion with the FISA court to resolve this aspect of the case. "We want the FISA court to say that if the district court says the opinion should be released, there is noting in its rules that prevents that," Sobel says. Then EFF can resume its battle with the Justice Department in federal district court for the release of the opinion. The

Justice Department was ordered (http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/052413-eff.pdf) by the FISA court to respond by June 7 to the motion EFF submitted to the FISA court.


Currently, given the conflicting positions of the Justice Department and the FISA court, Sobel notes, "there is no court you can go to to challenge the secrecy" protecting an opinion noting that the government acted unconstitutionally. On its website, EFF observes (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/EFF-takes-fight-against-secret-law-to-FISC), "Granted, it's likely that some of the information contained within FISC opinions should be kept secret; but, when the government hides court opinions describing unconstitutional government action, America's national security is harmed: not by disclosure of our intelligence capabilities, but through the erosion of our commitment to the rule of law."


As news reports emerge about the massive phone records and internet surveillance programs—each of which began during the Bush administration and were carried out under congressional oversight and FISA court review—critics on the left and right have accused the government of going too far in sweeping up data, including information related to Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing. There's no telling if the 86-page FISA court opinion EFF seeks is directly related to either of these two programs, but EFF's pursuit of this document shows just how difficult it is—perhaps impossible—for the public to pry from the government information about domestic surveillance gone wrong.