NSA says it can listen to calls without a warrant

At the rate things are coming out on the assorted scandals in Washington, we’re going to need a shoe store. It’s always seems to be “Another shoe dropped” regarding the scandals. This one is on the NSA spying on Americans.

Declan McCullagh of CNET reported yesterday that the NSA said they didn’t need a warrant to listen to people’s phone calls. Needless to say, this caught a few people by surprise, such as a district attorney in California who was ready to line Snowden up against a wall. Patterico of Patterico’s Pontifications wrote:

I thought Snowden’s claims sounded far-fetched, although I also acknowledged that I didn’t know for sure. They’re starting to sound more near-fetched, though, aren’t they?

Returning to the CNET story,

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

Excuse me? This means they are, in fact, wiretapping people, they are NOT getting a warrant, either through the FISA courts or through the normal courts.

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Personally, I can’t stand Nadler, but the NSA/Justice department wiretapping scandals are crossing political divides. I think we’re seeing a new split in the Congress. Those who support the spying on American citizens without warrants, and those who think it’s unconstitutional.

The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”

And this is why you are seeing people who originally thought Snowden should be targeted with a drone strike pulling back from that. Everything he is saying, in general, is proving out.

There are serious “constitutional problems” with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. “It epitomizes the problem of secret laws.”

How serious? Well, it looks like congress thought it was serious enough to clarify what they intended.

AT&T and other telecommunications companies that allow the NSA to tap into their fiber links receive absolute immunity from civil liability or criminal prosecution, thanks to a law that Congress enacted in 2008 and renewed in 2012. It’s a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as the FISA Amendments Act.

That law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed.

A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA “may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.” A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically — on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to “target” a specific American citizen.

And as you are now seeing, this is going over like a lead balloon. In general, as I’ve mentioned in the past, people are fine with the NSA cracking codes and eavesdropping on foreign governments and terrorist groups. They are outside of the United States and are not covered by our constitution. However, going after the records of millions of Americans strikes people of the days of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. it’s something that a police state does. And speaking of secret police, here’s what the Director of the FBI had to say when Nadler needled him.

Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek “a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual.”

Is information about that procedure “classified in any way?” Nadler asked.

“I don’t think so,” Mueller replied.

“Then I can say the following,” Nadler said. “We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that…In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there’s a conflict.”

Conflict? I would say it was another outright lie by some bureaucrat. This goes far beyond Obama and his minions, even though they have been using it for their benefit. This strikes to the core of our form of Constitutional Government.

This is yet another nail in the coffin of the formerly great nation known as the United States of America. We have, in my opinion, gone past the point where these bureaucracies cane be reformed. With the FBI alone, we’ve been trying to repair the damage done by J. Edgar Hoover for decades. With all the other agencies and departments now giving Americans their version of a proctological/gynecological exam, reforming is no longer possible. We need to “Bite the bullet” and start disbanding these agencies. Otherwise, we might just see a full scale break between the people and the federal government with all that entails. (Nothing good)

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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