From the court order: "We add, moreover, that there is a high degree of probability that requiring a warrant wound hinder the government's ability to collect time-sensitive information and, thus, would impede the vital national security interests that are at stake." Cough
Nowhere in that document does it say anything about not needing a warrant to get information on U.S. citizens residing in the U.S. What it does actually say is
For these reasons, we hold that a foreign intelligence exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement exists when surveillance is conducted to obtain foreign intelligence for national security purposes and is directed against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.
I.e. a FISA request.
Not according to the language used in this document it isn't. You can say it is similar if you want, but when they say "A warrant is not required" in this case they are not saying "no authorization is required".
So, one access to a external server? Visiting overseas?
Also, PRISM is an acronym for Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management. Could people please stop abusing it as a term for whatever random scary thing they want to believe the NSA is doing?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/technology/secret-court-ru...
The text Fourth Amendment doesn't narrow itself to "United States Persons". It says:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It feels like the judge is stating: The authority for this principle can be found in Black Box.
It may be justified for civil cases to be held in secret. After all, civil cases can be resolved by mediation, arbitration, even just negotiation. When the matter concerns a petition against the government however, or against a law, there is no reason for the case to be sealed or secret.
Whats next, the congress voted in a closed secret session a new secret law?
Before the FAA passed, there were no requirements or oversight governing collection of non US persons communicating over a US carrier. And in fact, existing legal precedent does not treat the carrier as party to the communication, so collection under those circumstances was likely legal. That's exactly the loophole the previous administration exploited to compel third-party compliance in foreign intelligence collection without oversight.
They take everything they want off the wire anyway; the best case scenario is that they have FISA rubber stamp warrants for the times where they "need a warrant".
Do we really care about specific instances of uses of PRISM? I mean, in an honest way I'm curious :: is there really any benefit if we could definitely prove that PRISM was used without a warrant? Is it worse than any of the other things that have been disclosed or leaked since originally finding out about PRISM?
I don't think so, but I was screaming bloody murder about NSLs in 2006, soooo......
I guess that's pretty much exactly what I'm experiencing. "Why bother trying if no one is listening". Not exactly the concept of 'disaster porn' but it's a close enough allusion.
Almost everyone I know that's involved in some kind of activism has this happen to them; I know that I feel it almost all the time. I'm not saying you're actually _doing_ any activism, but I think it's a side effect of paying so much attention to the letter of the law: law is a messy, sloppy thing, or at least it appears that way to this non-lawyer. It doesn't mesh well with my 'computers are deterministic' general mindset.
And really, _especially_ on this privacy front, it's terribly hard to see that these things are going to happen, get called 'crazy' and 'paranoid,' see them happen, and then sigh: "I told you so."
According to the 4th amendment, "warrants" must be used in specific investigations and for specific individuals. There's nothing specific about a FISA warrant. They just get data en masse from a lot of people. And they use this paper that they are calling a "warrant" from the FISA court, that says they can get the data on everyone.
Also, FISA warrants completely ignores such things as "probable cause" and "reasonable searches", which are pretty important for a democracy, I'd say. You can't say you're getting all the data of 100 million people, and also have "probable cause" for them.
"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It was adopted as a response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, which is a type of general search warrant, in the American Revolution. Search and seizure (including arrest) should be limited in scope according to specific information supplied to the issuing court, usually by a law enforcement officer, who has sworn by it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...
Er, um, no. FISA warrants and courts are different than regular warrants and courts for a very good reason. Most of them are issued post de-facto and as mtgx and I have pointed out, are literally rubber stamped. ZERO were declined last year.
I'd love a citation for the last sentence of your post. I'll work on background info on FISA warrants. Like I said, wish I had my debate evidence I cut years ago. Rather ironically, it's actually remarkably hard to refind some of that evidence 10 years later. Google loves to emphasize more recent publications.
A FISA warrant is as much a warrant as an FBI agent wiping their ass on a piece of paper and calling it a National Security Letter makes it a "legal warrant". (Yes, field FBI agents can issue them, and they're issued in the tens of thousands every single year, AND a single letter can apply to a person, team, family, or entire workplace.)
You might call it "legal" in that a law passed by Congress with secret interpretations and special addenedums tells them they can... but yeah, I'm going to keep on calling FISA warrants and NSLs used on US Citizens what it is: unconstitutional and thus practically, illegal.
What's amusing is how many people assume that the police ever needed a warrant to "investigate them." The police need a warrant to search your person or your property. The police don't need anything to investigate you, and need nothing more than a court order to subpoena documents from people who might have information about you. This has always been the way our system worked.
Depending on what exactly PRISM does, it may very well not require a warrant, any more than the police require a warrant to get your bank records or other kinds of information about you held by third parties.
For some reason, it's not really been refreshing to see people paying more attention now. I thought maybe it was a holier than thou thing but hitting blogs where we were talking about it back then I see the same thing. People who were outraged then are doing what they were then - trying to read between the lines and figuring out how it really works while still being legally compliant. Try commenting on that, and you're called a sheeple and told how it's all un-constitutional, yada, yada.
I don't mind when my outlying beliefs become hip, but I do get annoyed when they jump the shark.
For these reasons, we hold that a foreign intelligence exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement exists when surveillance is conducted to obtain foreign intelligence for national security purposes and is directed against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.
Not the same thing.
