From The Switch blog at Washington Post: After a legal battle that went on over a year, the federal government was forced to reveal a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISC) opinion that showed the National Security Agency (NSA) engaged in unconstitutional surveillance practices, including the collection of tens of thousands of Americans’ online communications.
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Read More… from How privacy advocates shined light on NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance
From Electronic Frontier Foundation: For over a year, EFF has been fighting the government in federal court to force the public release of an 86-page opinion of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Issued in October 2011, the secret court's opinion found that surveillance conducted by the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act was unconstitutional and violated "the spirit of" federal law.
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Read More… from Secret Court opinion finding NSA surveillance unconstitutional released
From The Guardian: The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National SecurityAgency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.
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Read More… from Glenn Greenwald’s partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours
From the Washington Post: The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government’s assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes.
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Read More… from Ability to police U.S. spying program limited, says FISA court chief judge
From ProPublica: The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.
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From The Washington Post: WASHINGTON — A senator who has been instrumental in the fight for open government warned Wednesday that the government’s practice of “vacuuming up the phone records of millions of law-abiding Americans” puts citizens’ privacy at risk.
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Read More… from Sen. Wyden denounces bulk phone record collection at ASNE convention
From The Washington Post: WASHINGTON — It’s as if the United States has two governments, one open and one very much not. President Barack Obama leads both, trying not to butt heads with himself.
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Editorial from Columbia Journalism Review: Despite the recent blockbuster leaks about spying on the phone records of millions of Americans, and President Obama’s stated willingness to discuss the issues they raise, a front-page New York Times article on Tuesday asserted that “legal and political obstacles” make a vigorous public debate about sur […]
From Bloomberg Businessweek: The secret U.S. court that rules on surveillance requests from intelligence agencies said it won’t stand in the way of an activist group’s lawsuit seeking the release of one of its nonpublic opinions.
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Read More… from U.S. surveillance court won’t stop release of secret ruling
