Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On - The InterceptThe Intercept. The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes: • Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W.
Bush; • Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases; • Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University; • Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights; Faisal Gill Asim Ghafoor. Confirmed: DOJ Uses Section 702 to Get Title I FISA Warrants. In addition to the apparent miscommunication between Mark Udall and Acting (and presumably soon to be confirmed) DOJ National Security Division Head John Carlin, there was an even more telling exchange in today’s hearing. In it, Martin Heinrich asked whether DOJ had yet written down its radical new policy of giving notice to defendants caught using Section 702.
Heinrich: As you know in October 2013, after months and months of discussion and debate in which you and the NSD were involved, DOJ adopted a new policy by which Federal prosecutors would inform defendants when they intended to offer evidence informed, obtained, or derived from intelligence collected under Section 702 of FISA. And when you and I met in December you informed me that that policy had not yet been reduced to a formal written policy, and so, Mr. Carlin, I wanted to ask, is that process done yet and has that policy been finalized and if so has it been disseminated in written form? Um. I’m glad that’s all cleared up. If One Judge Gives FISA Review, and Another Judge Gives FISA Review, All Hell Will Break Loose! There have been a couple of developments on the government’s effort to continue its practice of shielding its dragnet from adversarial legal review behind the screen of FISA.
First, the 7th Circuit appears to want to punt on the question of whether or not Adel Daoud’s lawyer should be able to review the FISA materials used against him. It claims (incorrectly, I suspect) it may not have the authority to review Sharon Coleman’s decision to give Daoud review. A preliminary review of the short record indicates that the order appealed from may not be an appealable order.Section 3731 of Title 18, United States Code, permits the United States to appeal certain rulings in a criminal case. The district court’s order of January 29, 2014, compelling disclosure of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application materials to defense counsel having the necessary clearance, does not appear to fit within the statute’s list of orders that the government can appeal. But I wanted to point out footnote 19: Fisa judge: Snowden's NSA disclosures triggered important spying debate | World news.
The court that oversees US surveillance has ordered the government to review for declassification a set of secret rulings about the National Security Agency's bulk trawls of Americans' phone records, acknowledging that disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden had triggered an important public debate. The Fisa court ordered the Justice Department to identify the court's own rulings after May 2011 that concern a section of the Patriot Act used by the NSA to justify its mass database of American phone data.
The ruling was a significant step towards their publication. It is the second time in a week that a US court has ordered the disclosure of secret intelligence rulings. On Tuesday, a federal court in New York compelled the government to declassify numerous documents that revealed substantial tension between federal authorities and the surveillance court over the years. "If there's a good side to this, maybe that's it. " The ACLU hailed Saylor's ruling as a victory. Barack Obama says the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court 'is transparent' President Barack Obama has taken a lot of criticism from both friend and foe in the wake of recent disclosures about how the U.S. government monitors telephone and Internet traffic.
He defended himself recently in an interview with Charlie Rose on June 17, 2013, making several claims in defense of government surveillance. The full discussion is available here, but one exchange in particular struck us as noteworthy. It involves the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a special court that hears government requests for warrants related to national security investigations. Rose: "So I hear you saying I have no problem with what NSA has been doing.
" Obama: "Well, let me finish, because I don’t. … (The FBI has) to go to the FISA court with probable cause and ask for a warrant. " Rose: "But has FISA court turned down any request? " Obama: "First of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small, number one. Rose: "Should this be transparent in some way?
" Our ruling. Secret-court judges upset at portrayal of ‘collaboration’ with government. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took the highly unusual step Friday of voicing open frustration at the account in the report and court’s inability to explain its decisions. “In my view, that draft report contains major omissions, and some inaccuracies, regarding the actions I took as Presiding Judge of the FISC and my interactions with Executive Branch officials,” Kollar-Kotelly said in a statement to The Post. It was her first public comment describing her work on the intelligence court. The inspector general’s draft report is among the many documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, touching off a roiling national debate about the proper balance between the government’s reach into Americans’ lives and the effort to protect the nation in the Internet age.
“That is incorrect,” she said. “I participated in a process of adjudication, not ‘coordination’ with the executive branch. A guide to FISA §1881a: The law behind it ... A guide to FISA §1881a: The law behind it all. Simply put, the National Security Agency is an intelligence agency. Its purpose is to monitor the world's communications, which it traditionally collected by using spy satellites, taps on cables, and placing listening stations around the world. In 2008, by making changes to U.S. law, the U.S. Congress enabled the NSA to make U.S. industry complicit in its mission.
No longer would the NSA have to rely only on international gathering points. It can now go to domestic companies who hold massive amounts of information on foreigners and order them to submit any information of interest to the NSA. Below we carefully analyse the legal framework around these requests. Of particular concern is U.S. law's distinction between foreigners and U.S. citizens or residents -- legally referred to as "U.S. persons. " About the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act § 1881a (a.k.a. FISA was established in 1978 in response to abuses in domestic intelligence surveillance powers.
Who may be targeted? No. Yes. Understanding the 2008 Changes to FISA — A Visual Guide (Flowchart) | Ketchup and Caviar (Political Commentary) Understanding Recent Changes to FISA — A Visual Guide (Flowchart) July 11th, 2008 Posted in Politics I have to admit that despite the fact that I read Glenn Greenwald’s blog and have followed his numerous posts on FISA , until recently I haven’t fully understand the law or how it recently changed . I think the complexity of the issue is one of the reasons there isn’t more outrage about or opposition to the revised FISA law. So I took the time to do some careful reading, diagramming as I went. I thought these might be useful to others. What you’ll see below are two diagrams comparing Old and New FISA. You can click on these thumbnails to see larger images.
I Used the Following resources for these charts: I wanted to know what combinations of the following factors triggered a FISA Warrant requirement under the old and new laws, and which didn’t: Is the Communications Domestic, Foreign-to-Foreign, or Foreign-to-U.S.? The focus of change is the bolded red line marked “U.S. or non-U.S. ShareThis. A Guide to the New FISA Bill, Part I. A Guide to the New FISA Bill, Part I Guest Blogger David Kris Marty Lederman and Jack Balkin invited me to submit a post on the FISA modernization bill (H.R. 6304) that was passed on Thursday by the House of Representatives, and that appears to be on the verge of becoming law. To understand this new legislation, I think you need to appreciate three matters: (1) some elements of the current version of FISA, which are what is at stake in the (soon to be concluded) debate over modernizing the statute; (2) the main legal and operational arguments for and against modernizing FISA; and (3) the Bush Administration’s actual efforts to modernize electronic surveillance, beginning with the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) in 2001, and ending with the new legislation.
Even in abbreviated, non-technical form, these three matters require some heavy lifting, so I’ll cover the first two today, and then address the third in a separate post that will appear tomorrow. 1. 2. A Guide to the New FISA Bill, Part II. A Guide to the New FISA Bill, Part II Guest Blogger David Kris Yesterday, in discussing H.R. 6304, the FISA modernization bill passed by the House on Thursday, I identified the key elements of current FISA, and described what I see as the main legal and operational arguments for and against modernizing the statute. Today, I’d like to describe the Bush Administration’s actual efforts to “modernize” electronic surveillance.
There have been, essentially, three Administration approaches to modernizing electronic surveillance – one directed at each branch of the federal government. As it turns out, the first two approaches seem to have failed, but the third (embodied in H.R. 6304) appears to be on the verge of success. a. B. As noted in yesterday’s post, FISA has three essential substantive requirements: first, a target that is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power; second, a facility being used by that target; and third, minimization.
C. A Guide to the New FISA Bill, Part III. A Guide to the New FISA Bill, Part III Guest Blogger David Kris [Here is Part I and Part II] In my last post, I compared the pending legislation to my speculation about the January 2007 FISA Court orders. Of course, it’s also interesting to compare the pending legislation to current (traditional) FISA. The opposite is true, however, with respect to stored e-mail. The second major limit in current FISA is that the statute does not apply where the surveillance target is located abroad and the surveillance occurs abroad. The third major limit is that current FISA does not apply to wire surveillance where the target is a foreigner, and the surveillance occurs abroad. Fourth and finally, current FISA does not apply to radio surveillance not targeting a U.S. person located in the United States where any party to the radio communication is outside the United States. 2.
(a) U.S. (b) foreign-to-U.S. communications, also known as one-end-U.S. communications; and (c) foreign-to-foreign communications. Concurring Opinions. I have been following the new FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but I have refrained from chiming in, as many others have been doing terrific blogging on the issue. Of particular note: * David Kris, A Guide to the New FISA Bill (I, II, III) * Wes Alwan, Understanding Recent Changes to FISA — A Visual Guide (Flowchart) * Orin Kerr, The New FISA Law and the Misleading Media Coverage of It * Marty Lederman, The Privacy-Protective Components of the New FISA Law * Jack Balkin, The New FISA Law and the Construction of the National Surveillance State I’ve been particularly dismayed at the Democrats’ strategy in dealing with the FISA Amendments. Future presidents can learn a lot from all this — do exactly what the Bush Administration did! The past eight years have witnessed a dramatic expansion of Executive Branch power, with a rather anemic push-back from the Legislative and Judicial Branches.
The Volokh Conspiracy - The New FISA Law. Assessing Surveillance Laws in An Era of Sunset Provisions: In my blog post last week on the new FISA Amendments, and a follow-up on Friday, some commenters expressed strong disagreement — and in some cases, downright contempt — at my view that the most natural baseline for assessing the latest FISA Amendments was last year's FISA law, the Protect America Act. Our disagreement raises a conceptually interesting question: How should we characterize the direction of new surveillance laws in an era when so many surveillance laws are being subject to sunset provisions? And applying that to the specific case here, is the Protect America Act the right baseline for the new FISA Amendments?
I think the question is tremendously important. Statutory laws require a feedback loop: The public needs to know if their policy preferences are being enacted into law. But the details of surveillance law are a mystery to 99.99% of the population. I think this is the case for three reasons. Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind. FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country. Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington. Without obtaining court approval, intelligence agents can then add more specific requests — like names of individuals and additional Internet services to track — every day for a year. National Security Letters are limited to the name, address, length of service and toll billing records of a service’s subscribers.
Because national security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence, it is difficult to know exactly how, and how often, the companies cooperate or resist. The Yahoo ruling, from 2008, shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. NSA taps in to systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and others, secret files reveal | World news.
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says. The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program.
The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers. Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program. An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of Prism. Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily | World news. Verizon forced to hand over telephone data – full court ruling | World news.
Post details: CA3: FISA surveillance led to domestic prosecution, and Patriot Act amendments not unconstitutional; even if they were, Krull wouldn't require exclusion.