Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance

Remember how in Obama's speech on June 7, 2013, he said that there are checks and balances for our elected government officials to utilize for all of the surveilance done by the US?

Watch at the 4 min 32 second mark.


Well, think again. It appears that the top-secret surveillance operations was found unconstitutional in 2011. But everything was "top secret" and untouchable, and also the Justice department would not respond to the pleas of the Senate.

And here they are still trying to cover it up.

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

Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance

reply to post by elouina


Oh my! Imagine my shock and surprise at this news!

I guess the lesson in this is that we should always take the word of habitual war criminals with a grain of salt....

At 2:00 min is funny...what a damn joke

Originally posted by Ex_CT2
reply to post by elouina

 

Oh my! Imagine my shock and surprise at this news!

I guess the lesson in this is that we should always take the word of habitual war criminals with a grain of salt....

Yes it is quite nice to have the paper trails that the US is famous for. Bread crumbs such as this are even better. Now lets see if we can get our hands on this 86 page document. Lets also see if it is even remotely possible to disband such a massive program. It has to be done if our country has even a shred of decency left.

reply to post by elouina


Church and Pike... It's happened before and there is precedent. The 60's had things like we see here, for what tech was back then. Wire taps... "Red Files" in most big city Police Departments for their intelligence units.... Infiltration of groups at all levels and targeting of groups by Government agencies.... A good deal of what we see now, happened then too. Directed at some of the very people who run the effort to do it to others now, ironically. If not a part, then in the generation right after it.

We need another series like Church and Pike and the committees into the whole range of intelligence activities then.

Now this is ironic, but the liberal left may get all they've wanted by the time it's all over. They'll just get it by losing what they hold most dear. They may get Bush ....but getting Bush will come THROUGH getting Obama, since Obama has continued and expanded the programs. One has to work backwards to get there. Now that will be interesting to see play out.

Do you know what is nearly as criminal? The US spends 80 billion a year on intelligence! This is more than a handful of countries spend on national defense. Here everyone is worried about tightening their belts and worried about sequesters. And we have a huge elephant running loose in our back yards. The amount spent is proof that the US has taken intelligence to a new level.

In 2011, we had nearly 860,000 people involved in intelligence work. 55,0000 alone work for the NSA. People don't have jobs in this country but the governemnt elites keeps growing. SICK!

Data intelligence complex is the real story

Well well... What do you know... President Obama has been caught lying. In my top post I have a video where as Obama states that every member of Congress had been briefed on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic phone surveillance program. Evidentally, they weren't. Only those select few on the house and senate intelligence committe were aware of this.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Friday disputed a claim President Obama made at a press conference only moments earlier, when the president said that every member of Congress had been briefed on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic phone surveillance program.

Merkley said only select members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the program, and that he was only aware of it because he obtained “special permission” to review the pertinent documents after hearing about it second-hand.

Dem Senator disputes Obama's statement that Congress was briefed on NSA surveillance

reply to post by elouina


Notice how he says more than once that no one is "listening" to your telephone calls. What about the content of those calls being transcribed automatically into text to be fed into a system and then analyzed?

I am one of those people who watches what others say to pick out what they are carefully avoiding saying, and he seems to be deliberately trying to make that fact clear - no one is LISTENING to your calls... but are people reading the contents of those calls in a way to get around that distinction, just as they use GCHQ in the UK to gather data for them and circumvent their own legal restrictions?

Does anyone actually believe anything these people say anymore?

As for the court opinion, I don't think any sensible American can even remotely try to suggest that what has been uncovered is constitutional in any way. The mass harvesting of private information of citizens is clearly and obviously in conflict with the constitution, I have no hesitation in saying this and I'm not even American. If I can understand that this is unconstitutional then surely millions of Americans can see that too.

You can call this a bump post if you like, but I'm pretty worried about why this massive news is not more important to Americans.

I keep looking at the "Recent Posts" list and there is hardly anything about the biggest story to hit the US in decades on there. Why are people more interested in talking about UFO's over a $cientology building than they are about a proven case of the "leader of the free world" becoming unaccountable to his own citizens?

The American president is now embroiled in a crisis that dwarfs almost any other we have seen in our lifetimes, he has defied the constitution of the United States and is using his special "privilege" to prevent having to face his own people over this, and no one seems too bothered about it!

I'm really starting to wonder if ATS is 80% teenager, 10% mod and 10% government agent.

Did the DOJ get James Rosen's Phone records from NSA Prism program ?

Originally posted by MajorAce
Did the DOJ get James Rosen's Phone records from NSA Prism program ?

You know I wondered the same thing. Earlier today a whistleblower exposed an abuse of the NSA surveillance program! Petraeus's affair was found out using it! And it was used to destroy him!

Originally posted by Rocker2013
You can call this a bump post if you like, but I'm pretty worried about why this massive news is not more important to Americans.

I keep looking at the "Recent Posts" list and there is hardly anything about the biggest story to hit the US in decades on there. Why are people more interested in talking about UFO's over a $cientology building than they are about a proven case of the "leader of the free world" becoming unaccountable to his own citizens?

The American president is now embroiled in a crisis that dwarfs almost any other we have seen in our lifetimes, he has defied the constitution of the United States and is using his special "privilege" to prevent having to face his own people over this, and no one seems too bothered about it!

I'm really starting to wonder if ATS is 80% teenager, 10% mod and 10% government agent.

It is not just ATS. It appears that the american populace is not concerned with such things! That seems to be the consensus of a number of news articles I read about. The people take note, their hair stands on end for a week, then they forget abiout it. This is exactly why these things happen!

I have another couple of threads I am thinking about writing. Be on the lookout for them.

I think we need a new thread to follow everything that's happening, because information is still being produced by the Guardian.

They have a live update thingy on the site now...

Obama defends NSA spying program as new Prism details emerge – live

Notice the new information there:

Corporations all come out with the same denial about allowing "direct access" to their servers. This tells me that they allowed indirect access. This could be that they supplied access to a mirror of all their data live and as it happens. This would be pretty easy to do for a corporation with funding from the NSA, and would allow the corporation to claim no direct access and to maintain their own corporate security over their own servers. They basically just copy everything to a secondary system that they can then share.

Also check out the new graphic released from the Prism document, detailing how both access to those companies data and monitoring of cables is collated to gather information. This means that they were not only mining the data from the corporations, but they were also accessing the data in the cable infrastructure at various points in the journey.

This means that there are agreements in place with the operators of the core infrastructure and cabling, is that Verizon or others too? There is the previous story about a whistle-blower from AT&T who made these claims about secret "intercept posts" in AT&T buildings before.

Like I said, I think we need an ongoing thread to cover all of this as it happens, with updates in the OP. This is far from over, and it would be good to have one place to go to for updates on everything and to complete a thorough picture. I just don't want to be the one to create that thread, I already have enough work to do that isn't getting done thanks to my addiction to this story

Here's more astonishing news:

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.


At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called “a sensitive intelligence collection program” after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.


Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009, analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.

and look who's involved !

The judges “were really upset about this,” said the former official. As a result, Attorney General Eric Holder pledged to the judges that the intelligence agencies would take steps to correct the problem as a condition of renewing the NSA’s surveillance program.

Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans


Mistakes ??

More like tests.

These "innocent" "mistakes" end up being normal data mining techniques.


And we are not alone......

Exclusive: UK security agency GCHQ gaining information from world's biggest internet firms through US-run Prism programme................

UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation

What if those "mistakes" get highjacked by other foreign governments ?

There are those that see the long running, systemic NSA, Verizon surveillance abuses, as merely individual privacy and govt. trust issues, but I would have to admit, that there is much more to these surveillance abuses that must be pursued and openly discussed, if we are ever going to learn what has actually been done with all the data collection.

While the nation bemoans privacy issues and abuse of power for political reasons and for targeting political enemies, we should be asking of the investigative media types, to honestly investigate and ask the hard questions that go far beyond any privacy abuses.

Since millions upon millions of records have been collected for supposedly fighting terrorism, I suspect this claim could be put to sleep and discredited, just by asking some of the following and more important questions about the NSA data collection and surveillance program.

Who controls the data that has been so far collected? This is a key question.
Where is all this data located? What control systems are in place to safeguard and control access to this data?
Has anyone data mined the so far collected data and if so, who mined it and for what reasons?
Who is currently and actively mining the data?
Has any of the personal data on millions of Americans been sold?
If sold, to whom was it sold and on what basis was it sold and for what amount of money?
Has any of this collected information been shared with foreign intelligence agencies?
If so, why and and based on what justification?
How much does it cost the tax payers to fund this collection program on an annual basis?

These real questions, are to me, the more truly investigative questions, that need to be asked and discussed, if we are ever to find out and know what data was collected and how and by whom it was used since its collection.

The NSA Verizon abuse has little to do with any terrorism investigations, so we should then explore the more obvious truth, that govt officials and elected politicians are being used as govt and legislative tools for corporate espionage and corporate monopolies, where the data is mined so as to allow certain corporations to mine it for profit and for creating highly refined dossiers of associates and all public and private activities on anyone in the nation considered a political enemy or as a member of some religious group that the govt seeks to undermine and or intimidate.

I opt for the hard questions of what has govt done with all of the data since its collection? This is the starting point and if others would see it as critical information that would lead to knowing the truth, then these questions will become a matter of discussion, not because they are sensational, but because they would answer many current questions and reveal the larger truth of the data collection in the process.

Such type of surveillance is needed in a modern society, but instead of monitoring the citizens for data that is mined for profit and for creating lists of political enemies, this type of complete surveillance should be the norm for being able to work in any elected position and or any federal position. We need to have such surveillance as a condition of employment, 24/7 surveillance of all our officials for fraud, corruption,treason, and more.

Anyway, such technological advances in data collection are to be expected, but what govt and corporations are doing with the data collected illegally, is not what benefits the nation. It is only a system of data collection that is used to extort cooperation, intimidate and threaten others and even corporations with what they dont want others to know.

Begin by asking what has been done with the data since its collection and who has mined it and for what purposes? I am certain, it will open up a Pandora's box of items, that the nation needs to know about, that is not currently being discussed, because of course, the media is only talking privacy abuses when they should be talking about much more.

Thinking outside of the box is a requirement to learning the truth, it is not an option. Thanks for the thread.

reply to post by MaxBlack


Max, I love you. If I weren't already engaged to the most amazing guy in the world, I'd be on my knee proposing to you. Fantastic post. One remark I will make is that there is also the invisible pink elephant in the middle of the room and that is that it would appear that all of this information is being initially collected and stored by corporations. While the sum total of this data across the board of all of these corporations may ultimately be getting into the hands of the federal government and its corresponding agencies, many of the web giants are becoming so monstrously large as to coming close to having that same sum total of data on the equivalency of what the federal government may have collected/stored.

As an example, Google isn't just simply Google.com or Google+. It's also youtube and much, much more.
List of Google's Mergers and Acquisitions

Microsoft also holds unprecedented data collection possibilities at the equivalency of what has occurred at the federal level and again, it is not simply just Microsoft as Microsoft owns Skype and a whole lot more, too:
List of Microsoft Mergers and Acquisitions

In other words, one of the most important factors, at least in my mind, is that this isn't information that the NSA or any other federal entity is collecting itself but information that they are obtaining from corporations with monstrous amounts of data on all of us. If one is going to be concerned about what the federal government can do with such data collection in the name of national security, then one should very reasonably be equally as concerned, if not more concerned, about what these giants can do with that same data. If our checks and balances may not be functionally appropriately on this same data, then how is it being handled by corporations who have even less transparency or accountability? I personally think that it's time for the FTC to do their jobs.

Similar to some of what you are saying but I just wanted to hammer that out very specifically.

reply to post by elouina


That is why I am pretty sure that this whole issue will no die, that more whistle blowers will come forwards and that we may have some big congress hearings on the Patriot act and the violation of constiutional rights and abuse of power.

This is just the beggining, and while you found that this was already been talk about 2011, the issues of unconstitutionality has been on going ever year that the patrot acts is due for signing but the courts keep siding with the government

They are all crocks and courrpted, it is highest court job to protect the constitutional rights of citizens in this nation and they have failed.

So I believe they should hold accountable for the inflirtation of corruption with them.

They are trusted and they do not protect Americans.

reply to post by marg6043


Well we hope more will come forward. It looks like the Obama admin is actively seeking this whistleblower to incarcerate them. This person did us a favor and here is the Obama admin trying to destroy the freedom of the press and whistleblowing.

Here I will show my source of this info.

Obama administration takes first step in probe on who leaked info about phone, email tracking

The Obama administration has taken a first step toward opening a criminal investigation into the purported leaking of classified documents related to the federal government tracking Americans' phone calls and emails, a source familiar with the high-level discussions told Fox News on Saturday.

Is it me or is this heading into the wrong direction? We need to be investigating who should be tried for treason!

reply to post by elouina

4:32 . We can all go home now. I could be eating donuts.

I could be networking with wealthy people. I could be calling my buddy and laughing about your phone calls...

You know, I have a very strong feeling that eyes should be centered on Dianne Feinstein as a "player" in this saga right now. I will be looking at her a lot in the near future, so she better not even breath wrong right now.