It's Transparency !!! don't u c ?
Obama admin says disclosing secret court opinion on
illegal spying could damage national security
By Madison Ruppert
Editor of End the
Lie
(Image credit: EFF)
In yet another move proving the
Obama administration is far from the most transparent in history, it has now
told a federal judge that disclosing a secret opinion on the government
illegally spying on Americans could likely cause “exceptionally grave and
serious damage to the national security.”
This came in response to a lawsuit
that would force the disclosure of an opinion by the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, the court that oversees the warrantless
wiretapping program which the White House claims is immune to
lawsuits.
This court authorized every single request from
the government in 2011 and when documents related to the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) were recently requested through the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), those who requested them received documents that were almost
entirely redacted.
According to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon
Democrat, the FISA court found “on at least one occasion” that the government’s
“minimization procedures” used while conducting surveillance breached he
Fourth Amendment. Now that ruling is being sought out.
In this latest attempt to avoid
having to actually be transparent, the Obama administration said
that the disclosure of that secret opinion would implicate “classified
intelligence sources and methods” and thus, “The government has determined that
disclosure of the information withheld from Plaintiff could result in exceptionally
grave and serious damage to the national security.”
The ruling was sought by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as part of a FOIA request which has now
become a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after
the government rejected their request.
When it comes to the government’s
claims about the disclosure of the opinion, Jacqueline Coleman Snead, a senior
Justice Department counsel, said the EFF “obviously cannot contend otherwise.”
If this information was released, it
could shed light on the entire current surveillance program under the 2008 FISA
Amendments Act that legalized the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping program
which began soon after September 11, 2001.
Currently, the FISA Amendments Act
gives the government the ability to conduct e-mail and telephone surveillance
on a massive scale within the United States without probable cause warrants.
All the government has to do is
claim that the people or groups targeted are “reasonably believed to be located
outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information.”
“In other words, the government can
collect e-mails and phone calls in the United States so long as the target is a
suspected terrorist group overseas,” explains David Kravets. “If the
government collects e-mails that are sent by people believed to be American,
the person’s identity is supposed to be given a pseudonym or ‘minimized.’”
The glaring problem is that since
the rulings are secret, it’s impossible to know just how restricted this type
of surveillance is and given what Wyden said last year, we can safely assume
it’s not carried out in the manner we might hope for.
The government wants to keep the
opinions secret because, according to Kravets, “the FISA Amendments Act
generally requires the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to rubber-stamp
terror-related electronic surveillance requests.”
Under the law, the government
doesn’t even have to directly identify the target of the surveillance or the
facility to be monitored.
The surveillance can begin an entire
week before the government even makes the request, and keep in mind the vast
majority of those requests, in some years all of them, are approved.
In the incredibly rare case that the
court rejects a government surveillance application, the surveillance can
actually continue during the entire appeals process.
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