Court oversight of NSA phone surveillance is a joke

[MNBrewer]

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/warrantless_searches_the_court_oversight_of_nsa_phone_surveillance_is_a.html?wpisrc=most_viral

The National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of all U.S. citizens—which numbers have called which other numbers, when, and for how long—in an enormous database. The government says this mass collection is OK because the database is “queried”—i.e., searched—only under court supervision. In theory, this two-tiered approach, with judicial scrutiny applied at the query stage rather than the collection stage, is defensible. But does the judiciary—in this case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—really examine the database queries?

This week, at House and Senate hearings, five administration officials answered questions about the phone surveillance program. They held back plenty, but they told us a lot more than we had previously known. They testified that last year, the NSA had plugged fewer than 300 phone numbers into the database— numbers for which the agency could claim a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of a connection to terrorism—to find out which other phones had called or received calls from those numbers. The officials cited multiple layers of supervision. But the judicial review they described is superficial. The NSA doesn’t have to get court approval each time it queries the database. It doesn’t even have to explain each query to the court afterward.