Secret Supreme Court Within the Supreme Court Responsible for Growing Body of Law

[bigtree]

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.
from ERIC LICHTBLAU at NYT:


WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets . . .”


read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?_r=0

[cantbeserious]

1. The More We Learn - The Worse The Situation Becomes - Thank You For Sharing

eom

[jaysunb]

2. THIS, is where the debate should be. n/t

[1-Old-Man]

3. Can there be any greater example of a lawlessness than secret law?

Secret law is no law at all.

[Mnemosyne]

4. K&R nt

[rhett o rick]

5. k&r thanks for posting.

[bigtree]

6. namaste

[rhett o rick]

13. Same to yeah.

[Fumesucker]

7. Are you trying to distract us from Obama's role in the government spying?

Kidding aside, this is an important topic that we need to be concerned about, thank you for posting and recced.

[bigtree]

8. I'm not much for piling on the prez, as you know

. . . but this issue of the NSA's brilliant hacker children and the willful and aggressive disregard for our rights to privacy would seem to me to be a no-brainer issue for Democrats. Clearly, the president has waded into the residue from the last administration, and, instead of draining the swamp, he's content to just stand there wiggling his toes in it while the muck fills up around him.

It's going to take leadership on the presidential level to reign in an agency like the NSA, and, it shouldn't be forgotten that NSA is just one of well over a dozen 'visible' spy agencies which are currently operating. There are entirely too many former Bushites left in government for Pres. Obama to assume he's put some lid on the privacy abuses just by engaging the FISA court. The tinkering and tweaking he's done will ensure that he'll go down in history as a cohort and accomplice of the homeland security ruse, rather than someone who was determined and responsible for actual reform and repeal of the Bush-era intelligence abuses and anti-constitutional snooping on Americans.

[rhett o rick]

15. Trying to give the president some credit. When he got into office I can

imagine that he got a friendly visit from those that were running our intelligence agencies. They probably explained that they had this elaborate system running to keep America safe and that if he were to mess with it too much, like appointing people that werent familiar with it, there could be consequences that might result in a terrorist disaster. And he would get the blame for messing with the security system.

I am not making excuses but trying to point out how difficult it might be. I still believe he is responsible and should have done more.

[bigtree]

16. I'd kinda like to make the same kind of case for him . . .

. . . but it isn't particularly flattering to point out how much he's trusted, believed, and entrusted to the Bush-era defenders of the former administration's anti-constitutional power-grabs.

I'd, personally, attribute his acquiescence on most of it to his relative inexperience in these matters of intelligence and 'national security.' I'd have to really devalue his intelligence to make that argument, but, I had hoped that he would have found folks willing to stand up to the system to help him if he was really convinced the Bush NS infrastructure needed to be dismantled. The fact that he hasn't says something.

[rhett o rick]

18. Seems to me to break down to two possibilities. Either he embraces the programs

or he doesnt have the power to change them.

[temmer]

17. good points nt

[Zorra]

9. Thanks, bigtree. nt

[temmer]

10. I smell a rat

a kind of slow motion putsch.

[HereSince1628]

11. Everyday I better understand how republics fall, mostly willfully

and wonder why it is that Americans think the demons of "our" human nature aren't like the demons of "theirs".

[Zorra]

12. A RW coup? nt

[ucrdem]

14. 100 pages doesn't exactly sound like a "vast secret body."

Especially the way legal decisions and statutes are formatted. The NYT is not above a good Obama bash now and again, especially when there's a nice war in the offing. Just sayin'.

[JoeyT]

19. So you failed reading comprehension on that point not once, but twice?

And presumably in every single thread made about this issue: The rulings are 100 pages, not 100 pages of rulings total.