The NSA Continues to Violate Americans' Internet Privacy Rights

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 29, 2018 at 11:07:03 EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The NSA Continues to Violate Americans' Internet Privacy Rights
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The NSA Continues to Violate Americans’ Internet Privacy Rights
> An upcoming federal appeals case could restore crucial privacy protections for millions of Americans who use the 
> internet to communicate overseas.
> By Patrick Toomey, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project
> Aug 22 2018
> <https://medium.com/aclu/the-nsa-continues-to-violate-americans-internet-privacy-rights-e328ffe8c627>
>
> A federal court will be scrutinizing one of the National Security Agency’s worst spying programs on Monday. The case 
> has the potential to restore crucial privacy protections for the millions of Americans who use the internet to 
> communicate with family, friends, and others overseas.
>
> The unconstitutional surveillance program at issue is called PRISM, under which the NSA, FBI, and CIA gather and 
> search through Americans’ international emails, internet calls, and chats without obtaining a warrant. When Edward 
> Snowden blew the whistle on PRISM in 2013, the program included at least nine major internet companies, including 
> Facebook, Google, Apple, and Skype. Today, it very likely includes an even broader set of companies.
>
> The government insists that it uses this program to target foreigners, but that’s only half the picture: In reality, 
> it uses PRISM as a backdoor into Americans’ private communications, violating the Fourth Amendment on a massive 
> scale. We don’t know the total number of Americans affected, even today, because the government has refused to 
> provide any estimate.
>
> This type of unjustifiable secrecy has also helped the program evade public judicial review of its legality because 
> the government almost never tells people that it spied on them without a warrant. Indeed, the government has a track 
> record of failing to tell Americans about this spying even when the person is charged with a crime based on the 
> surveillance. That’s one reason why this case is so important — this time, the government has admitted to the spying.
>
> In this case, the government accused a Brooklyn man, Agron Hasbajrami, of attempting to provide material support to a 
> designated terrorist organization in Pakistan. After he pleaded guilty to one of the charges, the government 
> belatedly admitted that it had read through his emails without a warrant.
>
> Now Mr. Hasbajrami has challenged the government’s warrantless surveillance and is asking the Second Circuit Court of 
> Appeals to throw out the resulting evidence. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier 
> Foundation are supporting him as friends-of-the-court, arguing that the surveillance was unconstitutional (the brief 
> we filed is here). At the hearing on Monday, we’ll explain to a three-judge panel why the Fourth Amendment requires 
> the government to get a warrant when it wants to exploit the communications of Americans who are swept up in PRISM.
>
> This large-scale internet surveillance grew out of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping 
> program. It is conducted under a controversial law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 
> Relying on Section 702, the government intercepts billions of international communications — including many sent or 
> received by Americans — and it hunts through them in investigations that have nothing to do with national security.
>
> The government attempts to defend this spying by pointing out that its “targets” are foreigners located abroad. But 
> this is no defense at all. Americans regularly communicate with individuals overseas, and the government uses PRISM 
> surveillance to collect and sift through many of these private communications. The government has even admitted that 
> one of the purposes of Section 702 is to spy on Americans’ international communications without a warrant.
>
> The government casts a wide net, making it easy for innocent Americans who communicate with family, friends, and 
> others overseas to be swept up. Relying on a single court order, the NSA uses Section 702 to put more than 125,000 
> targets under surveillance each year. These individuals need not be spies, terrorists, or accused of any wrongdoing — 
> they can be journalists, business people, university researchers, or anyone else who may have information bearing 
> remotely on “foreign affairs.”
>
> PRISM is a warrantless wiretapping program that operates around the clock, vacuuming up emails, Facebook messages, 
> Google chats, Skype calls, and the like. Government agents do not review all of the information in real-time — 
> there’s simply too much of it. Instead, the communications are pooled together and stored in massive NSA, FBI, and 
> CIA databases that can be searched through for years to come, using querying tools that allow the government to 
> extract and examine huge amounts of private information.
>
> [snip]
>
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> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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