FISA court works with the NSA allowing the unconstitutional surveillance of Americans

The Guardian (U.K.)  newspaper that broke the story of the NSA’s activities as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden published on June 20 “two full documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.” Both documents were signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and were issued in July 2009.

According to the article written by Glenn Greenwald and James Ball, the documents “detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.”

Not surprisingly, neither the Fourth Amendment nor the freedoms against tyranny that it protects are honored by Holder or the other architects and construction crews erecting the surveillance state.

As Greenwald and Ball report, the leaked documents demonstrate that when the NSA is conducting surveillance under the pretense of monitoring foreign targets, any U.S. communication caught in the dragnet is “collected, retained and used.”

Using Section 215 of the Patriot Act as justification, the NSA is now known to monitor and seize the phone records of millions of Americans who are not now or ever have been suspected of any crime that would justify the issuing of a search warrant. This wholesale watching of the telephone activities of citizens was revealed by The Guardian a few weeks ago as part of Snowden’s release of information on his former employer.

With regard to the lack of oversight provided by the so-called FISA court, The New American reported in May that, as required by provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 (FISA) and the Patriot Act (as amended in 2005), the Department of Justice revealed to Congress the number of applications for eavesdropping received and rejected by the FISA court.

The letter addressed to Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reports that in 2012, of the 1,789 requests made by the government to monitor the electronic communications of citizens, not a single one was rejected.

That’s right. The court, established specifically to judge the merits of applications by the government to spy on citizens, gave a green light to every government request for surveillance.

Not content to be a mere formality for electronic surveillance, the FISA court also held the coats of the FBI while that agency carried out the constitutionally suspect searches and seizures set out in 212 applications.

The documents released last week by The Guardian go beyond merely recounting the secret combination of the FISA court with the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic spying program, however.

As Greenwald and Ball write, The top secret documents detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the FISA court’s collusion with the NSA to eradicate the Bill of Rights is the policies of the latter rubber stamped by the former. The Guardian provided a summary of what the FISA court allowed the NSA to get away with. According to the newspaper’s report, the FISA court-approved NSA petitions allow the spy agency to:


• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;
• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;
• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;
• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.
All these activities violate the Fourth Amendment requirement that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” In practical terms, that means that the federal government cannot purposely monitor the phone or Internet communications carried on by an American or a person inside the United States without a qualifying warrant.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/15830-fisa-court-colludes-with-nsa-to-allow-unconstitutional-surveillance 
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/06/a-visual-look-into-the-nsas-surveillance-program.html

(VIDEO) NSA parody commercial with Sasha Grey:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/14dc1b13fa/sexy-nsa-commercial-with-sasha-grey 

What you need to know about the NSA’s surveillance programs:
http://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-data-collection-faq

NSA data harvesting continues and is actually expanding, despite the Obama administration’s claims:

http://endthelie.com/2013/06/27/nsa-data-harvesting-continues-and-is-actually-expanding-despite-the-obama-administrations-claims/#axzz2XVy9pG9l