NSA Broke Privacy Rules Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds

[Grizzmeister]

Here's an incredible article by one of the most knowledgeable people in the world today with respect to the NSA.

NSA: Listening to everyone - except oversight | Reuters

These newly released documents, however, show a massive breakdown in the court's oversight responsibilities — and an equally massive effort by the NSA to circumvent the law and secretly conduct widespread operations directed at Americans.

In the 2011 ruling, the court's then chief judge, John D. Bates, harshly admonished the agency for repeatedly misleading the court about its warrantless eavesdropping on tens of thousands of domestic email messages and Internet web searches for the previous three years. In his unusually harsh rebuke, Bates warned that the NSA's operations had violated the Constitution and exemplified a pattern of misrepresentation to the court — what most people would call lies — by agency officials.

[DC at the Ridge]

Originally Posted by DC at the Ridge

Not only is this government overreach, but clearly within the NSA there is a mindset that the overreach is completely okay. That's why the violations are increasing. It's not because the job is so complex (though the job IS extremely complex), or that the technology lends itself to overreach (though it DOES). It's because the people in charge are okay with mistakes that lead to violating Americans' privacy. Even the excuse, "it's metadata, not data" demonstrates their attitude. Metadata IS data, gigantic blocks of data. This is an agency that polices itself, and when violations happen, their attitude is, "oh, well, it can't be helped." The point of policing one's self is to prevent these violations from happening. Not to find excuses why the agency doesn't have to report its own violations.

We'll see if the courts are able to do their job and rein in the NSA.

Judge: NSA domestic phone data-mining unconstitutional - CNN.com

[wutitiz]

Originally Posted by Grizzmeister

Can we really consider the United States a first-world country any longer when the rule of law means nothing?

Here's an incredible quote from the article:


Me and the lovely Mrs. Grizzmeister are thinking about moving down to Ecuador because the citizens of the US our too timid to demand that their government uphold The Bill of Rights.

my friend from work already bought a retirement place in Ecuador for similar reasons. He says: "the third world is the free world." Maybe in poorer countries for the gov't to build an all-strangling, all-entangling bureaucracy. Maybe it's cheaper to have to pay a bribe to a local cop than to have to pay the institutional corruption we have here.

[texdav]

Snowden is just another who broke rules as is the NSA. The Surpreme Court rulings on search are clear and apply to all searches by government searches.They must meet the resonable standard of probable cause; no exceptions.