Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests | Hacker News Reader

Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

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164 pointsmarcieoum72 comments

Obama is almost certainly the best spoken US President in 50 years. But when asked a simple, straightforward yes or no question:

"But has FISA court turned down any request?"

We get this answer:

"The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion."

Just blather, incoherence and grasping at straws. C'mon man you went to Columbia and Harvard Law, you give speeches almost every day - you can do better.

How about "yes", "no" or "I don't know" next time.

The inarticulate, chopped-up sentences are one thing. But he's always been really big on the doublespeak, in my opinion.

The inarticulate, chopped-up sentences are just an artifact of the article's author purposefully being nasty to Obama. Everybody talks like that; it's just not quoted as a matter of course.

I think it makes more sense to say the author is writing it like that to show that Obama was stumbling with his words in response to a "yes/no/I don't know" question. That's useful information that I appreciate the author conveying.

The problem here is that that information is being conveyed solely through contentless innuendo. You can expect the same level of disfluency from a softball

"How awesome is your new program?" "So awesome"

Q&A session. People only think this transcript shows Obama stumbling with his words because they aren't aware that printed media cleans up the natural disfluencies that occur in speech. This transcript looks highly unusual, but that isn't because Obama's false starts and stops are unusual (they aren't). It's because it's unusual for them to be printed in a quote. Thus, the conclusion that the author is malicious. An attack on Obama for refusing to answer the question is fine. An attack on him for speaking like a normal person in a spoken interview makes no sense.

I think your response is valid and an excellent counterpoint.

I would only disagree by pointing out that the President of the United States is not a normal person merely having a spoken interview. He's known as an excellent orator -- that's an important part of his job --, his speeches are carefully crafted and as you (seem to) say this is a softball interview. With all that in mind, why is he stumbling over a seemingly simple question?

Couldn't it just be laziness? Is it customary to clean up someones speeched transcript so that it reads better in written form?

It's not just customary; it is very much against standard practice not to do it. You want to see what people actually say? The Nixon tape transcripts famously didn't clean the speech.

Yea, it does sidetrack from the substance of the discussion.

No, people that get flustered or that aren't practiced at speaking talk like that.

Basic speech trick is pausing for a second, thinking through your answer, and then giving it carefully. This gives you time to avoid null words and ums and false starts.

If you're the POTUS, I'd be more than happy to give you a little time to think over your answers about surveillance questions before you bumble through them.

This is the thing I hate about media.

Charlie, dude, you're the moderator. You're a journalist who's been schooled and has tens of years of experience in the field, whose duty is to inform your viewers/readers about current events. If they aren't informed, ask the fucking question. "But has FISA turned down any request?" "The -- because -- whatever". "Ok, so has it turned down any request?"

Charlie Rose gets lots of inside access and high-powered guests because his MO is to kiss up to powerful people, ask softball questions, and follow whatever plan he made for the interview, regardless of the answers he gets. He almost never asks useful follow-up questions, often doesn’t seem to pay any attention to what his guests have to say, and asks lots of moronic paragraphs-long yes-or-no questions (my favorite answer to one of these was from IIRC Bill Joy from maybe 15 years ago “[3 second pause] Well, Duh.”). As an interviewer qua interviewer, he’s the worst in public broadcasting. But of course, his show is still sometimes worth watching, because he ends up getting lots of great guests.

I cant disagree with you more . I am long time hn lurker and this is my first post. I have been religiously watching Charlie Rose for the last decade . He is one of the best interviewers in the game . I learned more about the NSA surveillance program from this one hour interview than every other newsgroup ( tv , reddit , hn etc ) combined over the last week.

He really is a genius . He gets more out of the guest than anyone else. People sometime think that interviewer should be aggressive try to catch the interview off guard , make home slip etc. This approach doesn't help anyone.The guest just become defensive and tries to pick and chose every word while the interviewer just comes off the as dick.

I takes a long time to appreciate Charile's Rope-a-dope style of interviewing.He just keeps sucking up to the guest lets him get through all of their talking points they have memorized and then the magic happens.

I’ve been watching Charlie’s interviews since I was in middle school in the late 90s, and his interview style can be roughly broken into two categories as follows:

1. (If the guest someone powerful and mainstream of high status and inside access, someone like a business tycoon or politician or beltway pundit.) Ask inane softball questions, talk the guest up, agree with everything said, and generally make himself seem like an enormous ass-kisser. Praise the guest’s wisdom and insight. (For the most obnoxious examples of this, see his numerous interviews with the invariably clueless Thomas Friedman.)

2. (If the guest is a more marginal figure, e.g. an academic or an activist, or really anyone with an opinion that Charlie hadn’t considered before or doesn’t want to hear.) Interrupt the guest, ask inane questions, when they answer in a way he doesn’t want ask the same question over and over again until they’re thoroughly fed up. Condescend as much as possible. Intentionally chop off their interesting sentences halfway through and redirect the conversation back to whatever “setup” thing Charlie is thinking about.

The occasional sports star, movie director, etc. ends up with a somewhat better interview, because in those cases he’s not spending all his effort trying to push his own point-of-view and sometimes he even listens to the guest.

Find any week when the same guest was on both Charlie’s show and Fresh Air. Listen to Terry Gross’s masterful interviewing in delight. Listen to Charlie’s awful awful interview and bash your head into the wall until all that remains is a dent and some bloody pulp.

Yes, this is a failure of the Journalist. You job is to find the truth, if they are evasive you do not just shrug and move on.

As much as I dislike him the US needs a Jeremy Paxman who is willing to ask the same question 14 times in a row. (Yes, I know the reason he asked so many times was because they were running fast, he still had to have the balls to do it.)

You'll enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KHMO14KuJk

(not american, sadly)

I am familiar with Jeremy Paxman's work. It's impressive.

Now that is how you keep your eyes on the prize during an interview.

This was significant for Michael Howard, and it helped to absolutely kill any chance he had of becoming PM. Jeremy Paxman can be a bit of a dick at times, especially when he's up against someone who has done their research, but he's a fantastic person to put against politicians.

Anne Widdecombe's remark about that he had "something of the night about him" didn't exactly help his chances:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/691317...

The question I want to see asked is:

"Obama, in the course of your day, you and your staff probably interact with many foreign diplomats and other persons which this system is likely to classify as 51% likely to be foreign. On top of that, the content of those conversation, depending on the topic at hand, is likely to include words that would trigger an alert. With this in mind, do you think it is acceptable that those in the NSA, many of whom may have a differing political affiliation than you, can read any correspondence flagged for review? Furthermore, how can any member of congress operate from a position of equality if they cannot have confidence that their communications could fall into the hands of their compatriots across the aisle that may have a different agenda?"

If the answer to those questions included a filter that excluded all members of the executive, legislative and judicial, the obvious follow up question would be, "Why are members of congress allowed this right, but not the citizens of this country?"

I would also take comments he made on the Wikileaks Manning trove and present them as counterpoints to any rebuttal he has. I don't remember anything verbatim, but I remember him specifically addressing the importance of American diplomats being able to be secure in their communications to be able to carry out the roles for which they were appointed. This exact same argument can be applied to every single elected representative of the people and every official appointed by a duly elected representative.

Do you really think that the NSA isn't sensitive to not being seen as spying on Congress or the President? That would be an obvious scandal that any moron would be smart to avoid.

I believe Snowden has gone on record saying that members of Congress are exempt from NSA spying.

Are all the staffers of those members of congress and the counter-parties with whom they interact also exempt? If you know someone's address book, you can spy on them while maintaining the appearance of spying on others.

The number of requests is not, as Obama asserts, "surprisingly small". It is probably smaller than it ought to be, and in light of the NSA's recent admission that they've tapped warrantlessly, that's probably the explanation.

Regardless, here's their record, and they certainly aren't disapproving much. https://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html

If there's a reason that Obama can't confirm it (beyond that he just doesn't know), it's because it is believed that the FISC acts differently than other warrant-granting entities in that at least usually, when it denies a request, it also then provides guidance on how to refile the request in a way that it might be approved. Regular courts will do this on procedural errors, but not as a matter of course.

In all likelihood, the 11 denials the FISC has issued over the past 34 years were likely all later converted to approvals with their guidance.

Don't we have evidence why the number of requests is "surprisingly small"?

All this time we assumed that the requests would refer to individuals who were under suspicion. But the Verizon order tells us differently. Here we've got one, giant request for "every call that passes through Verizon".

It's a huge amount of spying being done, all carried on the back of one (or a handful) of blanket requests.

As I understand it, that's possible, but the 'metadata' requests aren't routinely surveyed because they don't capture 'enough' data to constitute something that would require a warrant.

To put it in more real world terms, it takes a warrant for me to go into your house and listen to what you're doing, but I am perfectly free to sit outside your house and watch your comings and goings without one. I believe (but do not know) that the current interpretation of the metadata requests is being treated like this, where the NSA simply feels that no warrant is required.

Your argument however, probably holds more weight because, at the least, you would very much hope that Verizon and company wouldn't be handing over data without some kind of warrant, even with a 'strong suggestion' from the feds.

Obama:

> You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names. There is no content in that database...At no point is any content revealed because there’s no content that...the FBI — if, in fact, it now wants to get content; if, in fact, it wants to start tapping that phone

Snowden (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...):

> If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything.

Notice how Obama only talks about the phone metadata DB, and a process for getting data from companies about "non-US persons" (Google, etc) based on "essentially a warrant" (not the same thing as a warrant, though). Snowden's allegations are starting to become much wider than the original Verizon DB and PRISM systems. And I don't think that we are going to see Obama address them and deny them directly any time soon.

One wonders how we score intermediate foreign mail servers or proxies for the purpose of determining tappability.

The quotes you have highlighted are discussing two different things.

Obama is referring to the phone metadata database.

Snowden is referring to what an analyst sees after an email address is targeted, meaning that an active surveillance process has been started for that specific email address and that the email provider has begun to provide access.

So of course these two statements are different, because they are talking about different things. The operative phrase in Snowden's statement is "If I target", which should be read as "after I start data collection for an email address...".

Dear God, it's like I'm a kid again.

I didn't grow up in the US; when I was a kid, we didn't have this kind of interviews on TV. For one thing, most of the TV shows they aired was propaganda, and it was so utterly boring most of us didn't bother. The newspapers, on the other hand, carried propaganda along with the news, so you kindda had to read it, too, if you were to know what's happening. The smarter folks could even read between the lines.

This one struck the most sensible chord:

> And what that does is that does not apply to any U.S. person. Has to be a foreign entity.

Entities. Not individuals, not groups, but entities. If you're an American citizen, you're cool. If you're a foreign entity, you're preeeetty much either a ladybug or a human, either way, it's pretty much the same thing.

This was Communist speak for non-Communist (to be fair, it was the twisted kind of Soviet-inspired Communism). We had communist workers and teachers and housewives, but foreign elements. Our country had communist friends but the democratic entities weren't that friendly.

This defensive depersonalization makes it very easy to strip away ethics. Butchering unarmed civilians sounds a lot more horrifying than annihilating non-combatant, but dangerous entities.

> The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.

This sounds very much like the kind of conversation that, at some point, was taking place between Soviet representatives and representatives of various other subordinated, but somewhat nasty countries of the Soviet block.

It's the kind of stuff that was handed out to us during the talks about the Warszaw pact. Is it true that the Soviet Union has supreme command of all troops and can invade any territory, even that of its allies? Well, no, I mean, it wouldn't be an invasion. It's a trade-off we have do for our freedom: should the Revolution be abandoned in any of the member countries, the allied countries should intervene to restore the right values. That is why the Soviet Union has to have representatives at all levels, must be informed of every decision. It's one of those things we must concede for democracy -- we need to entrust our freedom to people who can protect it. Words like freedom, democracy, values and way of life were freely thrown in -- ours was the land of the brave and free, unlike that of the oppressed working-class friends living in imperialist, totalitarian states.

I shivered a bit when I read this.

Edit: BTW, just to practice my reading-between-the-lines muscle, my guess is that a) FISA hasn't turned down any request yet and b) the requests were summarily "reviewed" and approved, through a short process that should give legal backing. In other words, FISA isn't there to actually review the requests, it's there simply in order to fill in the paperwork that's needed in order to make the whole thing seem legitimate.

In the early days of the regime, we had something similar to this, too. The curious dudes submitted a request to a committee of representatives of the people -- the request was basically a form which said that the following people have highly suspicious activities that can be a threat to the security of our people, to the Revolution and the communist way of life we have so hardly fought for (actual fucking words!) and was recommended to be placed under surveillance. These were signed pretty much in bulk -- the representatives of the people usually signed a big list at the bottom. Later on, this was eventually dropped: complaining about paperwork was useless, and after a few years it became obvious complaining about paperwork was so dangerous that when it was no longer required, no one dared do anything about it.

You skipped something - besides the foreign entities that represent a perpetual threat, you also have the internal elements classified as "fierce civil libertarians", for now ;-)

Yes, yes, we had those, too. In the beginning, they were fierce opposites of progress, prisoners of the old mentality. It then became rather uncomfortable to label them as such, when a twenty-year old mentality was about as old as the regime itself, so we ended up with similar derogatory terms: fiercely anarchist, adversaries of order, hippies, and as the reality got more and more dire, mentally-troubled and drug users.

These "dedicated malcontents", I presume?

Yeah, there were enough terms for it. The scarring this left in the popular consciousness is impressive though. More than twenty years later, the exact same phrasings are still being used occasionally, and with the same meanings, especially by older people.

The sorriest part is that today's teenagers don't notice it, or don't know it. and underestimate what's under the words. A couple of years ago I went to visit my parents and I went hiking. There was a group of secondary school students who were on a school trip with their teacher, an obtuse, uptight old lady who had probably missed a couple of anger management appointments. I wasn't travelling with them, we were just hiking on the same trail, but hearing her yell and shout was probably doable a couple of hike trails away, too.

I don't interfere with this -- I hated school and firmly believe in natural selection, so I leave it to kids to make the life of these people as miserable as possible -- but when she scoffed at two particularly dedicated malcontents, calling them the "most agitating elements of the classroom" and "hooligans" (the word is actually somewhat more politically-loaded, but untranslatable -- it's roughly similar with, but not quite, "hooligan"), I snapped and asked her if this assessment is going to go on the record she'll write (again, untranslatable -- what I used was slang for "are you going to write this in your signed declaration for the state security apparatus", as a couple of decades into the regime, it became well-known that some citizens were actually spying and reporting on their neighbours, colleagues and friends). The combination of hatred, surprise, and desperation at not being able to "write me up" or otherwise screw with me, since -- not being her pupil -- I wasn't subject to he whims was chilling.

It's distressing, because the way that felonies and whatnot are handled nowadays, there does seem to be a rough approximation of this sort of black book phenomenon.

Dude, all of what you said happened in Romania, word for word, including the usage of "hooligans" and the reporting of "agitating elements" to the security apparatus. People were scared shitless that their own neighbours are going to report them for whatever crap they were doing (I distinctively remember my mother bringing home bananas and telling me to be quiet about it, as bananas, like other tropical fruits were quite rare).

It was fairly similar all over the place :-).

In the UK we're called "domestic extremists."

> And what that does is that does not apply to any U.S. person. Has to be a foreign entity.

Referring to a living, breathing human being with feelings, emotions, needs and wants (just like any American) as an "entity" is what Rory Miller calls "othering" [1]. The point of othering is to remove the humanity from someone or from a group of people. It makes it easier for someone to monitor, torture and... kill someone else.

And Americans are masters at it. People in the middle east, regardless of anything, are referred to by Americans as hajis. Gooks in Vietnam. And so on. It's subtle, but it works on Joe Public as well as it does on American soldiers invading some random country.

It's inhumane.

[1] Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected - http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594392137

Yeah, Snowden pointed this out in his QA today:

> More fundamentally, the "US Persons" protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal."

It's insane that the president is openly declaring that they are more than willing to violate people's civil rights, just as long as they didn't happen to be born in the USA.

(And what about dual citizens? Or US citizens like me that live abroad? OR THE SIX AND A HALF BILLION OTHER HUMANS WHO DESERVE PRIVACY TOO)

The media could help here, by instead of using the administration words in their articles, they'd be using their words - the normal words.

Also, at every press conference where they say "entities", they could ask, do you mean "people"? Or something along those lines. The people in the media are American citizens, too. It would help if they'd try to defend their own rights, too, instead of being nice to the government, which they are supposed to keep in check.

If "the media" were going to help, they could have done that at any time since 9/12/2001.

Yeah, but why would the media want that?

Exactly.

It's 2013 and the USA needs a Glasnost movement. It's ironic but here we go.

Secret courts, secret court orders, rubber stamped approvals. Gag orders on anybody coming in contact with said secret court orders. Where are we? Khmer Rouge Cambodia? Because it sure does not sound like the Land Of The Free.

FISA has provisions for surveilling "facilities", buildings, and locations, and is not limited to orders to surveil just an individual.

A more generous reading would suggest that is what "foreign entity" is referring to - cases where the NSA is surveilling a safehouse or a military base and not necessarily a human being.

A foreign company might also qualify as an entity. Even a company that merely has offices abroad might qualify. US Citizens who work for foreign entities might very well be included.

The law makes it clear that US persons (defined as citizens or legal residents) are not to be included whether they are presently in the USA or travelling abroad.

Even foreign persons who are under surveillance are to be excluded when they travel to the US.

Yet the system can only figure with 51% probability whether or not an entity being targeted is, in fact, foreign or US-born.

Care to point out where the law makes that clear? It's my understanding that communications to/from "foreign entities" are subject to monitoring; as are any communications which have been routed outside the continental US, without regard to the endpoints.

You may be right. However, "foreign entity" does not strictly mean "non-US person" and this is highly intentional. A foreign entity does not have to be a person. It can be a bank, a corporation, a nation, an foreign based activist group.

You view it as discriminatory and it may very well be; I purport that its purpose is to encompass literally everything that is not a U.S. person, thereby allowing them nearly unlimited use of all programs that are allegedly not used against U.S. persons. The discrimination aspect is import, but I think the definition aspect that extends the reach of their scope to nigh-unlimited, is also an important way to view that particular word choice.

When you are spying on a foreign bank or corporation, aren't you spying on a bunch of foreign people?

I mean, arguably, if the NSA were spying on Google, would that make it reasonably all right? It's not like Google has feelings or a right to privacy -- it's not a person, it's a corporation.

Unless they're spying on bulldozers or kitchen ustensils, "entity" could be easily replaced with "one or more people" and the phrase would retain the same meaning. It's one of the many procedures in the family of othering: we're not shooting at people, we're shooting at the 4th platoon.

What surprises me the most is Americans never stopping and wondering about people outside the US. This is why I never used a lot of services inside the US, and the few I have I will remove over time.

Most are happy to buy "Made in the USA." and bash economic immigrants. Just because they were born on the wrong side of the border. Not unique to the USA, though.

Best article I have read in a while. It's tragic comedy how they get a way with it.

I mean i tried asking a group of friends what they thought, to learn they don't know what the fuck PRISM is!

It usually goes. "No one cares about, what the government does, your just weird."

I'm anti social so the only time I hangout with them is when I'm stoned. So I can see why I'm weird to the average teenager, but to not know about the government being caught spying on us, makes it seem like they were never really caught unless your on 4chan or reddit...

Fuck it...

It's questionable that they are "getting away with it".

The implications of what they've done are incredibly vast and damning. Not to mention, persistent - people now know everything they type on their computer is handed over to the government. That doesn't go away, no matter how much the media might want to ignore the subject.

I'd actually be surprised if they completely get away with it. At least a few people will be in trouble over this whole thing. Lots of civil rights organizations are organizing lawsuits over this as we speak.

NYT columnist Maureen Dowd recently described a supposed political strategy in a recent column:

“It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.”

If you can delay and delay and delay until the outrage disapates you just might be able to get away with something outrageous.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/dowd-when-m...

Like they get away with Guantanamo? "Enhanced interrogation"? Still being in the middle east? No-knock warrants?

Please. This is the System. Nobody of any consequence will go to jail, because the System writes its own rules.

That probably sounds a little tin-hatty, but face it, you're counting on the Government to properly regulate the Government, while waving TERR'STS and AL'QAEDA and an American flag. It's not going to happen.

Eventually it will happen, but today is not that day.

If nothing changes, nobody goes to jail, and nobody loses their job (as in fired / disgraced, not retired with pension & consulting job @RAND), I'd say they got away with it.

>people now know everything they type on their computer is handed over to the government.

And those who are honest with themselves are less free, they moderate their behavior, even perfectly legal behavior. Those who are not honest with themselves will continue as if nothing changed ("the gov't doesn't care about what I do" "they aren't really recording and storing my calls").

Indeed the government will do as they please, it;s not like anyone is truly going to force them to stop that requires strength not complainants an lawsuits. My personal opinion is that we truly have no power in a large government, unless we were to revolt with riots, militias, and a organized task force and basic wage an un-winnable war with our own government. Anyways no one wants that except for maybe so guns nuts and anarchist. Although it would be pretty interesting in the history books. Which will be over written... haha America blows!

>What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not.

So I'm screwed as a non-US citizen, and so are the 2.5billion people using the internet outside of US purview. Now I'm seriously considering a switch to safer alternatives.

The reason that FISA warrant requests have such a high acceptance rate is because a federal prosecutor wouldn't ask for one unless they were certain it would be approved. They don't have to file a request every time a federal agent wants a warrant. They have the option to say "You need to gather more evidence".

They say a good trial lawyer won't ask a witness a question without knowing what the answer will be. FBI lawyers know the law and they know the judges, they won't just take shots in the dark when it comes to obtaining warrants. It's like asking why you have a 100% approval rate for your bank card purchases. If you know that you don't have enough money, you won't try to buy something.

Keep in mind that it's difficult to become a federal prosecutor and the job attracts intelligent people. The kind of lawyer that you see advertising on the side of a bus or a local DA trying to make a name for herself will try to push the envelope to get as much as they can. But high level corporate or government lawyers rarely sign their names to anything that isn't legally rock solid.

I just saw the Obama interview and he only hinted at this answer. As a Harvard trained lawyer he understands the system, but as POTUS he can't always be candid.

>But high level corporate or government lawyers rarely sign their names to anything that isn't legally rock solid.

So magically, these "high level" people stop trying to overreach? Suddenly they're struck with a respect for privacy and law? That's simply not credible. Feds regularly abuse seizure laws[1], why would you possibly think they're more restrained elsewhere?

I'd expect a reasonably high acceptance rate, especially if they're allowed to pick judges sympathetic to them. But a rate approaching zero should set off red flags.

1: e.g. http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/24/tewksbury-motel-foreclosure

Not just high acceptance rate, but 100% acceptance rate(or close to it).

Why fucking bother about courts at all? Just let them obtain the information they want without any hassle: they are professional and know the law.

That's the opium....

We don't know if the requests are good or bad. We have no way of reasoning about the approval rate other than looking to other courts, which suggest that it's impossibly high. We simply don't know but we wish.

Alternatively, if you were the judge and presented with something, perhaps something you might think about rejecting and they say there is a pending threat and they think this guy might blow something up what would you do then? Knowing your decision likely would never be made public...

At the very least they could make these decisions all go public after five years or something. The other counter argument here is that if everybody involved really takes it seriously, they are really looking out for our safety and really trying hard, shouldn't somewhat zealous agents try to overreach? Never a single case simply based upon religion or someone's nation of origin? Unless they just listen in anyways... In which case FISA is even more of a sham.

>a federal prosecutor wouldn't ask for one unless they were certain it would be approved.

Yes they would, over the course of a dozen years and many investigations, federal prosecutors would most certainly push the envelope of what is allowed to expand their power/capability, or if nothing else, to discover what the actual boundaries are.

Apparently there has been at least one instance of the FISA court rejecting a request, but we're not allowed to know about it.

From http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/justice-department...

the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying. ...

But in July 2012, Wyden was able to get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify two statements that he wanted to issue publicly. They were:

- On at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

- I believe that the government's implementation of Section 702 of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion.

It's amazing how little this guy knows.

> I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.

Lies right there. It's difficult to call someone a liar because the scope is far reaching, beyond just one untruth or another. Would it be correct to say "Obama is a liar"?

>Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

That means either: Courts have not rejected any requests. or: The gov't has ignored [one or more of] the rejections.

Then I can't support him.

> There is a second program called the 702 program. [...] It can only be narrowly related to counter-terrorism, weapons proliferation, cyber hacking or attacks

A FISA 702 http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr6304/text order (IANAL) authorises "the targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information". In FISA http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/STATUTE-92-Pg178... section 101 "foreign intelligence information" is defined thus:

(e) "Foreign intelligence information" means— (1) information that relates to, and if concerning a United States person is necessary to, the ability of the United States to protect against — (A) actual or potential attack or other grave hostile acts of a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power; (B) sabotage or international terrorism by a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power; or (C) clandestine intelligence activities by an intelligence service or network of a foreign power or by an agent of a foreign power; or PUBLIC LAW 95-511—OCT. 25, 1978 92 STAT. 1785 (2) information with respect to a foreign power or foreign territory that relates to, and if concerning a United States person is necessary to— (A) the national defense or the security of the United States; or (B) the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.

Again IANAL, but it seems that just about any possible reason the US could have for going through a non-resident alien's GMail or Dropbox account could be waved through under (e)(2). Lockheed Martin would like to know all your business secrets? Of course this would benefit the national defense of the United States. Annoying EU politician holding out against whatever intellectual-property treaty the US government is pushing this year? Clearly the United States would be aided in the conduct of its foreign affairs by complete surveillance of his email and calendar, maybe even by tipping off some journalists about the affair he is having. (Again, I'm not saying here that anything much like this has happened, just suggesting that the "foreign intelligence information" requirement isn't going to prevent it from happening.)

And it's not even clear to me that the FISC court has any requirement or ability to rule on whether the US government is staying within even this very generous "foreign intelligence information" requirement. On a FISA 702 certification the Government has to 702 (g)(2)(A) "attest that-- [...] '(v) a significant purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence information". Does this give the FISC any ability to inquire into the specifics, or is the government basically on Scout's honour in this?

So I can't see any legal basis on which FAA 702 orders are restricted to being "narrowly related to counter-terrorism, weapons proliferation, cyber hacking or attacks". But I presume Pres. Obama isn't just lying here, so I assume that an executive decision has been made to that effect: that the NSA cube-farm workers who are grinding through routine counter-terrorist surveillance are under orders to so restrict themselves. But that would just be an administrative order, not a law actually binding on the government. So, at some level between the President and the desk-jockeys, the decision could be made at any time to revise or take away that restriction - or just to set it aside ad hoc at any time for any reason. I don't think it's even clear that the boys who handle industrial espionage and the like are covered by this order at all.

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