Obama presents NSA reforms with plan to end government storage of call data

As for the "intent of fundamental laws" the intent of the 4th amendment was to prevent customs officials from trespassing on private property. The founders never talked about the "right of privacy" as a coherent concept. The "right to privacy" was conjured from the "penumbras" of the Constitution (i.e. thin air) just a couple of decades before Smith v. Maryland was decided.

How do you get probable cause without any information? How do you even get alerted to the idea that you should be opening an investigation into something, without any information?

I mean, how does that work in court? "Yes Your Honor, we would like to obtain a warrant to search Abdi Zullah's Internet-based communications for the next 3 months since we think that he maybe might be planning to blow something up. Maybe. And oh, this is all just a hunch, we've got no evidence at all for this yet."

You'd be laughed out of court, and rightfully so.

Both Clapper and Alexander have perjured themselves trying to hide what the NSA does. Is there a bigger arrow anywhere today pointing to a fundamental problem in government? This is way beyond "Cool Hand Luke"'s "We've got a failure to communicate."

Let's go through what I said item by item:

WHAT I SAID EARLIER:

"Nor should the tools that collected the data continue to exist. They should be disconnected and destroyed. All data, archives and logs, upstream and down, should be destroyed. All copies should be destroyed...Any and all specifications of how the system is built should be gathered and destroyed.."

ELABORATION:

Because if they aren't, then at any moment in the future the machines can be turned on again instantly and the process restarted, or the data retrieved. Where is our security in that?

In fact, because of what has happened, we must also either establish a method of oversight for the NSA or abolish it entirely. Reason for this is that the NSA has spun out of control (at least) once already and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again. Congressional oversight did not control the NSA nor did the Executive branch control the NSA; some other oversight is required at the very least. At worst the entire agency should be liquidated.

WHAT I SAID EARLIER:

"Those persons who managed, conceived, designed and built the systems and wrote the software should be terminated w/o pension and tried for crimes against the state. I'm talking top to bottom of NSA."

ELABORATION:

They have violated the most fundamental, the most basic of our human rights. To prevent this happening again they must be prosecuted and punished.

WHAT I SAID EARLIER:

"They should be, regardless of conviction, forever banned from re-implementing any similar systems forever. They should also be marked someway in the public record as having participated in the creation of these systems so that we can track them all their lives and ensure that they do not repeat what they have done. A federal agency should be created to track them and check periodically that they are not violating these terms. In other words, they should serve a permanent "parole", with their civil rights reduced (as they have reduced those of millions of Americans), the remainder of their lives. They have forfeited their civil rights by participating in the NSA's offenses and should pay dearly for it."

ELABORATION:

Again, once they are officially convicted and therefore felons they should be treated as such. Even if they aren't convicted, their future activities will have to be tracked until they die and their work product reviewed. Furthermore, because of the flagrancy of the violation and the dangers posed thereof, conviction or not, they should be prevented forever from participating in such activity again.

I know we're trying to put the genii back into the bottle here. But because we can't put the genii back into the bottle doesn't mean we can't for all practical purposes do damage control on his work. We can at least rip him and the bottle to shreds, burn every piece and scatter each shred under a different rock in some other part of the world. And by putting a federal agency on prosecutory watch for the next 20 years, we can suppress some of the damage already done by the NSA and some of the damage that their information-gathering would otherwise have done.

Satire, my ass.

The domestic portion of the NSA needs to be dismantled completely and utterly and the FISA court system discarded. The older open established legal framework for getting warrants must be restored for use by _all_ governmental agencies.