It's out! "BULK COLLECTION OF TELEPHONY METADATA UNDER SECTION 215 OF THE USA PATRIOT ACT"

[Bolo Boffin]

http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/Section215.pdf

Here's the government's legal justification for collecting metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Yes, there are lots of questions about other parts of the program. This is about Section 215.

Hot off the presses!

[hobbit709]

1. The U.S. would never do anything like this. "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink!"

[limpyhobbler]

2. Wait why is it dated today?

They did the spying and then retroactively came up with an argument for it.

[chimpymustgo]

3. Yep. But rumor has it a court has said it's illegal. But the ruling is SECRET.

[Igel]

14. This is a promise kept.

Within the last month it was announced that the government would make public the rationale and legal basis for its practices, showing how their interpretation of the law is consonant with the text of the law and court opinions.

The law has been around for a while. The courts have been using them. A lot of the information was scattered in public sources, but the actual in-house reasoning wasn't so much a secret as just not publicized. It, too, would have been formed through a lot of decisions and meetings, so that information was also likely scattered about in various files in the DOJ, NSA, etc.

This is one of a series of white papers ("position papers," if you will) saying why the government has adopted the position is has and why it believes it's a reasonable and justifiable position.

[discopants]

17. Because the President announced it yesterday to the press

Number three, we can, and must, be more transparent. So I've directed the intelligence community to make public as much information about these programs as possible. We've already declassified unprecedented information about the NSA, but we can go further. So at my direction, the Department of Justice will make public the legal rationale for the government's collection activities under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The NSA is taking steps to put in place a full-time civil liberties and privacy officer, and released information that details its mission, authorities, and oversight. And finally, the intelligence community is creating a website that will serve as a hub for further transparency, and this will give Americans and the world the ability to learn more about what our intelligence community does and what it doesn't do, how it carries out its mission, and why it does so.

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/09/210574114/transcript-president-obamas-news-conference

[djean111]

4. My favorite part:

"the Government cannot, through this program, listen to or record any telephone conversations".
Of course, they do not listen to conversations in real time, anyway. But they have those conversations tucked away so they can listen to them if the metadata points to something of interest, and they can sift through the stored conversations for key words. And then listen.

[Igel]

15. That kind of claim--plus legal caution--is the reason for this phrase.

"Through this program."

However, how, exactly, they would keep and "tuck away" the calls and "store" the content without recording the calls in some way does, really, require a bit of explanation on your part.

If you have a conversation and don't record it--electronically, in writing, etc.--how can you go back and search it?

[limpyhobbler]

5. So does the whole argument hinge on the definition of what is "relevant"?

Multiple FISC judges have found that Section 215 authorizes the collection of telephony
metadata in bulk. Section 215 permitsthe FBI to seek a court order directing a business or other
entity to produce records or documents when there are reasonable grounds to believe that the
information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation of international terrorism. Courts
have held in the analogous contexts of civil discovery and criminal and administrative -2-
investigations that “relevance” is a broad standard that permits discovery of large volumes of
data in circumstances where doing so is necessary to identify much smaller amounts of
information within that data that directly bears on the matter being investigated. Although broad
in scope, the telephony metadata collection program meets the “relevance” standard of Section
215 because there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that this category of data, when queried
and analyzed consistent with the Court-approved standards, will produce information pertinent to
FBI investigations of international terrorism, and because certain analytic tools used to
accomplish this objective require the collection and storage of a large volume of telephony
metadata. This does not mean that Section 215 authorizes the collection and storage of all types
of information in bulk: the relevance of any particular data to investigations of international
terrorism depends on all the facts and circumstances. For example, communications metadata is
different from many other kinds of records because it is inter-connected and the connections
between individual data points, which can be reliably identified only through analysis of a large
volume of data, are particularly important to a broad range of investigations of international
terrorism

So the government is saying everyone's phone records are relevant to an investigation of terrorism. They claim they must be able to collect everything in order to find the needle in the haystack.

But in fact if you collect everything from everybody, that defeats the entire purpose of the requirement for relevancy.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. "the Government cannot, through this program, listen to or record any telephone conversations."

Ok....
so what program IS there that allows the Gov't to listen or record any conversation??
Betcha there is one.
A very very secret ( for now) program.

[limpyhobbler]

7. "The Government cannot conduct substantive queries ofthe bulk records for any purpose other than...

...other than counterterrorism." (from page 3)


yet...

DEA Special Operations Division Covers Up Surveillance Used To Investigate Americans: Report

WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/05/dea-surveillance-cover-up_n_3706207.html

[NoMoreWarNow]

10. indeed.

[limpyhobbler]

8. The whole purpose of the word "relevant" in the law is to limit the scope of collection in some way.

Last edited Sat Aug 10, 2013, 10:35 AM - Edit history (1)

If all communications records are deemed relevant then it doesn't limit the scope at all, and the word "relevant" wouldn't be needed in the law because it serves no purpose. The fact that the authors of the law used the word "relevant" proves they wanted to exclude some things they thought were not relevant. Just call them up and ask them, I'm sure they will tell you that

The government's argument here is an incredibly contrived and flimsy justification to cover their own asses, and to justify funding for a bloated, unaccountable national security bureaucracy.



Also Making You "Comfortable" with Spying Is Obama's Big NSA Fix

[JoePhilly]

16. Is that the same reason for why the founders used the word "reasonable"

in the 4th Amendment?

[cantbeserious]

9. The Government Justification Is A House Cards With Holes Large Enough For Aircraft Carriers To Pass

eom

[NoMoreWarNow]

11. not to mention, there are undoubtedly other more invasive, even more secret programs.

I would be shocked if there weren't.

[cantbeserious]

12. Rest Assured - The Obama Administration Is Working Overtime To Compartmentalize The Truth

eom

[NoMoreWarNow]

13. "Compartmentalize The Truth"-- great phrase

how long before the administration starts using it?