FISA Judge: NSA misrepresented themselves, violated the Constitution

CSO – A federal judge said in a recently declassified opinion, issued during his time serving on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, that the National Security Agency misrepresented themselves and violated the Constitution for several years.

After the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won their lawsuit to obtain an 86-page opinion from the secret Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC) issued in October of 2011, the government released the redacted version on Wednesday, as written
by Judge John D. Bates.

In it, Judge Bates outlines the NSA’s Fourth Amendment violations as they go about collecting intelligence, including upstream
ISP traffic, and how the agency collected as many as 56,000 completely domestic communications per year, for several years.
Yet, according to the opinion, the court was just now learning that the nature of the information the NSA said they were collecting
was fundamentally different.

“The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third
instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope
of a major collection program& Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of
the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the standard for querying,” Judge Bates wrote in his opinion [PDF].

Related: NSA collected thousands of domestic communications in 2011

“The government’s submissions make clear not only that NSA has been acquiring Internet transactions since before the Court’s
approval of the first Section 702 certification in 2008, but also that NSA seeks to continue the collection of Internet transactions&”

At issue is the wholesale collection of Internet and telecommunications data, which by law is supposed to be largely restricted
in scope, with regard to what is collected and why, as well as restricted as to content. However, the FISC ruled that the
NSA overstepped their bounds, and collected far more data than was previously approved. Going so far as to mislead the court
as to what exactly was being collected and examined.

Two years later, the NSA says they have changed the way data is collected and processed, but documents leaked by Edward Snowden,
and recent reports from the Wall Street Journal, bring the FISC’s condemnation and accusations back into the spotlight. The
assumption being, if they misled the courts on three separate occasions, what’s to prevent further instances?

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal (citing both current and former officials as sources) says that the NSA has developed a
surveillance network that has the ability to cover more than 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic. In some cases, this
collection network retains the written content of emails written by citizens, as well as VoIP-based phone calls.

“The programs, code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew, among others, filter and gather information at
major telecommunications companies,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Netflash

FISA Judge: NSA misrepresented themselves, violated the Constitution