he
head of the U.S. government’s vast spying apparatus has conceded that
recent surveillance efforts on at least one occasion violated the
Constitutional prohibitions on unlawful search and seizure.
The admission comes in a letter from the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence declassifying statements that a top
U.S. Senator wished to make public in order to call attention to the
government’s 2008 expansion of its key surveillance law.
“On at least one occasion,” the intelligence shop has
approved Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to say, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court found that “minimization procedures” used by the
government while it was collecting intelligence were “unreasonable under
the Fourth Amendment.” Minimization refers to how long the government
may retain the surveillance data it collects. The Fourth Amendment to
the Constitution is supposed to guarantee our rights against
unreasonable searches.
Wyden does not specify how extensive this
“unreasonable” surveillance was; when it occurred; or how many Americans
were affected by it.
In the letter, acquired by Danger Room (.pdf), Wyden asserts a serious federal sidestep of a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
That section — known as Section 702 and passed in 2008
— sought to legalize the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance
efforts. The 2008 law permitted intelligence officials to conduct
surveillance on the communications of “non-U.S. persons,” when at least
one party on a call, text or email is “reasonably believed” to be
outside of the United States. Government officials conducting such
surveillance no longer have to acquire a warrant from the so-called FISA
Court specifying the name of an individual under surveillance. And only
a “significant purpose” of the surveillance has to be the acquisition
of “foreign intelligence,” a weaker standard than before 2008.
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