Foriegn Intelligence Surveillance Court Rubber Stamps Mass Surveillance Under Section 702 - Again

Deeplinks 2021-05-06

Summary:

As someone once said, “the Founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols.”  Well it was not just someone, it was Chief Justice John Roberts. He flatly rejected the government’s claim that agency protocols could solve the Fourth Amendment violations created by police searches of our communications stored in the cloud and accessible through our phones.  

Apparently, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) didn’t get the memo. That’s because, under a recently declassified decision from November 2020, the FISC again found that a series of overly complex but still ultimately swiss cheese agency protocols -- that are admittedly not even being followed -- resolve the Fourth Amendment problems caused by the massive governmental seizures and searches of our communications currently occurring under FISA Section 702. The annual review by the FISC is required by law -- it’s supposed to ensure that both the policies and the practices of the mass surveillance under 702 are sufficient. It failed on both counts.  

The protocols themselves are inherently problematic. The law only requires that intelligence officials “reasonably believe” the “target” of an investigation to be a foreigner abroad -- it is immaterial to the initial collection that there is an American, with full constitutional rights, on the other side of a communication

Justice Roberts was concerned with a single phone seized pursuant to a lawful arrest.  The FISC is apparently unconcerned when it rubber stamps mass surveillance impacting, by the government’s own admission, hundreds of thousand of nonsuspect Americans.

What’s going on here?  

From where we sit, it seems clear that the FISC continues to suffer from a massive case of national security constitutional-itis. That is the affliction (not really, we made it up) where ordinarily careful judges sworn to defend the Constitution effectively ignore the flagrant Fourth Amendment violations that occur when the NSA, FBI, (and to a lesser extent, the CIA, and NCTC) misuse the justification of national security to spy on Americans en mass. And this malady means that even when the agencies completely fail to follow the court's previous orders, they still get a pass to keep spying.  

The FISC decision is disappointing on at least two levels. First, the protocols themselves are not sufficient to protect Americans’ privacy. They allow the government to tap into the Internet backbone and seize our international (and lots of domestic) communications as they flow by -- ostensibly to see if they have been targeted. This is itself a constitutional violation, as we have long argued in our Jewel v. NSA case. We await the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Jewel on the government’s claim that this spying that everyone knows about is too secret to be submitted for real constitutional review by a public adversarial court (as opposed to the one-sided review by the rubber-stamping FISC).  

But even after that, the protocols themselves are swiss cheese when it comes to protecting Americans. At the outset, unlike traditional foreign intelligence surveillance, under Section 702, FISC judges do not authorize individualized warrants for specific targets. Rather, the role of a FISC judge under Section 702 is to approve abstract protocols that govern the Executive Branch’s mass surveillance and then review whether they have been followed.  

The protocols themselves are inherently problematic. The law only requires that intelligence officials “reasonably believe” the “target” of an investigation to be a foreigner abroad -- it is immaterial to the initial collection that there is an American, with full constitutional rights, on the other side of a conversation whose communications are both seized and searched without a warrant. It is also immaterial that the individuals targeted turn out to be U.S. persons.  This was one of the many problems which ultimately ended with the decommissioning of the Call Detail Records program, which despite being Congress' attempt to rein in the program which started under section 215 of the Patriot Act, still mass surveilled communications metadata, including inadvertently collecting millions of call detail records from American persons illegally. 

Next, the protocols allow collection for any “foreign intelligence,” purpose, which is a much broader scope than merely searching for terrorists. The term encompasses information that, for instance, could give the U.S.

Link:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/foriegn-intelligence-surveillance-court-rubber-stamps-mass-surveillance-under

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Tags:

analysis

Authors:

Cindy Cohn

Date tagged:

05/06/2021, 15:09

Date published:

05/06/2021, 14:25