By Madison Ruppert: The National Security Agency (NSA), which has recently been protected from having to disclose their relationship with the search engine giant and data mining powerhouse Google, is back in court over the case Jewel v. NSA.
The case, which was reinstated by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in late 2011, is challenging the NSA’s now well known massive warrantless surveillance program.
This case is more important than ever with the NSA pouring a whopping $2 billion into a heavily fortified data center which will almost certainly be used to monitor the communications of Americans. The National Counterterrorism Center’s new guidelines allowing extended data retention make matters even worse, if you can imagine such a thing.
Three former employees of the NSA, William
E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe, have come forward with
evidence to back up a case being valiantly fought by the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF).
In a motion filed in the 9th Circuit on July 2, the three
whistleblowers, all former intelligence analysts, confirmed the fact
that, “the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to
seize and store most electronic communications
passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the ‘secret room’
at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired
AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006,” according to the EFF.
The EFF is also now asking the court to reject the government’s now
tired “state secret” arguments in order to allow the case to actually
move forward.
“For years, government lawyers have been arguing that our case is too
secret for the courts to consider, despite the mounting confirmation of
widespread mass illegal surveillance of ordinary people,” explained
Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s Legal Director.
“Now we have three former NSA officials confirming the basic facts.
Neither the Constitution nor federal law allow the government to collect
massive amounts of communications and data of innocent Americans and
fish around in it in case it might find something interesting. This kind
of power is too easily abused,” said Cohn. “We’re extremely pleased
that more whistleblowers have come forward to help end this massive
spying program.”
All three former NSA employees have made quite an effort to expose
the wholly unacceptable surveillance program, including bringing the
program to the attention of the New York Times.
The leak quickly made them the targets of a federal investigation due
to the fact that the New York Times coverage quickly ignited
controversy in the media and public sphere over the gigantic warrantless
wiretapping program.
Thankfully, both Binney and Wiebe were formally cleared of all the charges against them, while Drake had the charges dropped.
In the EFF’s motion for partial summary judgment
they requested that the court move to no longer accept the government’s
attempts to shut down the case without even addressing the facts by
invoking the claim that it is too secret to even address.
This is the same weak argument that government lawyers have used time and time again when challenged on matters of secrecy and the disturbing drone assassination program.
Instead of allowing the government lawyers to fall back on this
tactic, the EFF is seeking to apply the processes under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which require the court to actually
rule if the electronic surveillance was conducted in a legal manner.
However, I believe it is worth pointing out that FISA leaves a lot to
be desired, as well as the court which sign off on FISA warrants. This
is because the courts authorized every single request from the
government in 2011, according to the government’s own report, which makes the entire process farcical.
“The NSA warrantless surveillance programs have been the subject of
widespread reporting and debate for more than six years now. They are
just not a secret,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien rightly pointed
out.
“Yet the government keeps making the same ‘state secrets’ claims
again and again,” Tien said. “It’s time for Americans to have their day
in court and for a judge to rule on the legality of this massive
surveillance.”
Well said, Tien. Let’s just hope that the American people do get
their day in court and that this unimaginably expansive surveillance
program is shut down before we descend even deeper into a complete surveillance state.
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