Federal Judge strikes down part of Patriot Act

[Oldguy]

Good. Maybe over time, we can get rid of the whole thing.

Judge rules secret FBI national security letters unconstitutional | Fox News

 

[Mad Scientist]

She then "stayed" her own ruling so that the Government can Appeal it (Influence the Judge).

National Security Letter good thing. Started by Jimmy Carter and improved by every President since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

 

[The2ndAmendment]

Smack Bush and Obama right in face. Do it again!

 

[waltky]

DOJ drops support for email snooping...

Justice: Email snooping law no longer makes sense
Mar 19,`13 WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department on Tuesday dropped its support for a controversial provision in a federal law that allows police to review some private emails without a warrant, but it asked Congress to expand its surveillance powers in other ways.

The testimony by a top Obama administration lawyer before a House subcommittee was met with cautious optimism by privacy advocates and civil liberties groups who have worked for years to overturn parts of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. They said it provides a starting point for a compromise in a debate that has endured for more than a decade. "What's very positive to me is the amount of common ground that's suddenly arisen," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, one of several organizations looking to change the law. "If we have an agreement on this (provision), we should move forward."

The 1986 law was written before the Internet was popularized and before many Americans used Yahoo or Google servers to store their emails indefinitely. The law allows federal authorities to obtain a subpoena approved by a federal prosecutor - not a judge - to access electronic messages older than 180 days. Privacy groups have sought since 2000 to amend the law but failed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks shifted the debate over the government's ability to intercept communications.

With Americans increasingly relying on email - and the proliferation of "cloud computing" to store messages on servers outside a person's home - the debate has shifted back toward privacy protections. Meanwhile, technology companies including Google, Twitter and Dropbox have said they are overwhelmed with requests by law enforcement for email records. Google says government demands for emails and other information held on its servers increased 136 percent since 2009.

On Tuesday, the acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy, Elana Tyrangiel, told a House Judiciary subcommittee that there is no principled basis to treat email less than 180 days old differently than email more than 180 days old. She also said emails deserve the same legal protections whether they have been opened or not.

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See also:

Judges asked to rule on warrantless GPS tracking
Mar 19,`13 -- A federal appeals court was asked Tuesday to decide whether the government must obtain a warrant before placing a GPS tracker on a suspect's car.

The case before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia involves three brothers suspected of robbing several pharmacies. Authorities placed a GPS device on their car without a warrant in 2010, and the tracking led to their arrests two days later. Lawyers representing the trio told a three-judge panel that warrantless tracking violates the Constitution's guarantee against unreasonable searches. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Zauzmer contended that authorities followed relevant legal precedents at the time in using the tracker without a warrant and had probable cause to suspect illegal activity. "This is a very important law enforcement tool," Zauzmer said. A district judge last year ruled in favor of brothers Harry, Mark and Michael Katzin, who had sought to suppress evidence gathered during the traffic stop in which they were arrested. The Justice Department appealed that ruling to the 3rd Circuit.

The judge had based his decision in part on a recent Supreme Court ruling that found the use of a GPS tracker constitutes a search. However, the judge noted that the high court's 5-4 ruling did not address the issue of long-term monitoring or whether a warrant is required. The Philadelphia case began in 2009 after city police approached the FBI about a string of pharmacy burglaries, each of which involved the alarm system being disabled by cutting outside telephone lines. Authorities later identified electrician Harry Katzin as a person of interest after several suspicious encounters at Rite Aid pharmacies in which he was questioned by police but let go. The FBI eventually placed a tracker on the car, and the trio was pulled over after a Rite Aid burglary in Hamburg, Pa.

Harry Katzin's attorney, Thomas Dreyer, acknowledged that authorities had probable cause to suspect his client. "Whether they did the right thing with that probable cause is what we have to decide," said Judge Franklin Van Antwerpen. The brothers' lawyers argued that the warrantless tracking was an unreasonable search. They also argued that authorities had plenty of time to apply for a warrant - and should have done so, because the relevant legal issues were unsettled when the tracker was placed in 2010. "This was an open issue. Why not ... get a warrant?" said attorney Rocco Cipparone, who represents Mark Katzin. "We should err on the side of protecting Fourth Amendment rights."

Zauzmer countered that some federal appeals courts had ruled at the time that warrants were not required, and that authorities acted in good faith in relying on those decisions to justify the tracker. Moreover, he said, car searches don't require warrants. A lawyer for American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an amicus brief supporting the Katzins, disputed that interpretation of the so-called "automobile exception" to warrants. The exception was developed to help police find contraband hidden in cars, not to allow unlimited tracking of suspects, said attorney Catherine Crump. It's unclear when the appeals court will rule.

Source

 

[waltky]

Sometimes it feels like, somebody's watchin' me...

Microsoft, Too, Says FBI Secretly Surveilling Its Customers
3.21.13 - Microsoft said the Federal Bureau of Investigation is secretly spying on its customers with so-called National Security Letters that don’t require a judge’s approval, a revelation Thursday that mirrors one Google announced two weeks ago.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft announced that the type of accounts the feds are targeting with National Security Letters, warrants or court orders include Hotmail/Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365. The announcements by the two tech giants mark the first time U.S. companies have divulged they were secretly responding to National Security Letters and coughing up user data to the bureau without probable-cause warrants. And the Microsoft announcement comes six days after a federal judge declared National Security Letters unconstitutional and gave the President Barack Obama administration 90 days to appeal the ruling.

A breakdown of the number of National Security Letters the FBI has issued to Microsoft targeted accounts (“identifiers”) for user data.

The NSLs, which have been issued nationwide hundreds of thousands of times, are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and businesses like Google and Microsoft to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more as long as the FBI says the information is “relevant” to an investigation. “Like others in the industry, we believe it is important for the public to have access to information about law enforcement access to customer data, particularly as customers are increasingly using technology to communicate and store private information,” Microsoft said.

Google, Microsoft and other entities that receive NSLs are gagged from disclosing them publicly or to the targets. But, “pursuant to approval from the government,” Microsoft released a numerical “range” of the number of NSLs it has received dating to 2009. Two weeks ago, when Google released its numbers, it said it only publicized a range “to address concerns raised by the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies that releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations.”

The ranges each company published are similar, but not identical. For 2012, which is the latest data available, Microsoft said it received 0-999 National Security Letters involving between 1,000 to 1,999 accounts. In 2011, Microsoft said it received 1,000-1,999 of them for 3,000-3,999 accounts. For 2010, the company reported 1,000-1,999 requests targeting 5,000-5,999 accounts. In 2009, there were 0-999 National Security Letters targeting 2,000-2,999 accounts.

More Microsoft, Too, Says FBI Secretly Surveilling Its Customers | Threat Level | Wired.com

 

[waltky]

FBI Increases Use Of Patriot Act Provision 1,000%...

FBI sharply increases use of Patriot Act provision to collect US citizens' records
12 June`13 > The FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such data to a national security court last year – a 1,000-percent increase from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show.

The FBI’s increased use of the Patriot Act’s “business records” provision — and the wide ranging scope of its requests -- is getting new scrutiny in light of last week’s disclosure that that the provision was used to obtain a top-secret national security order requiring telecommunications companies to turn over records of millions of telephone calls.

Taken together, experts say, those revelations show the government has broadly interpreted the Patriot Act provision as enabling it to collect data not just on specific individuals, but on millions of Americans with no suspected terrorist connections. And it shows that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court accepted that broad interpretation of the law. “That they were using this (provision) to do mass collection of data is definitely the biggest surprise,” said Robert Chesney, a top national security lawyer at the University of Texas Law School. “Most people who followed this closely were not aware they were doing this. We’ve gone from producing records for a particular investigation to the production of all records for a massive pre-collection database. It’s incredibly sweeping.”

The Justice Department and FBI did not respond to requests for comment. But in a recent interview with NBC News, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper dismissed the idea that the records were being used to spy on innocent Americans. “The notion that we’re trolling through everyone’s emails and voyeuristically reading them, or listening to everyone’s phone calls is, on its face, absurd,” he said. “We couldn’t do that even if we wanted to.” But little-noticed statements by FBI Director Robert Mueller in recent years – as well as interviews with former senior law enforcement officials – hint at what Chesney calls a largely unnoticed “sea change” in the way the U.S. government collects data for terrorism and other national security investigations.

The Patriot Act provision, known as Section 215, allows the FBI to require the production of business records and any other “tangible things” -- including “books, records, papers, documents and other items,” for an authorized terrorism or foreign intelligence investigation. The Patriot Act was a broad expansion of law enforcement powers enacted by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In addition to Section 215, other provisions expanded the FBI’s power to issue so-called “national security letters,” requiring individuals and business to turn over a more limited set of records without any court order at all.

In contrast to standard grand jury subpoenas, material obtained under both Section 215 orders and national security letters must be turned over under so-called “gag orders” that forbid the business or institution that receives the order from notifying its customers or publicly referring to the matter. From the earliest days of the Patriot Act, Section 215 was among the most hotly disputed of its provisions. Critics charged the language – “tangible things” -- was so broad that it would even permit the FBI to obtain library and bookstore records to inspect what citizens were reading.

Ashcroft confronted criticism

See also:

Lindsey Graham: ‘If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it’
12 June`13 > Sen. Lindsey Graham would propose censoring Americans' "snail" mail if he thought it would help protect national security, the South Carolina Republican said Tuesday. But for now, he says he doesn't think it's necessary.

Faced with questions about the disclosure that the National Security Agency has been collecting phone and email records of citizens, Graham pointed to a World War II-era program in which the federal government censored mail. He said it was appropriate at the time and that he would support reinstating the program if it aided security efforts. "In World War II, the mentality of the public was that our whole way of life was at risk, we're all in. We censored the mail. When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter was written back from the battlefield to home, they looked at what was in the letter to make sure they were not tipping off the enemy," Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. "If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don't think it is."

The Guardian newspaper revealed last week details of a government surveillance program enacted in response to terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that secretly collects digital communication data from U.S. citizens. The source who provided the information to The Guardian, a Hawaii-based former government contractor named Edward Snowden, fled to Hong Kong and his whereabouts are currently unknown.

The new details about the program have sparked a debate over civil liberties and the extent of lawful government surveillance. On Tuesday, Graham suggested that Americans should be more willing to give up certain civil liberties to prevent future terrorist attacks. "The First Amendment right to speak is sacrosanct, but it has limits," Graham added. "In World War II, our population understood that what we say in letters could be used against [us by] our enemies. It was designed to protect us and ensure that we would have First Amendment rights because under the Japanese and Nazi regime, they weren't that big into the First Amendment. We don't need to censor the mail, but we do need to find out what the enemy's up to."

MORE

 

[depotoo]

sooo, according to all this everything has increased under Obama's administration...

 

[Votto]

She then "stayed" her own ruling so that the Government can Appeal it (Influence the Judge).

National Security Letter good thing. Started by Jimmy Carter and improved by every President since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

Yes, kind of like Obamacare being ruled unconstitutional. Then Roberts will declare the Patriot Act a tax and all will be good with the world.

 

[The2ndAmendment]

She then "stayed" her own ruling so that the Government can Appeal it (Influence the Judge).

National Security Letter good thing. Started by Jimmy Carter and improved by every President since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

Yes, kind of like Obamacare being ruled unconstitutional. Then Roberts will declare the Patriot Act a tax and all will be good with the world.

Yes, you see, since the Internet is involved with Interstate Commerce...

 

[Votto]

She then "stayed" her own ruling so that the Government can Appeal it (Influence the Judge).

National Security Letter good thing. Started by Jimmy Carter and improved by every President since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

Yes, kind of like Obamacare being ruled unconstitutional. Then Roberts will declare the Patriot Act a tax and all will be good with the world.

Yes, you see, since the Internet is involved with Interstate Commerce...

Stop making it so easy for them.

 

[Moonglow]

I love this country. Checks and balances in operation, carry on.

 

[Votto]

I love this country. Checks and balances in operation, carry on.

Checks and balances? What has changes exactly. All this is, is judicial mud slinging. Things will never change.

 

[waltky]

Sometimes it feels like, somebody's watchin' me...

All the ways you’re being watched
June 14, 2013 WASHINGTON — Someone is watching you.

What you spend. Where you eat. Whom you call. Where you travel. What you Google. What you give to charity. Recent reports of government access to records from phone companies, Internet providers and credit card companies raise anew questions of just how much other people can know about you, especially in the age of the Internet and high technology. They watch from the air, from cameras, from computers. And you help them, volunteering vast amounts of information about yourself in the magnetic stripe on the back of your credit card, the SIM card in your phone, the sites you visit on the Internet. The government has access to some of it. And might have access to more from the vast corporations that compile it.

U.S. officials insist they only tap into information that points at suspected terrorists and that there are plenty of safeguards to make sure they don’t snoop on good guys. “I want the American people to know that we’re trying to be transparent here, protect civil liberties and privacy but also the security of this country,” Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, told Congress on Wednesday. He also acknowledged that the government could look at such things as phone records and what site someone Googled. All of it alarms civil libertarians. “We don’t want to live in a world where anytime you do anything you have to stop and ask yourself, ‘Could this come back to hurt me if somebody found out about it?’ ” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Because absolutely nothing we do is private.” Indeed. Here are just some of the ways Americans can be watched.

Internet

A quick Google search for a lunch spot? There’s a record of that. Arranging a vacation? Someone knows where you’re planning to go. Check in with Facebook? It tracks all the sites you visit that have “like” buttons or allow you to sign in with Facebook — pretty much all of them. If those Internet giants can record so much about you, who can look at this electronic diary? The government can access any emails, chats, searches, events, locations, videos, photos, log-ins and any information people post online with a warrant, which the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant secretly.

And the revelation of PRISM, a secret government program for mining major Internet companies, suggests the government could have direct access to Internet companies’ data without a warrant. Every company reportedly impacted — Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, PalTalk and AOL — denied knowing about the program or giving any direct access to their servers.

Email

See also:

Challenges to phone records face legal obstacles
June 12, 2013 WASHINGTON — The government's massive collection of Americans' phone records is drawing protests and lawsuits from civil liberties groups, but major legal obstacles stand in the way. Among them are government claims that national security secrets will be revealed if the cases are allowed to proceed, and Supreme Court rulings that telephone records, as opposed to conversations, are not private to begin with.

Justices have written recently about the complex issues of privacy in the digital age, and the high court could have the last word on challenges filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others. The Obama administration has said the collection of phone records — telephone numbers and the time and length of calls — is necessary to protect Americans from terrorism and that it does not trample on their privacy. The National Security Agency collects millions of phone records from the United States each day, but says it only accesses them if there is a known connection to terrorism.

The ACLU this week filed the most significant lawsuit against the phone record collection program so far. The suit demands that the courts put an end to the program and order the administration to purge the records it has collected. Conservative lawyer Larry Klayman also has filed suit over the program. Before either suit gets a full-blown court hearing, the administration could try to employ two powerful legal tools it has used in the past to block challenges to closely held surveillance programs.

In February, the Supreme Court shot down an effort by U.S. citizens to challenge the expansion of a surveillance law used to monitor conversations of foreign spies and terrorist suspects by finding that the Americans could not show that the government would eavesdrop on their conversations. In legal terms, they did not have standing to sue, the justices said in a 5-4 decision. The ACLU and Klayman both say they are or were customers of Verizon, which was identified last week as a phone company the government had ordered to turn over daily records of calls made by all its customers. In so doing, they said it is a simple matter of fact that records of their calls have been seized by the government. "We meet even the standard the government has been foisting upon the courts for the past decade," said the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer.

But American University law professor Steven Vladeck said the challengers might face a different problem. "They're not suing Verizon. They're suing the government for something a third party did. And so the issue is not their ability to prove that their communications were involved. It's how they can object to a third party's cooperation with the government in a suit against the government, rather than the third party," Vladeck said. Another issue the administration could try to use to derail the suits is the jeopardy to national security that would result from allowing them to proceed, the so-called state secrets doctrine.

MORE

 

[Politico]

It ain't going nowhere. Deal with it.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

But American University law professor Steven Vladeck said the challengers might face a different problem. "They're not suing Verizon. They're suing the government for something a third party did. And so the issue is not their ability to prove that their communications were involved. It's how they can object to a third party's cooperation with the government in a suit against the government, rather than the third party," Vladeck said.

The 4th Amendment places restrictions on government, not private companies. When Verizon takes possession of your phone records, do you still have an expectation of privacy? Is this similar to a landlord not being allowed to give the police access to your apartment when you’re not there, even though the landlord owns the apartment? The courts have ruled that one has a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to his dwelling, independent of that of a private third party.

That’s likely not the case with phone records.

When you contract with your wireless company you might be contracting to give them possession of your phone records, which they may use as they please – including turning them over to the government when asked, absent a 4th Amendment privacy rights violation.