NSA reformers dismayed after privacy board vindicates surveillance dragnet

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

NSA reformers dismayed after privacy board vindicates surveillance dragnet

Spencer Ackerman in Washington
theguardian.com, Wednesday 2 July 2014 19.47 BST

Civil libertarians saw their hopes for curtailing the National Security Agency's massive digital surveillance program dimmed in the wake of a report from a US government privacy board vindicating much of the international communications dragnet.

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The PCLOB denied that the 702 siphoning is bulk collection, even though it annually provides the NSA with "hundreds of millions" of different sorts of communications -- blessing an NSA definition that considers only indiscriminate collection, untethered to surveillance targets, to be bulk.

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Dealing another blow to privacy advocates, the board endorsed the NSA, CIA and FBI's warrantless, so-called "backdoor" searches for information from Americans, just weeks after the House of Representatives voted to ban them. While Medine and another board member, former federal judge Patricia Wald, wanted to add greater legal protections, the board advocated restricting the FBI's warrantless searches and urged NSA and CIA analysts to certify that their queries are "reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information."

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Perhaps most controversially, the PCLOB gave a qualified endorsement to the NSA's practice of siphoning directly from the Internet information that merely references a surveillance target even if the correspondence is neither from nor sent to that target, a practice known as "about" collection.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/02/nsa-surveillance-government-privacy-board-report

[kickysnana]

1. Perhaps "the handlers" have been busy whispering into peoples ears...again. n/t