US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans

TheCoelacanth

Secret courts are anathema to democracy and need to be abolished.

edot

"Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”" Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.

ARandomerDude

The debate about reapproval of section 702 is all theater. Does anyone genuinely believe the government would stop surveilling us if the authorization expired?

tokai

This headline has been relevant since 2001.

sharts

This kind of thing will never stop. And those who control it have all the leverage and power. Perhaps all the spying data should just be publicly accessible and easily accessible for all to use and abuse. Would democratizing it all so there is never an expectation of privacy from the public vs a select few in power be better in the long run?

advisedwang

They don't want the public to see the big green "APPROVED" rubber stamp that the FISC uses.

baggachipz

> The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators. How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.

V__

I will always be baffled by the dichotomy of "the US has the most freedom" and "no democratic country spies more on its citizens".

matthewmcg

He should go further and describe or read these secret rulings on the Senate floor, where the speech and debate clause protects him.

silverFork

How it is done, everybody knows how.. backdoors in servers, back door in communication equipment, decryption method for of all that goes through fiber in entire world.. Massive data storage to store everything. How is not an issue; every node and communication, hardware and software has a backdoor. Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up. Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.

crmd

This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas, Julian Assanges, <insert national activist of your choice>, etc. gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class. This is why the owners of every country come together to support these technologies, without exception and regardless of political coalition membership.

darksaints

I'm increasingly of the opinion that state secret classification of our law enforcement systems should only exist for a year max. We've abused the system to shield evil people from accountability and to hide evil actions by our government, and that has to change.

mock-possum

So grateful to have Wyden in my corner. Especially for the last decade or so it sparks joy to fill his bubble in on the ballot.

jeffbee

The article could have been interesting but by fundamentally misrepresenting the structure of the American federal government they made it impossible to take seriously.

trimethylpurine

A ruling belongs to the judicial branch.

motohagiography

what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do. fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open. the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.

anigbrowl

Secret methods are an unavoidable necessity of governance. Secret laws an legal decisions are the hallmark of a failed polity.

wormius

I had a dream last night that the government had a database that corps sent in "opt-out" info from people. Anytime someone opted out of a surveillance system (e.g. ad tracking, etc...) that info got sent to the government as a signal that the person is sus. They took the "if you have nothing to hide" logic to its full conclusion. The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this. But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.

giancarlostoro

Isn't that what all the hype about National Security Letters (and related events from those years) were all about? I never thought any of that went away, the media just stopped reporting on it. We had Lavabit and Snowden showing us how unhinged these things can get.

shevy-java

Trump is going to lose. People are tired of his lies.