NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds

The aspect of these revelations that's most disturbing to me is the structure and functions of the FISA court and its ability to make opaque decisions about law, even if in this case they chastised the NSA.

From all I've read on this topic, and I've read quite a bit, this particular case is a rarity. Most of the time they are a rubber-stamp, and I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised that this particular finding was released in response to the EFF's FOIA request in an effort to shift the debate away from the blatantly unconstitutional actions of redefining law and not disclosing the new interpretations.

The issue with the FISA court is less about the lack of an adversarial process or the fact that the apointments to it have been made in a partisan manner, (although both of these aspects are definite problems, but they seem to be the only aspects most politicians will address,) and more about the fact that because of the classified nature of their decisions, there's no informed way to bring suit if they violate the law themselves.

The Supreme Court is constitutionally the highest court in the nation, but this court's decisions can't be appealed to it, since no one is allowed to know their decisions... It's unconstitutional, but there's no way to use the constitution to rein it in. It was aptly put by Jimmy Carter (regardless of what one thinks about his presidency,) as he defended Snowden: "America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time,"

 

Here is what the federal doctrine is supposed to be about, so that supply side economics can supply us with better governance at lower cost.

 

They are. They are executive agencies.

Even if they were there before, he still is responsible for them while under his watch.

Much like Guantanamo bay, Obama took the baton and ran with it.

 

The reason I took that view was because the GOP is trying to imply it didn't exist before Obama. But then the GOP has never been accused of being honest and ethical. I guess expecting that has to rank right up there with expecting Tea Partiers to think for themselves or consider anything but themselves.

 

been waiting for more news like this... In fact, I've always thought that people should boycott the companies that participate so they can leverage their shareholders and corporate financial powers to kill the programs entirely. It would be a lot more effective than marches, petitions or letter writing campaigns to government officials. The Citizens United ruling said money is speech, and they've got a hell of a lot more than we do. might as well use our normal human voices to influence the voices that politicians actually listen to, right?

 

unskewedewd : I try to say away from google but if you have a web site and want to be found by search engines an association is necessary Microsoft is a company look at differently than most others do. I've been using computers longer than most people posting on this site have been alive. I don't remember the OS used but we ran a piece of paper tape through it which got the thing running. I wrote the required programs in Single User Basic which was also called basic or George Washington Basic. I knew nothing about computers and am happy to say don't know any more about them today than I knew then. Information was entered and the results received using a teletype typewriter/printer. Monitors became available long before we had Windows and our OS became DOS. I jumped from my old 4k computer to an IBM 256K with 2 floppy disc drives, a monochrome monitor and dot-matrix printer just before Windows became available. Price for the computer system was between 1800 and 2000. It didn't take long to obtain a CGA monitor after Windows became available. "Internet-in-a=Box" Microsoft is the company that did more for computers than any other. Thank you Microsoft! It would be difficult for us to avoid Microsoft. In the world of Computers Microsoft was the Big Bang.

I don't really like things like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, You Tube. etc. People are up in arms over the gathering of information by the government but look at the stuff they themselves are putting on the internet for the world to see. We must stay connected . . . the US Government isn't the only ones out there looking at things.

 

we already knew that... Bush admitted it