Skip to content

Comment on Uncle Sam snooping on US folks? Not without a warrant, lawmakers agreeparent

Comments

The NSA has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic.
An internal NSA audit from May 2012 identified 2776 incidents i.e. violations of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans and foreign targets in the U.S. in the period from April 2011 through March 2012, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes are not intentional.
The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do so and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.

"trust me bro"

A legal opinion declassified on August 21, 2013, revealed that the NSA intercepted for three years as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans not suspected of having links to terrorism, before FISA court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_di...

Hey at least it's covered under Section 702 though! They are policing themselves because the courts are too busy, but that's fine, and all those accidental times they broke the law, won't happen again, trust us! It was only 56,000 times they broke the law anyway!

Why aren’t the people responsible in prison? Surely this is more serious than possession of weed.

Please see my previous comment. Here's the part to pay attention to:

The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do so and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.

The courts are too busy and are leaving it up to the people doing the crimes to police themselves and report their crimes to the courts, on a "trust" based system.

Nobody is watching the watchers, that's why.

The US President is in charge of the executive branch, isn’t he? So why doesn’t he order the justice department to arrest the criminals? There’s enough evidence to get a warrant surely.

In the U.S., the president isn't the boss of the justice department. This helps prevent the president from ordering the department to lock up a political opponent.

Congress should be scrutinizing the justice department for failing to do so, but I'm sure most of Congress is okay with it.

You’re right, the President isn’t in charge the attorney general is. So Merrick B. Garland is the person allowing this injustice to go unpunished. Can’t he be impeached for violating his oath to the constitution or something like that?

https://www.justice.gov/ag/staff-profile/meet-attorney-gener...

A politician will never arrest himself.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.