Secret court approves three more months of NSA phone snooping
Secret court approves three more months of NSA phone
snooping
By Stephen Dinan-The Washington Times Friday, January 3,
2014
The secret court that oversees the nation’s intelligence
activities renewed its approval of the National Security Agency’s
telephone-records program on Friday, granting the government a new three-month
window to collect data on all Americans’ phone calls.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office
announced the court’s ruling in a statement, though officials didn’t make the
ruling itself public, saying it was going through declassification procedures.
The decision marks the 36th time the program has been
approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“It is the administration’s view, consistent with the
recent holdings of the United States District Courts for the Southern District
of New York and Southern District of California, as well as the findings of 15
judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on 36 separate occasions
over the past seven years, that the telephony metadata collection program is
lawful,” Shawn Turner, spokesman for Mr. Clapper, said.
Last month a federal judge in the District of Columbia
ruled that the NSA’s phone-records program was likely unconstitutional, but
another federal judge in New York concluded the opposite. The Obama
administration has said it is appealing the adverse ruling.
In his statement Friday, Mr. Turner said the Obama
administration is willing to consider changes to the NSA program “while still
maintaining its operational benefits.”
Under the NSA program, the agency collects the time,
duration and parties involved in most calls placed within the U.S. The agency
stores that data for five years, but says it doesn’t query the data unless it
is investigating a specific terrorism case, when it delves into the data to see
who a suspect is calling, who those associates are calling, and who that second
round of associates is calling.
A White House review, released last month, was harshly
critical of the program, saying the NSA shouldn’t store the data but rather
should leave it with telephone companies, only accessing the data when analysts
have a specific articulable reason. The White House review was also critical of
the secret court that has repeatedly upheld the NSA’s snooping program, saying
the judges could benefit from having an adversarial process and citizens should
have an advocate to argue their interests to the court.
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