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by Noaidi 60 days ago
No.

First, FISA was created in 1978 to protect Americans from the CIA by forcing them to show probably casuse. Section 702 of FISA is about intercepting any foreigners communications for which they need no warrent.

But the CIA incidentally collects data of U.S citizens during these warrentless wire taps, and that would be the 4th amendment challenge, but so far that is going nowhere.
3 comments
rsingel 60 days ago
Close but a lot of this, as Sen Wyden points out, turns on how NSA and DoJ lawyers define terms. So you get situations where bulk collection of communications of Americans to Americans into a data center isn't considered interception until a human looks at it. There's so much we don't know because the policies/legal interpretation and the FISA court rulings on them are secret. Sen Wyden tries to warn but he can only hint at the real dangers and policies
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WillAdams 60 days ago
An important consideration is that just the graph of who talks to whom can be quite powerful:

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

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anonymousiam 60 days ago
There's also the game that they play where they spoof BGP announcements that cause routing changes for domestic traffic that makes it flow out and then back into the US, making it fair game for collection. Also, our Five Eyes partners aren't prohibited from collecting on US targets, and we all share.
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andai 60 days ago
Doesn't "receiving surveillance data about your citizens that your allies collected for you" also count as spying on your own citizens?

I'm not a lawyer but...

"You spied on me!" -"Relax, sweetheart... Of course I didn't spy on you. I got Mike to spy on you. Hey Mike!"

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sylos 59 days ago
Unfortunately the lawyers did argue and it's legal. They really dug in to the wording and not the spirit of the law
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gib444 60 days ago
Oh wow, that's crazy because people from the USA are always saying how unique and powerful the Constitution is and how many freedoms the USA has.

It seems almost like the USA is similar to other countries where the state does whatever they like. I bet that can't be true though surely because the USA has so many freedoms? You must be mistaken

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