Posted on 11/19/2013 8:04:30 AM PST by kobald
A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has criticised the US government for ignoring guidelines surrounding the National Security Agency's (NSA) Prism programme for domestic surveillance of web users. FISC set out suggested regulations for the Prism programme, which spied on citizens' emails and web use for around 10 years before being shut down in 2011...
"NSA exceeded the scope of authorised acquisition continuously during the more than [redacted] years of acquisition under these orders," wrote Judge Bates in a 117 page document. He added that guidelines stated that the government should only gather data on those for whom there was a reasonable suspicion that they posed a threat to national security. "Each order authorised NSA analysts to access the acquired metadata only through queries based on validate 'seed' accounts, i.e. internet accounts for which there was a reasonable articulable suspicion (RAS) that they were associated with a targeted international terrorist group; for accounts by U.S. persons, RAS could not be based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment. "As noted above, record of compliance with these rules has been poor," wrote Judge Bates...
(Excerpt) Read more at computing.co.uk ...
One of the good reasons for ubiquitous encryption is to simply swamp the NSA. Cloward-Piven style.
However, it’s tough to get people to use even simple encryption tools (not to mention use them well). Maybe 5% of my friends use GPG.
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