and so, here we are
In trudging through the FISA document that came to light on Tuesday, it was discovered that the National Security Agency had been illegally conducting searches on people in the US. The document has gone on to state that those illegal searches, which were conducted under Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah, mounted to a whopping 85% of the total searches involving US person identifiers.
Section 702 data on US persons identifiers may be conducted if they are first “approved in accordance with [internal] NSA procedures, which must require a statement of facts establishing that the use of any such identifier as a selection term is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.” The problem is that querying US persons without a warrant amounts to a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, no matter what “internal NSA procedures” are followed.
The Fourth Amendment is crystal clear: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
On page 81, the FISA report pointed out that “In May and June 2016, NSA reported to oversight personnel in the ODNI and DOJ that, since approximately 2012, use of [redacted] to query communications in [redacted] had resulted in inadvertent violations of the above-described querying rules of Section 702 information.” The NSA claims that “the violations resulted from analysts not recognizing the need to avoid querying datasets for which querying requirements were not satisfied or not understanding how to formulate [redacted] queries to exclude such datasets.” more at freedomoutpost.com ...