The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board: NSA Phone Spying Is Illegal
So now both sides of this debate have rulings that favor them. What I find interesting is how some the supporters of the program seek to dodge the strict question of the legality/constitutionality and talk about how necessary the PRISM program is or the effect the debate has on NSA staff. The report claims that there is no instance where PRISM found an unsuspected terror cell, or that it has disrupted any plots here in the US. But stay tuned that is based on information provided which may not be complete for good reasons. Nobody should feel vindicated, this debate has a good ways to run. To SCOTUS, through Congress and of course we have the important reforms proposed by President Obama to keep in mind moving forward.
These 3 members have the majority ruling against PRISM.
David Medine, a former associate director of the Federal Trade Commission.
Patricia Wald, a former federal judge.
James Dempsey, a privacy attorney with the Center for Democracy & Technology.
The dissenting minority
Former Justice Department lawyers Rachel Brand and Elisabeth Collins Cook.
Their dissent is based on the effect on the people at NSA, a very different point than the legal/constitutional issue.
“Based on information provided to the Board, we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” the report found. “Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”…
“When the government collects all of a person’s telephone records, storing them for five years in a government database that is subjected to high-speed digital searching and analysis, the privacy implications go far beyond what can be revealed by the metadata of a single telephone call,” the majority wrote.
The report said the FISA Court, as it’s known, did not perform a constitutional analysis of the program until last year.
Dissenting board members were former Justice Department lawyers Rachel Brand and Elisabeth Collins Cook. Brand said they were “concerned about the detrimental effect this superfluous second-guessing can have on our national security agencies and their staff.”
I suggest anyone skeptical of Wired take a look at the PDF. The boards work deserves to be viewed on it’s own merits.
