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from the gov't-appointee-fights-for-the-people dept.
The appointment of a FISA Court amicus to argue on behalf of the American public -- part of the surveillance reforms contained in the USA Freedom Act -- seems to be working out pretty well. FISC judge Michael Mosman appointed Washington DC attorney Preston Burton to examine one issue facing the court: whether the NSA can retain the bulk records it collected under Section 215. According to the new limitations, the NSA must immediately destroy any records that are not "foreign intelligence information." Unsurprisingly, the NSA is reluctant to begin this purge.
There are a certain amount of records the NSA must retain as they are part of ongoing lawsuits against the government. The NSA has stated that it's impossible to separate the phone records relevant to the lawsuits from the rest of the collection.
Burton -- in his response to the government's response to his original amicus brief -- doesn't find the NSA's claim of limited technical capabilities believable. In his first brief, he asked the following question:
Why has the government been unable to reach some stipulation with the plaintiffs to preserve only the evidence necessary for plaintiffs to meet their standing burden? Consider whether it is appropriate for the government to retain billions of irrelevant call detail records involving millions of people based on, what undersigned understands from counsel involved in that litigation, the government's stubborn procedural challenges to standing- a situation that the government has fostered by declining to identify the particular telecommunications provider in question and/or stipulate that the plaintiff is a customer of a relevant provided.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 13 2015, @07:10AM
You are damned right it's been done. Murphy's law - if it can happen, it will happen. You know it, I know it, millions of Americans know it - but Joe Government is still babbling about the limitations of - uhh - geez, I really don't know where any of these limitations he speaks of come from. The NSA and the intelligence communities recognize no limitation to their powers, and none of us knows the limits of their technology. I mentioned above the most powerful computer system in the world - but none of us on the outside knows how powerful that thing is. We can only guess.
We have no assurances that all of our computers aren't already compromised.