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posted by janrinok on Wednesday December 31 2014, @09:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the exempt-from-the-law-of-the-land dept.

TechDirt reports:

[...]the FISA Court has the reputation as a rubberstamp for a reason--it almost never turns down a request.

However, in the rare instances where it does, apparently, the DOJ doesn't really care, knowing that it can just issue [a National Security Letter] instead and get the same information. At least that appears to be what the DOJ quietly admitted to doing in a now declassified Inspector General's report from 2008(PDF). EFF lawyer Nate Cardozo was going through and spotted this troubling bit:

We considered the Section 215 request for [REDACTED] discussed earlier in this report at pages 33 to 34 to be a noteworthy item. In this case, the FISA Court had twice declined to approve a Section 215 application based on First Amendment Concerns. However, the FBI subsequently issued NSLs for information [REDACTED] even though the statute authorizing the NSLs contained the same First Amendment restriction as Section 215 and the ECs authorizing the NSLs relied on the same facts contained in the Section 215 applicants...

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @01:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @01:25AM (#130669)

    Not a single citizen is moving their butts to walk on the capital

    Even more fundamentally, they continue to vote for the lesser of 2 evils (Red|Blue).
    Many aren't even bothering to vote.

    People who have been on the presidential ballot in recent years:
    Rocky Anderson - Justice Party;
    Jill Stein, Cynthia McKinney, David Cobb, Ralph Nader - all Greens.

    Nader has been on the ballot continuously since 1992 (lately without a party).
    There has never been another guy on the ballot opposite him who is smarter than he is.

    I'll even list Dennis Kucinich - Democrat.
    He's definitely not your typical Blue; on the Political Compass, he charts with the Greens.

    -- gewg_