| Title | The US Government is Trying to Keep Key NSA Spying Rules Secret | |
| Date | Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:14PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
A federal appeals court in New York will hear oral argument on Tuesday in the ACLU's lawsuit fighting for the public's right to know the legal justifications for government spying.
The Freedom of Information Act suit seeks the release of secret memos written by government lawyers that provided the foundation for the warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications. In essence, these memos serve as the law that governs the executive branch. By withholding them, the government is flouting a core principle of democratic society: The law must be public.
The memos cover the government's legal interpretations of Executive Order 12333 [(EO 12333)], which was issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. It's the primary authority under which the NSA [(National Security Agency)] conducts surveillance, and it encompasses an array of warrantless, high-tech spying programs. While much of this spying occurs outside the United States and is ostensibly directed at foreigners, it nonetheless vacuums up vast quantities of Americans' communications. That's because in today's interconnected world, communications are frequently sent, routed, or stored abroad — where they may be collected, often in bulk, in the course of the NSA's spying activities.
For example, the NSA has relied on EO 12333 to collect nearly 5 billion records per day on the locations of cell phones, as well as hundreds of millions of contact lists and address books from email and messaging accounts. It also intercepted private data from Google and Yahoo user accounts as that information traveled between those companies' data centers located abroad.
Related: DOJ Made Secret Arguments to Break Crypto, Now ACLU Wants to Make Them Public
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printed from SoylentNews, The US Government is Trying to Keep Key NSA Spying Rules Secret on 2024-04-23 08:04:23