Does Edward Snowden even exist?
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Snowden gets Russia asylum; White House 'extremely disappointed'
By Ashley Fantz and Phil Black, CNN
updated 4:58 PM EDT, Thu August 1, 2013
Moscow (CNN) -- The White House is "extremely disappointed" that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia.
Snowden has legal status in Russia for one year, his Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said earlier Thursday, adding that his client has left the Moscow airport. Hours later White House spokesman Jay Carney spoke about the news in a press conference.
The United States is reconsidering a planned meeting between President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin next month in Moscow before a G-20 gathering in St. Petersburg, Russia, he said. "We are evaluating the utility of a summit."
Lawyer: Snowden has asylum; White House 'extremely disappointed' - CNN.com
By Ashley Fantz and Phil Black, CNN
updated 4:58 PM EDT, Thu August 1, 2013
Moscow (CNN) -- The White House is "extremely disappointed" that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia.
Snowden has legal status in Russia for one year, his Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said earlier Thursday, adding that his client has left the Moscow airport. Hours later White House spokesman Jay Carney spoke about the news in a press conference.
The United States is reconsidering a planned meeting between President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin next month in Moscow before a G-20 gathering in St. Petersburg, Russia, he said. "We are evaluating the utility of a summit."
Lawyer: Snowden has asylum; White House 'extremely disappointed' - CNN.com
Russia should just say fuck off what are you going to do about it? Nothing.
But Putin rubs elbows with the rich ruling elite as it is so he'll bend eventually, sadly.
But Putin rubs elbows with the rich ruling elite as it is so he'll bend eventually, sadly.
Props:
Roz, Roz, short and 4 others
Lady's hands look like a marionette. I can't believe this is a spokesperson for the us govt it reminds me of a Saturday night live skit or something. Those reporters were on point tho.
Siccness.net/vb now on Barry's Blacklist y'all watch out now ya hear!
Siccness.net/vb now on Barry's Blacklist y'all watch out now ya hear!
Props:
Roz, Roz, short and 2 others
http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-nsa-snowden-20131222,0,7166210.story#axzz2oGdn8Bdq
A spy world reshaped by Edward Snowden
Leaks from the former NSA contractor have been so illuminating that experts say they mark a turning point in U.S. intelligence operations.
By Ken Dilanian
December 22, 2013, 6:00 a.m.
WASHINGTON — After news reports that the National Security Agency had secretly monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone calls, America's top intelligence official was asked why congressional oversight committees were kept in the dark.
Shouldn't Congress have been briefed, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) asked James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, about a spying operation that would embarrass the U.S. government if exposed?
"Well, sir, there are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback," Clapper replied at a House Intelligence Committee hearing in October. "The conduct of intelligence is premised on the notion that we can do it secretly, and we don't count on it being revealed in the newspaper."
Not these days.
Clapper and his colleagues now operate in a spy world reshaped by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who claims responsibility for what officials deem the largest and most damaging compromise of classified information in U.S. history. Among the casualties is the assumption that some of the nation's most carefully guarded secrets will stay secret.
NSA officials say Snowden downloaded and removed about 1.7 million documents from computer networks at an NSA listening post in Hawaii where he worked until June. The haul included about 2,000 specific requests for NSA surveillance that officials say make up a digital road map of spying successes and gaps in such high-profile targets as Iran, Russia, North Korea and China.
The requests have not been made public. But other leaks from Snowden's cache have been so illuminating that experts say the disclosures will mark a turning point in U.S. spying, much as revelations of CIA assassinations and NSA domestic spying led to creation of the congressional oversight committees and new laws in the 1970s.
At least some change appears inevitable. In just the last week, events produced "a seismic shift in the movement for real surveillance reform," said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a critic of NSA programs.
In Washington, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon issued a sharp rebuke to the NSA on Monday when he ruled that a major program that Snowden exposed — the secret logging of virtually every American's telephone calls — was "almost Orwellian" in scope and probably violated the Constitution.
Leon stayed his ruling pending an expected government appeal. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and has been a staunch Capitol Hill ally for the embattled agency, announced that she would welcome a Supreme Court review to determine whether the bulk collection is legal.
The next day, the leaders of the nation's largest technology companies sat down with President Obama and complained that the NSA was damaging their reputations and undermining Silicon Valley's ability to sell computer hardware and cloud services, hurting the U.S. economy. (Privacy advocates have noted that they have been calling on leading technology companies to offer safeguards of their own against the use of personal information they gather.)
Several executives said some foreign customers had begun to reject American-made technology because Snowden's leaks showed that the NSA had enlisted tech firms and secretly tapped their data-transfer hubs. Some companies are facing lawsuits from shareholders demanding disclosure of any cooperation with NSA data-mining programs.
And on Wednesday, a presidential task force called for sweeping changes in NSA operations at home and abroad, including an end to the NSA's vast collection of U.S. telephone records. It said telephone companies or other groups, instead of the government, should keep the logs and allow the NSA access only if it obtains a court order.
Some critics say that's not enough. Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee who has called for new curbs on NSA operations, said the panel's proposals would leave intact what he called "the surveillance state in America." Storing telephone data on the servers of a nongovernmental entity, he said, "would simply represent an outsourcing of bulk collection, not an end to it."
The crosscurrents added pressure on Obama to act more forcefully. On Friday, he said at a news conference that he would make "a pretty definitive statement" in January to outline surveillance reforms, including support for at least some of the task force's 46 recommendations.
"People are concerned about the prospect, the possibility of abuse," he said. But he said he was confident that the NSA was "not engaging in domestic surveillance or snooping around" on Americans.
Intelligence officials say some of America's adversaries, including members of Al Qaeda, have changed how they communicate to avoid the surveillance that Snowden disclosed.
Other costs are also now clear.
In nearly every meeting with foreign leaders or other officials, White House officials face angry complaints about the spying that was revealed in Snowden's leaks and questions about what might come next, officials said. One official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue involves classified material, said senior White House aides spend far more time grappling with the issue than is publicly understood.
But the administration official said an NSA-led intelligence task force that is investigating the leaks may never determine precisely what information Snowden stole or whether it's been copied, making it difficult to warn other governments or preempt his disclosures to mitigate the repercussions.
In Brazil, where Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA had monitored phones used by President Dilma Rousseff and her senior advisors, the government has responded by proposing to build fiber-optic lines to Europe so Brazil's Internet traffic can bypass U.S. data hubs that the NSA was monitoring.
In Europe, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other major technology and telecommunications companies have been tarnished by their apparent cooperation with the NSA, said Jay Cline, president of Minnesota Privacy Consultants, which advises corporations about privacy issues.
"The Europeans consider privacy as a human right," he said. "The details of what is being surveilled has raised questions among Europeans whether any of their data can be trusted in the U.S."
Snowden, who has been charged with espionage and is living in Russia, was hardly the first — and may not be the last — American with a high-level security clearance to leak a huge cache of U.S. secrets.
He has said he was inspired by Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison in August after being convicted of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic records, cables and videos to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks in 2010.
Michael Hayden, who headed both the NSA and CIA, said the chance of exposure of an NSA surveillance program "is like zero" under normal circumstances. But the risk calculus changes dramatically when a trusted insider is involved, he said.
"What the Snowden thing has done," he said, "is show that sometimes the greatest risk to discovery is the self-anointed leaker inside your organization."
ken.dilanian[USER=64208]@LATimes[/USER].com
Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times
A spy world reshaped by Edward Snowden
Leaks from the former NSA contractor have been so illuminating that experts say they mark a turning point in U.S. intelligence operations.
By Ken Dilanian
December 22, 2013, 6:00 a.m.
WASHINGTON — After news reports that the National Security Agency had secretly monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone calls, America's top intelligence official was asked why congressional oversight committees were kept in the dark.
Shouldn't Congress have been briefed, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) asked James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, about a spying operation that would embarrass the U.S. government if exposed?
"Well, sir, there are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback," Clapper replied at a House Intelligence Committee hearing in October. "The conduct of intelligence is premised on the notion that we can do it secretly, and we don't count on it being revealed in the newspaper."
Not these days.
Clapper and his colleagues now operate in a spy world reshaped by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who claims responsibility for what officials deem the largest and most damaging compromise of classified information in U.S. history. Among the casualties is the assumption that some of the nation's most carefully guarded secrets will stay secret.
NSA officials say Snowden downloaded and removed about 1.7 million documents from computer networks at an NSA listening post in Hawaii where he worked until June. The haul included about 2,000 specific requests for NSA surveillance that officials say make up a digital road map of spying successes and gaps in such high-profile targets as Iran, Russia, North Korea and China.
The requests have not been made public. But other leaks from Snowden's cache have been so illuminating that experts say the disclosures will mark a turning point in U.S. spying, much as revelations of CIA assassinations and NSA domestic spying led to creation of the congressional oversight committees and new laws in the 1970s.
At least some change appears inevitable. In just the last week, events produced "a seismic shift in the movement for real surveillance reform," said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a critic of NSA programs.
In Washington, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon issued a sharp rebuke to the NSA on Monday when he ruled that a major program that Snowden exposed — the secret logging of virtually every American's telephone calls — was "almost Orwellian" in scope and probably violated the Constitution.
Leon stayed his ruling pending an expected government appeal. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and has been a staunch Capitol Hill ally for the embattled agency, announced that she would welcome a Supreme Court review to determine whether the bulk collection is legal.
The next day, the leaders of the nation's largest technology companies sat down with President Obama and complained that the NSA was damaging their reputations and undermining Silicon Valley's ability to sell computer hardware and cloud services, hurting the U.S. economy. (Privacy advocates have noted that they have been calling on leading technology companies to offer safeguards of their own against the use of personal information they gather.)
Several executives said some foreign customers had begun to reject American-made technology because Snowden's leaks showed that the NSA had enlisted tech firms and secretly tapped their data-transfer hubs. Some companies are facing lawsuits from shareholders demanding disclosure of any cooperation with NSA data-mining programs.
And on Wednesday, a presidential task force called for sweeping changes in NSA operations at home and abroad, including an end to the NSA's vast collection of U.S. telephone records. It said telephone companies or other groups, instead of the government, should keep the logs and allow the NSA access only if it obtains a court order.
Some critics say that's not enough. Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee who has called for new curbs on NSA operations, said the panel's proposals would leave intact what he called "the surveillance state in America." Storing telephone data on the servers of a nongovernmental entity, he said, "would simply represent an outsourcing of bulk collection, not an end to it."
The crosscurrents added pressure on Obama to act more forcefully. On Friday, he said at a news conference that he would make "a pretty definitive statement" in January to outline surveillance reforms, including support for at least some of the task force's 46 recommendations.
"People are concerned about the prospect, the possibility of abuse," he said. But he said he was confident that the NSA was "not engaging in domestic surveillance or snooping around" on Americans.
Intelligence officials say some of America's adversaries, including members of Al Qaeda, have changed how they communicate to avoid the surveillance that Snowden disclosed.
Other costs are also now clear.
In nearly every meeting with foreign leaders or other officials, White House officials face angry complaints about the spying that was revealed in Snowden's leaks and questions about what might come next, officials said. One official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue involves classified material, said senior White House aides spend far more time grappling with the issue than is publicly understood.
But the administration official said an NSA-led intelligence task force that is investigating the leaks may never determine precisely what information Snowden stole or whether it's been copied, making it difficult to warn other governments or preempt his disclosures to mitigate the repercussions.
In Brazil, where Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA had monitored phones used by President Dilma Rousseff and her senior advisors, the government has responded by proposing to build fiber-optic lines to Europe so Brazil's Internet traffic can bypass U.S. data hubs that the NSA was monitoring.
In Europe, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other major technology and telecommunications companies have been tarnished by their apparent cooperation with the NSA, said Jay Cline, president of Minnesota Privacy Consultants, which advises corporations about privacy issues.
"The Europeans consider privacy as a human right," he said. "The details of what is being surveilled has raised questions among Europeans whether any of their data can be trusted in the U.S."
Snowden, who has been charged with espionage and is living in Russia, was hardly the first — and may not be the last — American with a high-level security clearance to leak a huge cache of U.S. secrets.
He has said he was inspired by Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison in August after being convicted of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic records, cables and videos to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks in 2010.
Michael Hayden, who headed both the NSA and CIA, said the chance of exposure of an NSA surveillance program "is like zero" under normal circumstances. But the risk calculus changes dramatically when a trusted insider is involved, he said.
"What the Snowden thing has done," he said, "is show that sometimes the greatest risk to discovery is the self-anointed leaker inside your organization."
ken.dilanian[USER=64208]@LATimes[/USER].com
Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times
Props:
short and short
I know someone who was on the ship. If they didn't really bury him at sea, they sure went the extra mile in making it look legit. It wasn't a case of just they said, they DID bury someone at sea for a fact, was it Bin Laden... none of us can do anything about it if it wasn't
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Props:
short and short
The Snowden incident is not real in the sense of how they are feeding it to the public. Snowden could just be a code word, we would be none the wiser. Many of these media companies are ran by spy agencies. This means not only are they controlling the news, they are potentially saying things we can't possibly grasp because we read it in the literal sense.
Props:
short and short
Judge rules NSA collection of phone records is legal - CNN.com
Judge rules NSA collection of phone records is legal
By Evan Perez, CNN
Washington (CNN) -- The National Security Agency notched a much-needed win in court Friday after a series of setbacks over the legality and even the usefulness of its massive data collection program.
A federal judge in New York ruled the NSA's bulk collection of data on nearly every phone call made in the United States was legal.
The ruling contrasts with another ruling last week by a federal judge in Washington, who called the same program "almost Orwellian" and likely unconstitutional.
In his ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge William Pauley said the NSA's bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act was legal. The program was revealed in classified leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
"But the question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of government to decide," said the ruling by Pauley, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case, said it would appeal Pauley's ruling.
"We are extremely disappointed with this decision, which misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government's surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director.
Review: NSA snooping program should stay in place
President Barack Obama is examining a review of the surveillance efforts that recommended changes in how the NSA program was conducted. Obama said last week he would decide what to do about it in January.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the NSA's bulk collection of metadata -- phone records of the time and numbers called without any disclosure of content -- apparently violates privacy rights.
His preliminary ruling favored five plaintiffs challenging the practice, but Leon limited the decision only to their cases.
"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," said Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush. "Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment."
Leon's ruling said the "plaintiffs in this case have also shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits of a Fourth Amendment claim," adding "as such, they too have adequately demonstrated irreparable injury."
He rejected the government's argument that a 1979 Maryland case provided precedent for the constitutionality of collecting phone metadata, noting that public use of telephones had increased dramatically in three decades.
Leon also noted the government "does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature."
However, he put off enforcing his order barring the government from collecting the information, pending an appeal by the government.
A Justice Department spokesman said in response to Leon's ruling that "we believe the program is constitutional as previous judges have found."
Explosive revelations this year by Snowden triggered new debate about national security and privacy interests in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Snowden's disclosures led to more public disclosure about the secretive legal process that sets in motion the government surveillance.
The NSA has admitted it received secret court approval to collect vast amounts of metadata from telecom giant Verizon and leading Internet companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
The case before Leon involved approval for surveillance in April by a judge at a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that handles individual requests for electronic surveillance for "foreign intelligence purposes."
Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of the 1970s, the secret courts were set up to grant certain types of government requests -- wiretapping, data analysis and other monitoring of possible terrorists and spies operating in the United States.
The Patriot Act that Congress passed after the 9/11 attacks broadened the government's ability to conduct anti-terrorism surveillance in the United States and abroad, eventually including the metadata collection.
In order to collect the information, the government has to demonstrate it is "relevant" to an international terrorism investigation.
However, the 1978 FISA law lays out exactly what the special court must decide: "A judge considering a petition to modify or set aside a nondisclosure order may grant such petition only if the judge finds that there is no reason to believe that disclosure may endanger the national security of the United States, interfere with a criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence investigation, interfere with diplomatic relations, or endanger the life or physical safety of any person."
In defending the program, Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA's director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that "15 separate judges of the FISA Court have held on 35 occasions that Section 215 (of the Patriot Act) authorizes the collection of telephony metadata in bulk in support of counterterrorism investigations."
Initially, telecommunications companies such as Verizon were the targets of legal action against Patriot Act provisions. Congress later gave retroactive immunity to those private businesses.
The New York ruling makes it more likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will have to tackle the issue of privacy and settle the dispute over the the NSA program.
For years, the courts have relied on a 1979 Supreme Court precedent that found privacy rights didn't extend to personal information people give to third-parties such as the phone companies, which store basic data on calls made. The secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has relied on that ruling to periodically reauthorize the NSA phone data program.
But technology has come a long way since then; modern cell phones are in constant communication with phone towers and tell a lot more information about phone customers than old land line phones. And at least some justices may be ready to take on the issue again.
Ruling last year in an unrelated case, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the 1979 standard may be "ill suited to the digital age" because people reveal a lot more information in seemingly mundane tasks.
"It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties," she wrote.
CNN's Bill Mears and Tom Cohen contributed to this report.
Judge rules NSA collection of phone records is legal
By Evan Perez, CNN
Washington (CNN) -- The National Security Agency notched a much-needed win in court Friday after a series of setbacks over the legality and even the usefulness of its massive data collection program.
A federal judge in New York ruled the NSA's bulk collection of data on nearly every phone call made in the United States was legal.
The ruling contrasts with another ruling last week by a federal judge in Washington, who called the same program "almost Orwellian" and likely unconstitutional.
In his ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge William Pauley said the NSA's bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act was legal. The program was revealed in classified leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
"But the question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of government to decide," said the ruling by Pauley, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case, said it would appeal Pauley's ruling.
"We are extremely disappointed with this decision, which misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government's surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director.
Review: NSA snooping program should stay in place
President Barack Obama is examining a review of the surveillance efforts that recommended changes in how the NSA program was conducted. Obama said last week he would decide what to do about it in January.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the NSA's bulk collection of metadata -- phone records of the time and numbers called without any disclosure of content -- apparently violates privacy rights.
His preliminary ruling favored five plaintiffs challenging the practice, but Leon limited the decision only to their cases.
"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," said Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush. "Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment."
Leon's ruling said the "plaintiffs in this case have also shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits of a Fourth Amendment claim," adding "as such, they too have adequately demonstrated irreparable injury."
He rejected the government's argument that a 1979 Maryland case provided precedent for the constitutionality of collecting phone metadata, noting that public use of telephones had increased dramatically in three decades.
Leon also noted the government "does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature."
However, he put off enforcing his order barring the government from collecting the information, pending an appeal by the government.
A Justice Department spokesman said in response to Leon's ruling that "we believe the program is constitutional as previous judges have found."
Explosive revelations this year by Snowden triggered new debate about national security and privacy interests in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Snowden's disclosures led to more public disclosure about the secretive legal process that sets in motion the government surveillance.
The NSA has admitted it received secret court approval to collect vast amounts of metadata from telecom giant Verizon and leading Internet companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
The case before Leon involved approval for surveillance in April by a judge at a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that handles individual requests for electronic surveillance for "foreign intelligence purposes."
Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of the 1970s, the secret courts were set up to grant certain types of government requests -- wiretapping, data analysis and other monitoring of possible terrorists and spies operating in the United States.
The Patriot Act that Congress passed after the 9/11 attacks broadened the government's ability to conduct anti-terrorism surveillance in the United States and abroad, eventually including the metadata collection.
In order to collect the information, the government has to demonstrate it is "relevant" to an international terrorism investigation.
However, the 1978 FISA law lays out exactly what the special court must decide: "A judge considering a petition to modify or set aside a nondisclosure order may grant such petition only if the judge finds that there is no reason to believe that disclosure may endanger the national security of the United States, interfere with a criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence investigation, interfere with diplomatic relations, or endanger the life or physical safety of any person."
In defending the program, Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA's director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that "15 separate judges of the FISA Court have held on 35 occasions that Section 215 (of the Patriot Act) authorizes the collection of telephony metadata in bulk in support of counterterrorism investigations."
Initially, telecommunications companies such as Verizon were the targets of legal action against Patriot Act provisions. Congress later gave retroactive immunity to those private businesses.
The New York ruling makes it more likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will have to tackle the issue of privacy and settle the dispute over the the NSA program.
For years, the courts have relied on a 1979 Supreme Court precedent that found privacy rights didn't extend to personal information people give to third-parties such as the phone companies, which store basic data on calls made. The secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has relied on that ruling to periodically reauthorize the NSA phone data program.
But technology has come a long way since then; modern cell phones are in constant communication with phone towers and tell a lot more information about phone customers than old land line phones. And at least some justices may be ready to take on the issue again.
Ruling last year in an unrelated case, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the 1979 standard may be "ill suited to the digital age" because people reveal a lot more information in seemingly mundane tasks.
"It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties," she wrote.
CNN's Bill Mears and Tom Cohen contributed to this report.
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the dictatorship that is the barack hussein obama regime said they were not gonna prosecute whistleblowers. yet more whistleblowers have been prosecuted under this regime than the all previous presidential camps combined. the multibillion dollar multi alphabet agency spy industry has not caught even 1 "alleged terrorist" and never will
every electronic device built since 1996 has hidden spy tech built in. the microsoft and apple regimes sell their gadgets to the american public. ads run nonstop on tv promoting this regime or that regimes latest gadget as a "must have". all these add ons like kinect and the new ps4 add on are basically spy cameras. except that they are marketed as "neccessary" and all this bullshit
every electronic device built since 1996 has hidden spy tech built in. the microsoft and apple regimes sell their gadgets to the american public. ads run nonstop on tv promoting this regime or that regimes latest gadget as a "must have". all these add ons like kinect and the new ps4 add on are basically spy cameras. except that they are marketed as "neccessary" and all this bullshit
