Public Said to Be Misled on Use of the Patriot Act

[groovedaddy]

WASHINGTON — Two United States senators on Wednesday accused the Justice Department of making misleading statements about the legal justification of secret domestic surveillance activities that the government is apparently carrying out under the Patriot Act.

The lawmakers — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both of whom are Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee — sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. calling for him to “correct the public record” and to ensure that future department statements about the authority the government believes is conveyed by the surveillance law would not be misleading.

“We believe that the best way to avoid a negative public reaction and an erosion of confidence in U.S. intelligence agencies is to initiate an informed public debate about these authorities today,” the two wrote. “However, if the executive branch is unwilling to do that, then it is particularly important for government officials to avoid compounding that problem by making misleading statements.”

The Justice Department denied being misleading about the Patriot Act, saying it has acknowledged that a secret, sensitive intelligence program is based on the law and that its statements about the matter have been accurate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/us/politics/justice-dept-is-accused-of-misleading-public-on-patriot-act.html?ref=us

[chill_wind]

1. Congress would appear to have NO clue or oversight

just in this aspect alone:

Warrantless "emergency" surveillance of Internet communications by DOJ up 400%
According to an official DOJ report, the use of "emergency", warrantless requests to ISPs for customer communications content has skyrocketed over 400% in a single year.

Christopher Soghoian
Thursday, August 04, 2011


The 2009 report (pdf), which I recently obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request (it took DOJ 11 months (pdf) to give me the two-page report), reveals that law enforcement agencies within the Department of Justice sought and obtained communications content for 91 accounts. This number is a significant increase over previous years: 17 accounts in 2008 (pdf), 9 accounts in 2007 (pdf), and 17 accounts in 2006 (pdf).

(snip)

The emergency requests documented in these reports only scratch the surface

A letter (pdf) submitted by Verizon to Congressional committees in 2007 revealed that the company had received 25,000 emergency requests during the previous year. Of these 25,000 emergency requests, just 300 requests were from federal law enforcement agencies. In contrast, the reports submitted to Congress by the Attorney General reveal less than 20 disclosures for that year. Even though no other service provider has disclosed similar numbers regarding emergency disclosures, it is quite clear that the Department of Justice statistics are not adequately reporting the scale of this form of surveillance. In fact, they underreport these disclosures by several orders of magnitude.

The current reporting law is largely useless. It does not apply to state and local law enforcement agencies, who make tens of thousands of warrantless requests to ISPs each year. It does not apply to federal law enforcement agencies outside DOJ, such as the Secret Service. Finally, it does not apply to emergency disclosures of non-content information, such as geo-location data, subscriber information (such as name and address), or IP addresses used.

As such, Congress currently has no idea how many warrantless requests are made to ISPs each year. How can it hope to make sane policy in this area, when it has no useful data?

http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/08/warrantless-emergency-surveillance-of.html

About Christopher Soghoian
http://www.dubfire.net/

[SavWriter]

2. Can anyone name anything within the PATRIOT Act that they like?

I can't. I can't name a single thing I like about that abomination. I detest it with all the venom in my soul. I hate it with all the fury in my heart. In my dreams, I saw a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President ending it. In my nightmare reality, I watched them renew and continue this disaster.

It was one of the blackest days of my life, watching my own party renew and continue the policy where the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments were completely violated.

[chill_wind]

3. +1000

And right up there with it, for me, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the Fisa "Fix" and the IWR.

[OnyxCollie]

4. K&R. nt

[NICO9000]

5. Gee, ya think?

:eyes: