Saturday, 9 May 2015, NEW YORK, NY - In an extraordinary vindication for National Security Agency (N.S.A.) whistle-blower Edward J. Snowden massive secret dragnet U.S. government mass surveillance and metadata storage privacy invasions perpetrated by the N.S.A. revealed to the public in 2013 by documents that Mr. Snowden provided to the press have been found to be illegal since their 2001 inception by a momentous decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. The Court ruled Thursday that the N.S.A. dragnet bulk collection of telephone records is illegal and cannot be justified under any reading no matter how tortured, contorted and convoluted of the widely despised Section 215 of the so-called "Patriot Act". The Court issued this decision without regard for repeated rulings since 2006 by the totally bogus unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) secret federal court hack monkey judges repeatedly rubber-stamping the illegal N.S.A. activities on the alleged authority of the Patriot Act the government hoping to give the illegal and unconstitutional N.S.A. abuses of the People some stink of legitimacy so as to keep all involved out of prison. In response to thousands of lawsuits brought following the Snowden revelations lower authentic real federal district courts have been split issuing contradictory decisions on the authority granted or not granted the N.S.A. by the Patriot Act Section 215.
The dragnet bulk collection of Americans' telephone records first was undertaken illegally by the not-really-elected Bush-Cheney Administration in October 2001 as part of a larger group of Orwellian programs of indiscriminate dragnet mass surveillance and data collection the month after the horrific 11 September 2001 U.S. attacks without regard for the acknowledged lack of any statutory nor any other legal authority making it clearly illegal to perpetrate such an "unprecedented" power grab against the People's privacy in this country's past two hundred and fifty years. The Bush-Cheney administration unconstitutionally illegally expanded enormously the State's secret invasion of all Americans' privacy rights allegedly in order to hunt for hidden terrorist cells none of which have ever been found in the U.S. by the N.S.A. but also at the same time throwing into the Patriot Act a foul bubbling Macbethian cauldron of other draconian executive branch "wish list" police state powers having nothing at all to with terrorism which already repeatedly had been rejected by Congress in more more measured thoughtful times for example when not unbearably pressured by howling "national security" White House generated hysteria to pass a several hundred page stack of Bush-Cheney administration garbage legislation ink still wet on the page without reading it delivered at dawn all amid a backdrop of fears Congress at any moment might come under an anthrax attack therefore desperate to escape the Capitol building as soon as possible.
Such a failed strategy consuming enormous amounts of money on the virtually useless outrageously expensive acquisition and operation of enormous amounts of technological equipment should long ago have been replaced largely by security efforts implemented with all immediate haste with a redirection of funding to appropriate domestic law enforcement authorities adapting to evolving terrorist threats for example just one suggested by a former Navy SEAL who had participated in a valuable discontinued operation in which U.S. special forces were tasked with setting up a "mock" terrorist cell with specifics unknown to the government and proceeded in their adapted "terrorist" mindset to identify "soft" and "hard" targets that actual terrorist cells or remotely "self-radicalized" individuals would be most likely to hit so that appropriate precautions presumably including surveillance could be put in place by the government.
Should this sound naive to some perhaps readers may feel differently when informed that just one example of potential targets the special forces "mock" terrorist cell identified was not taking down "hard" target airliners but instead the "soft" targets at airports they identified as the long lines of persons corralled waiting to get into airport security checkpoints and perhaps worse yet also what the SEAL mock "cell" identified as often completely unprotected baggage claim areas where crowds of as many or more people than even are on one plane but actually from several planes often are gathered crowded together distracted and unwary in very close quarters which warnings the government still apparently largely has not heeded.
These areas of potential high risk actually repeatedly were communicated to the world on CNN and are here repeated to an infinitesimally smaller audience the editorial board of the
Ninth Amendment must emphasize emphatically only with the intention of promoting the safety and security of the American people encouraging the thoughtful and reasoned deployment rather than indiscriminate wasting of finite "national security" resources as best able to protect all and to call attention to the fact that while so many of this country's resources for "national security" are diverted increasingly to exotic and obscure seemingly unrealistic endeavors of agencies increasingly far removed from the reality of the streets that such potential targets as identified by the Navy SEAL on CNN (hopefully better protected by now in the wake of the CNN worldwide report months ago and if not readers are urged to demand whatever law enforcement authorities are available locally do so) and other commonsense precautions which often seem overlooked and/or underfunded while outfits such as the N.S.A. are consuming enormous amounts of U.S. taxpayers' money accomplishing virtually nothing at all to prevent domestic terrorism while simultaneously effectively in the process tearing to shreds the U.S. Constitution they are sworn to uphold and presumably dedicated to protect which is the sole basis of any legitimate power they may have and is the foundation protecting and preserving the continued existence of the United States.
In any case back to the claimed objective of the not-really-elected Bush-Cheney administration to capture or kill terrorists and so commence U.S. aggressive participation in an enormously expensive armed conflict in both Afghanistan (to become the longest conflict in U.S. history) and the U.S. totally unprovoked "false flag" conflict started with an unprecedented "first strike" on Iraq (which Bush temporarily more confused than usual mistakenly thought that the U.S. had "won" having read "Mission Accomplished" on a banner strategically placed where he could read it from the deck of an aircraft carrier) and U.S. (with the dragging participation of coalition forces such as the British who did their best to stay back out of harm's way) invasion then gradually degrading into an apocalyptic nightmare in Iraq inuring to the enormous monetary profit of torture enthusiast "Pigheart" Dick "Criminal Notorious" Cheney while destroying their lives as they knew them for most of the rest other the others involved in the Iraqi conflict excluding Cheney's and other psychopathic opportunists who live to exploit the spoils of such turmoil and misery.
Most significantly in addition to accomplishing no stated U.S. goals whatsoever after instigating and engaging in these enormously totally needless conflicts which caused the deaths and wounding of tens of thousands of American and "coalition" soldiers as well as untold numbers of others including thousands of Iraqi civilians hit in the initial U.S. war armament industry "guaranteed precision bombings" of Baghdad and later events including the recently reported here in the
Ninth Amendment massacre by Cheney Blackwater "Blackdeath" murderous psychopaths of unarmed civilians while caught in a traffic circle the Bush-Cheney Administration of course never was able to locate Osama bin Laden the accused "mastermind" of the horrific 11 September 2001 attacks. Bin Laden later was found allegedly by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (another CIA victory racked up along with "Argo") and killed in Pakistan under the current administration of President Barack Obama.
Today Afghanistan appears destined to be retaken by the Taliban whose origins in part are an unintended consequence of the CIA initiating the spending of billions of U.S. dollars on Operation Cyclone in the arming of the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets while also likely tangentially funding Osama bin Laden and the nascent al-Qaida later responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks on the U.S. Meanwhile today Iraq is occupied widely and under threat by the demented and depraved ISIS another U.S. unintended direct consequence in its the case of its "good fortune" resulting from the stupendously idiotic actions of the Bush-Cheney administration which with the most powerful armed forces in the world at its disposal managed to "save" both the U.S. and Iraq from non-existent fabricated threats by virtually destroying Iraq with wanton and willful lack of concern for human welfare breaking apart a tenuously held together country of diverse peoples and often conflicting interests.
The Bush-Cheney administration travesty further succeeded in alienating a large part of Iraq's population after experiencing such things as the deadly mayhem of the Baghdad hell zone left for everybody else outside the U.S. tightly protected "Green Zone" enclave so dispersing into groups of armed insurgents making Baghdad a virtual civilian populated war zone. Such a surrounding uncontrolled environment overseen by no authority left by the totally unprepared U.S. forces led for one thing to the monumentally tragic al-Qaeda claimed bombing bringing down the Canal Hotel assassinating while killing many others as well the United Nations General Secretary's Special Representative in Iraq Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello thought to be a likely candidate for UN-Secretary General who had chosen to maintain U.N. operations outside the "Green Zone" which he rejected in order to preserve some semblance of legitimacy to the original espoused reasons for the outside world's descent upon the beleaguered Iraqi people ostensibly to work with and help them rather than live in bunkered fear of them. In the catastrophic bombing de Mello who was buried alive after several hours of frantic efforts to save him died under the rubble of the former building.
Meanwhile in other catastrophic Bush-Cheney Administration U.S. blunders Iraq's newly "disbanded" and suddenly "unpaid" against the pleading of senior Iraqi military commanders (by proclamation of a new U.S. administrator of Iraq apparently fresh from her U.S. State Department cubical who had absolutely no idea of how she single-handedly was putting into motion monumentally destructive seriously deadly forces still greatly at play in world affairs today in her first disastrous day on the job alone) immediately fired the entire career professional Iraqi army with long combat experience from a particularly vicious ten-year war against Iran.
The quickly alienated Iraqi officers and other soldiers knowing exactly where they were stockpiled departed with most of Iraq's armaments as U.S. troops watched with orders to do nothing. A few years later they returned with their new "friends" to collect the brand new armaments the U.S. had bought and left behind when it departed for the use of the newly-trained Iraqi army which abandoned the U.S.-supplied armaments and allowing the former Iraqi professional army to continue to provide for itself and its families having formed presumably the military core of the newly emerging demented and depraved ISIS terrorists who now allegedly represent a threat to a growing number of countries inconsistently rumored to include this country based on varying sources. It now has been determined that the Bush-Cheney ISIS legacy they left now represents a "national security" threat which Iraq never did.
In any case for those readers remaining through the above digression the subsequent history of the Bush-Cheney secret illegal domestic spying initiative started in October 2001 essentially is that the N.S.A. mass surveillance and related activities came to be called part of the program called "Stellarwind" (such operations being named by failed aspirants unable to find more lucrative employment in the pharmaceutical industry making up new names for new medications) and for each component of the that program a legal basis as put charitably by the
New York Times "evolved" (not how the law works) including after a mere five years of apparently unsuccessful efforts (an incredible feat given the readily available compliant FISA court rubber stamper judges) in 2006 the bulk phone records collection component of the Stellarwind program finally was rubber stamped by some FISA hack monkey judge willing to "legally legitimize" it "based on the idea that Section 215 could be interpreted as authorizing bulk collection." A rigorous legal analysis indeed: "could be" but apparently was not interpreted. It subsequently has been rubber stamped approximately every 90 days likewise by FISA monkey judges.
Alas the federal appeals court in Thursday's unanimous decision did not agree with the FISA monkey court's "legal analysis" that the Section 201 authorization of the collection of records found to be "relevant" to a national security case meant collecting
all records possible of every person in the United States and later figuring out if something in there were "relevant" to national security without "analyzing" others although apparently reading them. In its unanimous decision Judge Gerard E. Lynch wrote for the Court that Section 215 "cannot bear the weight that the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program." The Court's ruling that the program is illegal noted that Congress was capable of writing a bill that clearly provided a legal basis for such an "unprecendented" program although the Court did not go on to reach the issue of whether or not it then would find any such bill unconstitutional as also had been argued before the Court against the program by the American Civil Liberties Union. Specifically,
, Judge Lynch wrote:
“Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans. Perhaps such a contraction is required by national security needs in the face of the dangers of contemporary domestic and international terrorism. But we would expect such a momentous decision to be preceded by substantial debate, and expressed in unmistakable language.”
The federal appeals court decision without other federal government action yet known to have been taken in response appears to express the Court's determination that since 2001 all N.S.A. dragnet indiscriminate collection of Americans' bulk telephone records has been illegal and establishes for the time being that there is no legal basis for the continued collection of such records. The court however did not issue an injunction prohibiting that practice but instead remanded the case to the district court below it to figure out what to do. The legal status of the decision further is complicated by the issue of concurrent FISA Court determinations that Patriot Act Section 215 does authorize bulk collection of telephone records and that the FISA court has its own FISA appeals court where one might predict the outcome with some confidence. In the meantime the federal government could appeal the regular real federal court decision here to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The editorial board of the Ninth Amendment joins many in applauding this long overdue federal court of appeals decision unanimously declaring the illegality of the government's dragnet indiscriminate bulk collection of telephone records under Section 215 of the so-called "Patriot Act" which perhaps serendipitously coincides with a great many immediate circumstances coalescing in just the type of debate for which the above decision calls.
Current reports are that the debate this past week ranged from the House of Representatives bipartisan backing of the proposed fake-reform USA Freedom Act supported by the White House and apparently the N.S.A. and by F.B.I. Chief James B. Comey which would limit government requests for phone records stored by phone carriers to those based on "reasonable suspicion" to at least a handful of others opposed who appear likely to lose at the far right of the spectrum led by the "defiant" Senate majority leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Richard M. Burr (R-NC) both of who want the Patriot Act Section 215 to remain as is extended to the year 2020 both "dismissing" the Court's decision with Burr essentially calling the Court's determination "a joke".
The Ninth Amendment due to near constant incidents often reported in posts here of private entities' either violation of privacy laws and/or in other ways often failing adequately to protect consumers' personal data which are are as bad or even worse than the government in its N.S.A. overloaded servers or wherever that it is neither safe nor advisable to entrust the nation's private phone carriers to store private personal consumer telephone records for the government on demand as provided in the proposed USA Freedom Act. The editorial board of the Ninth Amendment joins the American Civil Liberties Union position that the State's domestic dragnet indiscriminate mass surveillance and metadata collection that had been illegally based on the Patriot Act Section 214 under any circumstances is unconstitutional and moreover that rather then being legally required to store Americans' personal private telephone records carriers in fact should follow just the opposite practice and be prohibited from doing so under penalty of prosecution for privacy and other violations.
Readers interested in more information about the above particularly details about and links including to the 97-page decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit can go to the first link below. Readers interested in the above also can go to the second link below which provides more recent information about the fallout from the Court's decision affecting government decision-makers especially now facing tight deadlines with Section 215 of the Patriot Act if unchanged expiring on June 1 but Congress having a scheduled recess next Friday 22 May 2015 for the Memorial Day holiday. Finally interested readers can go to the third link below for Reuters report on the above.
[RE-UPDATE] Readers interested in more information on the above can go to the added
Washington Post forth link below reporting that the White House is urging passage of the proposed fake-reform USA Freedom Act reportedly enjoying bi-partisan support and expected to pass the House of Representatives as early as Wednesday with the director of national intelligence and the attorney general expected soon to issue letters of support stating that they do no believe the USA Freedom Act will undermine national security while claiming the reforms it proposes will "enhance" Americans' privacy. The latter is an absolutely misleading lie by the Obama administration and its agencies.
This fallacious White House position supporting the USA Freedom Act (which itself is absolutely objectionable to the
Ninth Amendment editorial board just as it is to the entire
New York Times editorial board as previously posted here) is knowingly based on a false proposition which does not bear its weight in that at the moment given as reported above the only real actual federal court to opine has been the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which has issued a decision finding the language of Patriot Act Section 215 presumably since 2001 neither has bolstered national security such that it now can be "undermined" by any new legislation purporting to weaken it nor could the ineffective Patriot Act Section 215 likewise in any way legitimately reduce Americans' privacy such that it needs to be "enhanced".
Similarly the Obama administration's reported "conclusion" that the fake-reform USA Freedom Act offers the State the best way to "maintain its power" to obtain terrorist records with "some measure of speed" is equally specious given that the Court's decision finds that the the Patriot Act Section 215 language no matter how fairly (or unfairly) read confers no such power upon the State. In fact even given the proposition that having wrongfully assumed such a power under Patriot Act Section 215 the government actually has meaningfully obtained any terrorist records of significance particularly with the use of anything beyond previously existing powers seems more and more highly questionable upon more closely subjecting such claims to greater scrutiny.
In fact most recently the much self-congratulatory degree of "transparency" of the Obama administration both in its actions and in the words of President Obama himself and his spokespersons has shown itself to and seems likely to stray even further as more facts become known from that characterization which President Obama would wish history to confer upon his administration not to mention his own legacy seemingly now better described as a growing concerted intentional opaqueness ranging through a disturbingly increasing scope of matters of great consequence and lasting concern to the American people.
[UPDATE III] Readers interested in more recent updated information on the above can go to the added bottom three links with the Obama administration most recently "begging" that surveillance authority is "vital" as F.B.I. Director James Comey calls continued unconstitutional illegal current law enforcement roving wiretap non-existent legal authority "critical" to law enforcement and brand spanking new but not necessarily improved U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch immediately toes the Obama administration cynically bogus Obama (BOGUSPOTUS) line using a late CNN on-air scare as the usual fright manipulation forum for her threat that "loss" of unconstitutional non-existent mass surveillance authority poses an "increased risk to safety" of Americans without Lynch making any reference whatsoever to the countervailing invasion and violation of Americans' constitutional privacy and other civil rights (the last being the one long-forgotten except for "special occasions" D.O.J. department).
[UPDATE IV] Readers interested in more recent information on the above can go to the added two links below.
[UPDATE V] Because of the failure of the U.S. Senate either to extend nor to replace the Patriot Act before adjourning on Saturday, 23 May 2015 the so-called "Patriot Act" currently remains scheduled to expire automatically under its "sunset" provision on Monday, 1 June 2015. The U.S. Senate now is scheduled to re-convene on Sunday, 31 May 2015 in an attempt presumably either to extend or replace the Patriot Act before the Patriot Act's scheduled self-termination at midnight of that day. Readers interested in the latest information on the above can go to the added
bottom link below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/us/nsa-phone-records-collection-ruled-illegal-by-appeals-court.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/us/politics/court-ruling-on-nsa-data-collection-jolts-both-defenders-and-reformers.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/08/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSKBN0NT29720150508?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-backs-bill-that-would-curtail-nsa-collection-of-phone-records/2015/05/11/aa96ee50-f7ec-11e4-9ef4-1bb7ce3b3fb7_story.html?hpid=z10
UPDATE III links below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/us/politics/nsa-phone-data-collection-extension-splits-senate.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/opinion/rand-pauls-timely-takedown-of-the-patriot-act.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-is-playing-chicken-with-nsa-spy-program-white-house-says/2015/05/22/796e3574-00af-11e5-833c-a2de05b6b2a4_story.html?tid=hpModule_ba0d4c2a-86a2-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z10
UPDATE IV link below:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/23/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSKBN0O729C20150523?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
UPDATE V link below:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/05/25/senate-nsa-vote-underscores-rift-in-2016-field/
UPDATE VI link below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html
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