FISA Judge To Yahoo: If US Citizens Don’t Know They’re Being Surveilled, There’s No Harm

Thursday, November 20, 2014
By Paul Martin

NewsForage.com
Nov. 20, 2014

A legal battle between Yahoo and the government over the Protect America Act took place in 2008, but details (forced from the government’s Top Secret file folders by FISA Judge Reggie Walton) are only emerging now. A total of 1,500 pages will eventually make their way into the public domain once redactions have been applied. The most recent release is a transcript [pdf link] of oral arguments presented by Yahoo’s counsel (Mark Zwillinger) and the US Solicitor General (Gregory Garre).

Zwillinger opens up the arguments by questioning the government’s methods of determining who should be placed under surveillance.

Why I show this to you is because I think it’s a perfectly fair question for you to ask the Solicitor General of the United States how a name gets on this list. This isn’t reviewed by a — the FISA Court. These names aren’t reviewed by the Attorney General of the United States. The difference between surveilling an account and exposing someone’s most private communications and not is how a name gets on this list; and all we know about it from page 47 of their brief, is that an intelligence analyst puts it on the list.

From this arbitrary beginning springs a wealth of errors.

[REDACTED] of the accounts we have been given do not exist. They aren’t accounts at Yahoo. Whether the government is misinformed, or using stale information, we don’t know; But the fact that [REDACTED] accounts do not exist raises a serious possibility that some of those accounts have already been recycled and are used by other Yahoo users, or that the information that the government has is just wrong, and the wrong is being placed under surveillance.

The Rest…HERE

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