There Was A Secret Ruling Against The NSA For Spying On Americans

Business Insider
Michael Kelley

The "secret room" in AT&T's Folsom Street office in
San Francisco believed to be one of several
Internet wiretapping facilities at AT&T offices around the
country feeding data to the NSA.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing the Justice Department for details of last month's ruling by a secretive U.S. court that National Security Agency's domestic spying program violated the U.S. Constitution, Jon Brodkin of arstechnica reports.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) found that "on at least one occasion" the NSA had violated the Fourth Amendment’s restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The decision is classified “because of the sensitive intelligence matters" it concerns, according to a letter from Seb. Ron Wyden (D-OR) to Congress that was acquired by Wired.

The EFF wants the information because of its current lawsuit against the NSA (i.e. Jewel vs. NSA) that alleges the U.S. government operates an illegal mass domestic surveillance program. Three NSA whistleblowers—including William Binney—agreed to provide evidence that the NSA has been running a domestic spying program since 2001.

The kicker is that there is ample evidence that the NSA has gone above and beyond the powers granted through the 2008 FISA Amendment Act by actively spying on the electronic communications of American citizens within the U.S. and by coercing service providers to feed it any and all information it wants.

That is what FISC found and what the government does not want to admit.

Army Tried to Delete Bales From Web After Arrest

Military
David Goldstein and Matthew Schofield

WASHINGTON -- Besides waiting nearly a week before identifying the Army staff sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers, the U.S. military scrubbed its websites of references to his combat service.

Gone were photographs of the suspect, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, as well as a recounting in his base's newspaper of a 2007 battle in Iraq involving his unit, a report that quoted him extensively.
But they weren't really gone.

Given the myriad ways that information remains accessible on the Internet, despite the best efforts to remove it, the material about Bales was still out there and available, such as in cached versions of Web pages. Within minutes of the Pentagon leaking his name Friday evening, news organizations and others found and published his pictures, the account of the battle - which depicts Bales and other soldiers in a glowing light - and excerpts from his wife's personal blog.

So why did the Pentagon try to scrub Bales from the Internet in the first place?

The military said its intention in removing the material wasn't to lessen the Army's embarrassment over the horrific attack - nine of the victims were children - but to protect the privacy of Bales' family.
"Protecting a military family has to be a priority," said a military official, who like several interviewed for this story spoke only on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

"I think the feeding frenzy we saw after his name was released was evidence that we were right to try. ... Of course the pages are cached; we know that. But we owe it to the wife and kids to do what we can."

A second Pentagon official acknowledged that one of the reasons for the delay in releasing Bales' name was to remove references to his Army service from the Internet. But when Army Maj. Nidal Hasan was arrested in the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, the Pentagon released his name immediately.