Center for Democracy & Technology: Yahoo Court Documents Reveal Pitched Battle Over Surveillance Power

Center for Democracy & Technology: Yahoo Court Documents Reveal Pitched Battle Over Surveillance Power by Harley Geiger:

Documents released yesterday as a result of litigation brought by Yahoo show how the court charged with assessing government intelligence surveillance requests secretly applied a broad exception to the Fourth Amendment to authorize sweeping surveillance of digital records without a warrant. The FISA Court (FISC) opined that this exception to the Fourth Amendment permits programmatic surveillance of many individuals – including Americans – with no connection to a crime or terrorism. The documents also showed the FISC threatened to fine Yahoo a quarter-million dollars per day unless Yahoo acquiesced to the surveillance.

The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether there is a foreign intelligence exception to Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, though other courts had found a limited exception. The newly declassified FISC opinion provides insight into the FISC’s strikingly broad view of the government’s surveillance power, and a very limited role for the Fourth Amendment in protecting against it. The FISC’s secret evisceration of Fourth Amendment protections should bolster efforts to pass the USA FREEDOM Act, which would make the FISC’s decisions more available to the public and more informed by the perspective of a “special advocate” of privacy rights at FISC proceedings.

Corporate Counsel: Yahoo Shines Some Light on NSA Surveillance Efforts:

Facing a $250,000 per-day fine that could have skyrocketed in a matter of weeks, Yahoo! Inc. in 2008 gave in to U.S. government demands at the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for access to multiple user accounts that the tech giant sought to protect under the Fourth Amendment.