FISA

[Peter Lemkin]

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FISA Judge Who Approved Massive NSA Spying Identified?

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The Washington Post has a new article out,

Secret-court judges upset at portrayal of "collaboration' with government.


And the article does report that the judge was annoyed that the idea of collaborating with the government was an inaccurate portrayal.


But it seems that the bigger story is that this judge is THE judge, who, all alone, decided that it was okay for the NSA and whoever else had access, to spy on ALL Americans. Her name is Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.



Colleen Kollar-Kotelly by Wikipedia


Here's the excerpt from the WaPo article that is most significant:

On July 14, 2004, the surveillance court for the first time approved the gathering of information by the NSA, which created the equivalent of a digital vault to hold Internet metadata. Kollar-Kotelly's order authorized the metadata program under a FISA provision known as the "pen register/trap and trace," or PRTT.

The ruling was a secret not just to the public and most of Congress, but to all of Kollar-Kotelly's surveillance court colleagues. Under orders from the president, none of the court's other 10 members could be told about the Internet metadata program, which was one prong of a larger and highly classified data-gathering effort known as the President's Surveillance Program, or PSP.

But the importance of her order -- which approved the collection based on a 1986 law typically used for phone records -- was hard to overstate. "The order essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk Internet metadata that it had under the PSP," the inspector general's report said, with some minor caveats including reducing the number of people who could access the records.

On May 24, 2006, Kollar-Kotelly signed another order, this one authorizing the bulk collection of phone metadata from U.S. phone companies, under a FISA provision known as Section 215, or the "business records provision," of the USA Patriot Act. "

A 2006 Washingtonpost article also mentions Kollar-Kotelly, so the news is not a first time revelation of her tie to the authorization. The older article also refers to her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth and suggests that they had serious concerns about the legality of the program, instituted when George W. Bush was president;

" Both judges expressed concern to senior officials that the president's program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional, according to sources familiar with their actions. Yet the judges believed they did not have the authority to rule on the president's power to order the eavesdropping, government sources said, and focused instead on protecting the integrity of the FISA process.

It was an odd position for the presiding judges of the FISA court, the secret panel created in 1978 in response to a public outcry over warrantless domestic spying by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The court's appointees, chosen by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, were generally veteran jurists with a pro-government bent, and their classified work is considered a powerful tool for catching spies and terrorists."

Perhaps this judge has been portrayed unfairly, as collaborating with the government. But more important, it seems to put a face-- THE face-- on the American who decided it was okay to spy on every other American.


Regardless of her raising of concerns, she went ahead and, with her unique power, as head of the secretive FISA Court, made an even more secret decision to approve the worse spying in the history of America. In spite of evidence of abuses, that the 2006 WaPo article reported, she went ahead and approved further, more egregious and aggressive spying. It looks like she never said no, when asked.


She should be called before congress and questioned. And she should be more worried about what she DID than what is said about her so far. There is no question that she did approve the horrific level of spying we now know the NSA engages in.


The question is, how did any protector of the citizens-- the duty of every elected and appointed government official, ever allow a single person to make such an important decision-- and who decided to keep it secret? Because they violated their oath and should be punished to the full extent of the law.

[Magda Hassan]

Sunday, July 07, 2013

Star Chamber 2013
by digby

"The Star Chamber has, for centuries, symbolized disregard of basic individual rights ..." US Supreme Court, Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806 (1975)

I suppose that references to The Star Chamber are some sort of cliche these days. It's surely considered to be typically shrill, emo-prog, over the top whining to make such comparisons to what's happening with our secret surveillance state.

But if you can read this story in today's New York Times without your mind turning for at least a few seconds to this idea, then I don't think you're paying attention (emphasis mine.)

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of lawgiving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court's classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court's still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.

"We've seen a growing body of law from the court," a former intelligence official said. "What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets."

In one of the court's most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the "special needs" doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment's requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government's need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.'s collection and examination of Americans' communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. "It seems like a legal stretch," William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. "It's another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data."

While President Obama and his intelligence advisers have spoken of the surveillance programs leaked by Mr. Snowden mainly in terms of combating terrorism, the court has also interpreted the law in ways that extend into other national security concerns. In one recent case, for instance, intelligence officials were able to get access to an e-mail attachment sent within the United States because they said they were worried that the e-mail contained a schematic drawing or a diagram possibly connected to Iran's nuclear program.

In the past, that probably would have required a court warrant because the suspicious e-mail involved American communications. In this case, however, a little-noticed provision in a 2008 law, expanding the definition of "foreign intelligence" to include "weapons of mass destruction," was used to justify access to the message.

The court's use of that language has allowed intelligence officials to get wider access to data and communications that they believe may be linked to nuclear proliferation, the officials said. They added that other secret findings had eased access to data on espionage, cyberattacks and other possible threats connected to foreign intelligence.

"The definition of foreign intelligence' is very broad," another former intelligence official said in an interview. "An espionage target, a nuclear proliferation target, that all falls within FISA, and the court has signed off on that."

(I'm going to guess that "narco-terrorism" conveniently does too.)

The most fatuous comment President Obama has ever made was this:

Rose: "Should this be transparent in some way?"

Obama: "It is transparent, that's why we set up the FISA court. The whole point of my concern before I was president -- because some people say well, Obama was this raving liberal before, now he's Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney sometimes says, 'Yes, you know, he took it all, lock stock and barrel.' My concern has always been not that we shouldn't do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances?"

That the secret FISA Court is transparent was ridiculous on its face. That it has any "checks and balances" is ludicrous. But with these revelations, those comments enter George W. Bush territory for sheer idiocy.

And there's more, lots more. For instance, the article points out that 10 of the 11 judges on the FISA court were appointed by Republican presidents. And, if you'll recall, they are the worst of the worst:

A retired federal judge warned Friday against blind faith in the secret court deciding the scope of U.S. government surveillance. During a panel discussion on constitutional privacy protection in the wake of a leaked Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision that revealed widespread NSA data collection, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner stood up in the audience to counter the statements of conservative law professor Nathan Sales that secret surveillance requests are subject to meaningful judicial review. She cautioned:

As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced.

Two reasons: One … The Fourth Amendment frameworks have been substantially diluted in the ordinary police case. One can only imagine what the dilution is in a national security setting. Two, the people who make it on the FISA court, who are appointed to the FISA court, are not judges like me. Enough said.

Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School who teaches criminal law and criminal procedure, was a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer before being confirmed to the federal bench in 1993. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Gertner explained that the selection process for the secret national security court formed in 1978 is more "anointment" than appointment, with the Chief Justice of the United States now John G. Roberts selecting from a pool of already-conservative federal judges those he thinks are most suited to decide national security cases in secret:

It's an anointment process. It's not a selection process. But you know, it's not boat rockers. So you have a [federal] bench which is way more conservative than before. This is a subset of that. And it's a subset of that who are operating under privacy, confidentiality, and national security. To suggest that there is meaningful review it seems to me is an illusion.

And now we know the scope of their "review" is much larger than we knew and that it includes the rewriting of the law without any accountability or outside review at all:

It has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come

I'm truly shocked by this, despite my knowledge that the military industrial complex and the secret surveillance state has been a constant ever since the US became an Imperial power after WWII. The sheer audacity of it, particularly having the court that was createdspecifically to provide some oversight of government surveillance turn into a lawless, secret parallel Supreme Court made up of a bunch of hard core reactionaries, overseen by an administration elected in large part because its promises of transparency and the rule of law is just too rich.

Of course, it's that "rule of law" thing that everyone sees as a get out of jail free card. After all, the FISA Court is legal, right? Who says they can't turn themselves into a parallel Supreme Court and completely transform the Fourth Amendment in secret? It's not as if the congress specifically told them not to do that. It's all their fault.

One must assume that all those who like Jonathan Alter, defend this entire regime (and the president) because all that matters is that it's "legal", equally defend the three strikes laws, federal mandatory minimums for marijuana possession and sentencing disparities between cracks and powder cocaine. Not to mention the death penalty. All perfectly legal. Also barbaric. But hey, if it's on the books It Must Be Good, right? Because we got rid of all the Bad Laws and now everything's perfect.

I guess if you look at history you shouldn't be surprised that all it took to go back to the 17th Century idea of the Rule 'O Law was a handful of violent religious fanatics. On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that the ruling elite are always ready to exploit any opportunity to enhance their power. I guess our Constitution was pretty weak tea after all. What a shame.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com.br/2013/0...-2013.html

[Magda Hassan]

Court's Classified Rulings Expanded Powers of NSA

FISA has evolved into a parallel of US high court

By Eric Lichtblau

July 08, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "New York Times"-- In one of their most important decisions, the judges expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the "special needs" doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment's requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government's need to combat an overriding public danger.

Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the NSA's collection and examination of Americans' communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects.

"It seems like a legal stretch," William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. "It's another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data."

While President Obama and his intelligence advisers have spoken of the surveillance programs leaked by Snowden mainly in terms of combating terrorism, the court has also interpreted the law in ways that extend into other national security concerns.

In one recent case, for instance, intelligence officials were able to access an e-mail attachment sent within the United States because they said they were worried that the e-mail contained a schematic drawing or a diagram possibly connected to Iran's nuclear program.

In the past, that probably would have required a court warrant because the suspicious e-mail involved American communications.

In this case, however, a little-noticed provision in a 2008 law, expanding the definition of "foreign intelligence" to include biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, was used to justify access to the message.

The court's use of that language has allowed intelligence officials to get wider access to data and communications that they believe may be linked to nuclear proliferation, the officials said. They added that other secret findings have eased access to data on espionage, cyber attacks and other possible threats connected to foreign intelligence.

"The definition of foreign intelligence' is very broad," another former intelligence official said in an interview. "An espionage target, a nuclear proliferation target, that all falls within FISA, and the court has signed off on that."

The official, like a half-dozen other current and former national security officials, discussed the court's rulings and the general trends they have established on the condition of anonymity because they are classified. FISA court judges refused to comment on the scope and volume of their decisions.

Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case the government and its findings are almost never made public.

[Magda Hassan]

NSA memo pushed to 'rethink' 4th Amendment

The National Security Agency pushed for the government to "rethink" the Fourth Amendment when it argued in a classified memo that it needed new authorities and capabilities for the information age.
The 2001 memo, later declassified and posted online by George Washington University's National Security Archive, makes a case to the incoming George W. Bush administration that the NSA needs new authorities and technology to adapt to the Internet era.
Continue Reading
In one key paragraph, NSA wrote that its new phase meant the U.S. must reevaluate its approach toward signals intelligence, or "SIGINT," and the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
"The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today," it wrote. "The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment."
Americans learned about one upshot of NSA's philosophy this week when Washington acknowledged two of its subsequent surveillance programs: One that tracks the phone records of millions of Americans and one that accesses the servers of several major Internet companies, including Facebook, Google and Apple. The revelations were first reported by Britain's Guardian newspaper and the Washington Post.
NSA's memo continued: "Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws. But senior leadership must understand that today's and tomorrow's mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the protected' communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries."
The quotes around "protected" appear in the original document.
NSA's phone-tracking program and its PRISM Internet monitoring program both suggest U.S. officials continue to take to heart NSA's "rethought" interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Rather than tracking only Americans suspected of crimes or involved with terrorism, since 2006 NSA has collected the records of everyone, then returned to a secret federal court to get authorization to target specific individuals more closely.
President Barack Obama defended the surveillance on Friday on his visit to California to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping
"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and 0 percent inconvenience," he said. "We're going to have to make some choices as a country. What you can say is, in evaluating these programs, they make a difference to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity."
Obama said there was robust oversight over NSA's monitoring Congress knows about the surveillance, as do the judges on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If critics don't trust all three branches of the government to check and balance each other, Obama said, "we're going to have some problems here."
Earlier, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also defended NSA's surveillance activities in a rare statement late Thursday.
"Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats."
The NSA has been a central player in U.S. cyber strategy since at least 1997, according to a separate declassified memo obtained by the National Security Archive. That document describes how the administration of President Bill Clinton assigned NSA with "Computer Network Attack" "a natural companion to NSA's exploit and protect functions," the memo said.
But it wasn't until later, after the infusion of billions of dollars and the new legal authorities that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that NSA's capabilities grew to the scale revealed this week. Beforehand, the agency warned in its 2001 memo that it needed to "build a modern information infrastructure that … mirrors the technology and capabilities available on the global digital communications network."
"The need for action was underscored in January 2000 when NSA experienced a catastrophic network outage for 3 ½ days," the memo said. "The outage greatly reduced the signals intelligence information available to national decision makers and military commanders. As one result, the president's daily briefing 60 percent of which is normally based on SIGINT was reduced to a small portion of its typical size."
NSA, it said elsewhere, "must live on the network."



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/ns...z2Zaxt7Pei

[Peter Lemkin]

this is how it read, before it was shredded.....

AMENDMENT IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

[Magda Hassan]

Door May Open for Challenge to Secret Wiretaps

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Senator Dianne Feinstein gave a speech in 2012 that some took to suggest that warrantless wiretaps contributed to several terrorism cases. A Senate lawyer now says she was misunderstood.

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: October 16, 2013

WASHINGTON Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant for the first time that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials.

Enlarge This Image

Haraz N. Ghanbari/Associated Press

Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the United States solicitor general.


Prosecutors plan to inform the defendant about the monitoring in the next two weeks, a law enforcement official said. The move comes after an internal Justice Department debate in which Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. argued that there was no legal basis for a previous practice of not disclosing links to such surveillance, several Obama administration officials familiar with the deliberations said.
Meanwhile, the department's National Security Division is combing active and closed case files to identify other defendants who faced evidence resulting from the 2008 wiretapping law. It permits eavesdropping without warrants on Americans' cross-border phone calls and e-mails so long as the surveillance is "targeted" at foreigners abroad.
It is not yet clear how many other such cases there are, nor whether prosecutors will notify convicts whose cases are already over. Such a decision could set off attempts to reopen those cases.
"It's of real legal importance that components of the Justice Department disagreed about when they had a duty to tell a defendant that the surveillance program was used," said Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor. "It's a big deal because one view covers so many more cases than the other, and this is an issue that should have come up repeatedly over the years."
The officials familiar with the deliberations spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the internal legal policy debate. The policy reversal itself was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The debate was part of the fallout about National Security Agency surveillance set off by leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. They have drawn attention to the 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, which legalized a form of the Bush administration's once-secret warrantless surveillance program.
After Congress enacted the law, plaintiffs led by Amnesty International challenged its constitutionality. In February, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to dismiss the case because those plaintiffs could not prove they had been wiretapped under it.
In urging the Supreme Court to reject the case, Mr. Verrilli had told the justices that other defendants would have legal standing to bring about judicial review of the program because prosecutors would notify people facing evidence derived from surveillance under the 2008 law.
But it turned out that Mr. Verrilli's assurances clashed with the practices of national security prosecutors, who had not been alerting such defendants that evidence in their cases had stemmed from wiretapping their conversations without a warrant.
Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued in the Supreme Court on behalf of the plaintiffs challenging the 2008 law, said that someone in the Justice Department should have flagged the issue earlier and that the department must do more than change its practice going forward.
"The government has an obligation to tell the Supreme Court, in some formal way, that a claim it made repeatedly, and that the court relied on in its decision, was simply not true," he said. "And it has an obligation to notify the criminal defendants whose communications were monitored under the statute that their communications were monitored."
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. The department's practices came under scrutiny after a December 2012 speech by Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee. During debate over extending the 2008 law, she warned that terrorism remained a threat. Listing several terrorism-related arrests, she added, "so this has worked."
Lawyers in two of the cases Ms. Feinstein mentioned one in Fort Lauderdale and one in Chicago asked prosecutors this spring to confirm that surveillance under the 2008 law had played a role in the investigations of their clients so they could challenge it.
But prosecutors said they did not have to make such a disclosure. On June 7, The New York Times published an article citing Ms. Feinstein's speech and the stance the prosecutors had taken.
As a result, Mr. Verrilli sought an explanation from national security lawyers about why they had not flagged the issue when vetting his Supreme Court briefs and helping him practice for the arguments, according to officials.
The national security lawyers explained that it was a misunderstanding, the officials said. Because the rules on wiretapping warrants in foreign intelligence cases are different from the rules in ordinary criminal investigations, they said, the division has long used a narrow understanding of what "derived from" means in terms of when it must disclose specifics to defendants.
In national security cases involving orders issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, prosecutors alert defendants only that some evidence derives from a FISA wiretaps, but not details like whether there had just been one order or a chain of several. Only judges see those details.
After the 2008 law, that generic approach meant that prosecutors did not disclose when some traditional FISA wiretap orders had been obtained using information gathered through the warrantless wiretapping program. Division officials believed it would have to disclose the use of that program only if it introduced a recorded phone call or intercepted e-mail gathered directly from the program and for five years, they avoided doing so.
For Mr. Verrilli, that raised a more fundamental question: was there any persuasive legal basis for failing to clearly notify defendants that they faced evidence linked to the 2008 warrantless surveillance law, thereby preventing them from knowing that they had an opportunity to argue that it derived from an unconstitutional search?
The debate stretched through June and July, officials said, including multiple meetings and, dueling memorandums by lawyers in the solicitor general office and in the national security division, which has been led since March by acting Assistant Attorney General John Carlin. The deliberations were overseen by James Cole, the deputy attorney general.
National security lawyers and a policy advisory committee of senior United States attorneys focused on operational worries: Disclosure risked alerting foreign targets that their communications were being monitored, so intelligence agencies might become reluctant to share information with law enforcement officials that could become a problem in a later trial.
But Mr. Verrilli argued that withholding disclosure from defendants could not be justified legally, officials said. Lawyers with several agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the N.S.A. and the office of the director of national intelligence concurred, officials said, and the division changed the practice going forward.
National Security Division lawyers began looking at other cases, eventually identifying the one that will be publicly identified soon and are still looking through closed cases and deciding what to do about them.
But in a twist, in the Chicago and Fort Lauderdale cases that Ms. Feinstein had mentioned, prosecutors made new court filings saying they did not intend to use any evidence derived from surveillance of the defendants under the 2008 law.
When defense lawyers asked about Ms. Feinstein's remarks, a Senate lawyer responded in a letter that she "did not state, and did not mean to state" that those cases were linked to the warrantless surveillance program. Rather, the lawyer wrote, her point was that terrorism remained a problem.
In a recent court filing, the lawyers wrote that it is "hard to believe" Ms. Feinstein would cite "random" cases when pressing to reauthorize the 2008 law, suggesting either that the government is still concealing something or that she had employed the "politics of fear" to influence the debate. A spokesman for Ms. Feinstein said she preferred to let the letter speak for itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/us/pol...ted=2&_r=0

[Magda Hassan]

US asks top court not to take case on NSA cyber-snooping
AFP - President Barack Obama's administration is urging the Supreme Court not to take up the first case it has received on controversial National Security Agency cybersnooping.
US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
EPIC believes the NSA overstepped its authority by carrying out broad communications monitoring and surveillance worldwide, and demanded the program be stopped.
A US Supreme Court decision to take the case would be "a drastic and extraordinary remedy that is reserved for really extraordinary causes," argued Donald Verrilli, an administration lawyer, in a statement released late Tuesday.
The US administration also believes the EIPC suit cannot move forward because it argues the court lacks authority under the 2001 Patriot Act to weigh in on the legality of NSA activities.
"This court lacks jurisdiction to issue a writ of certiorari to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," the secret intelligence affairs court, Verrilli added.
In mid-August President Barack Obama pledged to overhaul US spy programs amid a debate sparked by the leaks of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, which revealed vast telephone and Internet surveillance programs.
Obama promised a new era in intelligence with more supervision, transparency and safeguards in the NSA's collection of electronic information.
His administration has however maintained a hard line against the leaking of such information, and is seeking to prosecute Snowden on espionage charges.
After the disclosures Snowden fled to Hong Kong and then to Russia, where he has been granted one year's temporary asylum despite Washington's demands that he be returned.
The National Security Agency is gathering email and instant messenger contact lists from hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens worldwide, many of them Americans, The Washington Post reported late Monday.
The US agency's data collection program harvests the data from address books and "buddy lists," the newspaper said, citing senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by the fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
During a single day last year, the NSA's Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, the Post said, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation.
The figures, described as a typical daily intake of the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250?million a year, according to the report, which was published on the newspaper's website.


The NSA declined to confirm the specific allegations in the Post report but defended its surveillance activities as legal and respectful of privacy rights.
http://www.france24.com/en/20131016-us-a...r-snooping