So Much Warrantless Surveillance, Feds Can’t Keep Track

The National Security Agency (NSA) conducts warrantless surveillance of millions of people around the world and very little of it has anything to do with stopping terrorism.

Not that this is any sort of revelation to those who pay attention to the contraction of constitutional liberty, but recent reports from mainstream news outlets are highlighting not only the vacuuming up of metadata in violation of the Fourth Amendment, but the use of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to justify untold spying operations carried out under cover of this federal statute.

Some light is being shed on these activities lately with the release this week of the report published by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). The Guardian reports that the information revealed in this report “gives Americans a fairly detailed look unclassified at how the NSA spies through its notorious Prism program — and how it snoops ‘upstream’ (a euphemism for the agency’s direct access to entire internet streams at telecoms like AT&T). The board issued a scathing report on the Patriot Act surveillance months ago, but oddly they went the opposite route this time around.”

FK – Such a system will inevitably collapse in upon itself.