Inside 'Prism' Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure

I just want to point to a part of this exchange that everyone is ignoring (but that I pointed out while live tweeting this).

Mueller: I’m not certain it’s the same–I’m not certain it’s an answer to the same question.

Mueller didn’t deny the NSA can get access to US person phone content without a warrant. He just suggested that Nadler might be conflating two different programs or questions.

And that’s one of the things to remember about this discussion. Among many other methods of shielding parts of the programs, the government is thus far discussing primarily the two programs identified by the Guardian: the phone metadata collection (which the WaPo reports is called MAINWAY) and the Internet content access (PRISM).

Thus, we are effectively just talking about two programs, and not two that intersect via targeted technology, as MAINWAY would with NUCLEON and MARINA with PRISM. So, while there are a slew of other possibilities for what Mueller might mean by “another question,” one big one is “how may an analyst access NUCLEON information if she had MAINWAY data”?

And, as Sanchez notes in his piece, the way 702 is supposed to work (and indeed, would have to work for the claims made about PRISM’s role in thwarting the Najibullah Zazi attack to be remotely true) is that US person information comes up along with targeted foreign targets. Indeed, as I noted last year during the FISA Amendments Act debate, in an effort to defeat this amendment prohibiting effectively what Sanchez has laid out, Sheldon Whitehouse said that getting US content without a warrant was the entire point.

He referred back to his time using warrants as a US Attorney, and said that requiring a warrant to access the US person communication would “kill this program,” and that to think warrants “fundamentally misapprehends the way in which this program operates.”

The possibility that the government would do this kind of thing has been raised repeatedly since Russ Feingold did so in 2009 during the FISA Amendments Act debates, speaking specifically about the content of calls to people overseas.

KEEP READING 
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost