{"id":9616,"date":"2015-07-01T07:50:05","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T12:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9616"},"modified":"2015-07-01T07:50:05","modified_gmt":"2015-07-01T12:50:05","slug":"bulk-phone-surveillance-lives-again-to-die-in-a-more-orderly-fashion-in-five-months","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9616","title":{"rendered":"Bulk Phone Surveillance Lives Again, To Die in a More Orderly Fashion in Five Months"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"hero\">\n<h3 class=\"title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/06\/30\/bulk-phone-surveillance-lives-die-orderly-fashion-five-months\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bulk Phone Surveillance Lives Again, To Die in a More Orderly Fashion in Five Months<\/a><\/h3>\n<h1 class=\"title\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn03.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2015\/06\/GettyImages-464519658-article-display-b.jpg\" alt=\"Featured photo - Bulk Phone Surveillance Lives Again, to Die in a More Orderly Fashion in Five Months\" \/><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ti-body\">\n<p>A federal judge with the top-secret surveillance court on Monday\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/justsecurity.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/FISC-15-75-Opinion-06292015.pdf\">breezily reinstated<\/a>\u00a0the NSA bulk domestic surveillance program that was temporarily halted a month ago, allowing the agency to go back to hoovering up telephone metadata for five months while it unwinds the program for good.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cPlus \u00e7a change, plus c\u2019est la m\u00eame chose,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Michael W. Mosman wrote in his ruling, using the French phrase that means \u201cthe more things change, the more they stay the same\u201d to summarize the legislative and judicial back-and-forth that led to the temporary reinstatement.<\/p>\n<p>By failing to agree on how to reauthorize certain sections of the Patriot Act, the Senate on May 31 engaged in a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/06\/01\/first-time-since-911-congress-checks-security-state\/\">rare act of rebellion<\/a>\u00a0against the surveillance state, forcing the National Security Agency to shutter the program that had collected telephone metadata \u2014 information about who called who, and for how long \u2014 for more than a decade, until NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed its existence in 2013.<\/p>\n<p>Two days later, however, the Senate passed a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/06\/02\/one-small-step-toward-post-snowden-surveillance-reform-one-giant-step-congress\/\">milquetoast\u00a0surveillance reform bill<\/a>\u00a0that ordered the bulk collection program phased out by November 29, to be replaced by one in which the NSA has to request specific records, and explain why.<\/p>\n<p>That led to Monday\u2019s paradoxical decision to revive bulk collection so it can die again, theoretically in a more orderly fashion.<\/p>\n<p>In his decision, Mosman also flippantly dismissed a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/05\/07\/appellate-court-rules-nsas-bulk-collection-phone-records-illegal\/\">major appellate court ruling<\/a>\u00a0in May that the program was illegal. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was the government\u2019s legal cover for bulk collection, didn\u2019t authorize any such thing. The decision hinged on the common-sense conclusion that when the Patriot Act gave\u00a0the government power to obtain phone records \u201crelevant to an authorized investigation,\u201d\u00a0that wasn\u2019t power to collect all phone records everywhere.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bulk Phone Surveillance Lives Again, To Die in a More Orderly Fashion in Five Months A federal judge with the top-secret surveillance court on Monday\u00a0breezily reinstated\u00a0the NSA bulk domestic surveillance program that was temporarily halted a month ago, allowing the agency to go back to hoovering up telephone metadata for five months while it unwinds [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6891,1543,249,551,577,613,765,5567],"class_list":["post-9616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-bulk-phone-surveillance","tag-digital-surveillance","tag-edward-snowden","tag-national-security-agency","tag-nsa","tag-patriot-act","tag-surveillance","tag-the-intercept"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9617,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9616\/revisions\/9617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}