MassPrivateISobriety checkpoints and mandatory drug testing of student athletes and railroad workers are among the legal precedents justifying the U.S. government’s now-defunct and court-approved secret email metadata dragnet surveillance program, according to documents the authorities released late Monday.
38 states and the District of Columbia permit sobriety checkpoints.
The thousands of pages of records the President Barack Obama administration unveiled include the nation’s first opinion from a secret tribunal authorizing the government to obtain data from the “to,” “from,” “cc,” and “bcc” fields of all emails “to thwart terrorist attacks.”
“This concern clearly involves national security interests beyond the normal need for law enforcement and is at least as compelling as other governmental interests that have been held to justify searches in the absence of individualized suspicion,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, then the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, wrote in anopinion.
(The 87-page opinion is heavily redacted, including its date. But parsed with other documents in the data dump, experts believe the opinion is dated July 2004. Because the opinion is repeatedly blacked out, it is unclear whether the order authorizes broader internet data collection.)
The Bush administration first implemented the program shortly after the 2001 terror attacks. But it wasn’t until 2004 that the administration sought authorization from the secret court after being faced with threats of resignation from senior officials. Those officials include James Comey, then the deputy attorney general who is now the FBI chief.
Rights lawyers blasted the decision, saying there was no legal basis for the secret court, formed in 1978 to assist the government in obtaining foreign intelligence, to approve the program.
“These documents show that the government asked the FISC for permission to collect information far beyond what was authorized by the statute and the court acquiesced,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director at the Brennan Center.
The government stopped the internet-collection program in 2011 “for operational and resource reasons,” the authorities said. Along the way, another secret court opinion chastised the program for its “systemic overcollection” of data and provided “no comprehensive explanation of how so substantial an overcollection occurred.” (Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the government has been siphoning data from Yahoo and Google as it transits from one of their data centers to the other.)
The government released the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and others.
“We think this is the foundational opinion for the bulk collection of Americans’ metadata,” said Patrick Toomey, an ACLU attorney.
To be sure, Supreme Court rulings related to drunken driving, student athletes and railway officials weren’t the only legal precedent Kollar-Kotelly cited.
She noted a 1979 decision, involving a purse snatching, that concluded that Americans had no expectation of privacy in information stored with third parties in a case concerning a mugger’s telephone calling records.
“The same analysis applies to the meta data involved in this application. Users of e-mail (REDACTED) voluntarily expose addressing information for communications they send and receive to communications service providers. Having done so, they lack any legitimate expectation of privacy in such information for Fourth Amendment purposes,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote, adding in a footnote that “this is the first application presented to this Court” seeking such metadata.
What’s more, she said, “Whether a large number for persons are otherwise affected by the government’s conduct is irrelevant.”
She sided with the NSA’s plea for bulk collection. “NSA asserts that more precisely targeted forms of collection against known accounts would tend to screen out the ‘unknowns’ that NSA wants to discover, so that NSA needs bulk collection in order to identify unknown (REDACTED) communications.”
The opinion did not name the “communications services providers” ordered to participate in the program to capture the data with so-called “pen registers and trap and trace devices.” But she did say that “The raw volume of the proposed collection is enormous.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/11/nsa-web-metadata/
Drivers stopped at roadblocks asked for breath, saliva & DNA:
Texas – drivers along a busy Fort Worth street on Friday were stopped at a police roadblock and directed into a parking lot, where they were asked by federal contractors for samples of their breath, saliva and even blood.
It was part of a government research study aimed at determining the number of drunken or drug-impaired drivers.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) admitted it was attempting to conduct a government study meant to determine the number of drunk or drug-impaired drivers on the road at any given time.
The NHTSA, which is spending $7.9 million on the survey over three years, said participation was “100 percent voluntary” and anonymous. For more click here.
An NHTSA spokesperson admitted similar programs were being conducted in 30 other cities throughout the US.
The tests were made even more mysterious when reporters, alerted to the situation by concerned drivers, were unable to find any officers in the Fort Worth Police Department who had been involved. The NHTSA only admitted its involvement after local media sought answers.
NBC affiliate was able to determine that the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, a government contractor, was hired to conduct the check. For more click here.
“It just doesn’t seem right that you can be forced off the road when you’re not doing anything wrong,” said Kim Cope, who said she was on her lunch break when she was forced to pull over at the roadblock on Beach Street in North Fort Worth.
But Cope said it didn’t feel voluntary to her — despite signs saying it was.
“I gestured to the guy in front that I just wanted to go straight, but he wouldn’t let me and forced me into a parking spot,” she said.
Once parked, she couldn’t believe what she was asked next.
“They were asking for cheek swabs,” she said. “They would give $10 for that. Also, if you let them take your blood, they would pay you $50 for that.”
At the very least, she said, they wanted to test her breath for alcohol.
She said she felt trapped.
“I finally did the Breathalyzer test just because I thought that would be the easiest way to leave,” she said, adding she received no money.
NHTSA: Low staffing sobriety checkpoints
http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/enforce/LowStaffing_Checkpoints/
NHTSA: Saturation patrols & sobriety checkpoints
http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/alcohol/saturation_patrols/
http://rt.com/usa/texas-drivers-saliva-blood-breath-990/
Off duty Alabama police collect DNA samples of motorists at sobriety roadblocks:
http://www.sott.net/article/262739-Off-duty-Alabama-cops-collect-DNA-samples-at-sobriety-checkpoint-roadblocks
Denver sheriff’s help private companies take breath, blood & DNA samples:
http://infowars.net/articles/september2007/200907checkpoints.htm
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/11/sobriety-checkpoints-paved-way-for-nsa_21.html