alt Hacker NewsNo.
First, FISA was created in 1978 to protect Americans from the CIA by forcing them to show probably casuse. Section 702 of FISA is about intercepting any foreigners communications for which they need no warrent.
But the CIA incidentally collects data of U.S citizens during these warrentless wire taps, and that would be the 4th amendment challenge, but so far that is going nowhere.
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There's also the game that they play where they spoof BGP announcements that cause routing changes for domestic traffic that makes it flow out and then back into the US, making it fair game for collection. Also, our Five Eyes partners aren't prohibited from collecting on US targets, and we all share.
Oh wow, that's crazy because people from the USA are always saying how unique and powerful the Constitution is and how many freedoms the USA has.
It seems almost like the USA is similar to other countries where the state does whatever they like. I bet that can't be true though surely because the USA has so many freedoms? You must be mistaken
Close but a lot of this, as Sen Wyden points out, turns on how NSA and DoJ lawyers define terms. So you get situations where bulk collection of communications of Americans to Americans into a data center isn't considered interception until a human looks at it. There's so much we don't know because the policies/legal interpretation and the FISA court rulings on them are secret. Sen Wyden tries to warn but he can only hint at the real dangers and policies