The US government is hiding secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans

"Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”"

Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.

Secret courts are anathema to democracy and need to be abolished.

I will always be baffled by the dichotomy of "the US has the most freedom" and "no democratic country spies more on its citizens".

How it is done, everybody knows how.. backdoors in servers, back door in communication equipment, decryption method for of all that goes through fiber in entire world.. Massive data storage to store everything. How is not an issue; every node and communication, hardware and software has a backdoor.

Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.

Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.

The debate about reapproval of section 702 is all theater. Does anyone genuinely believe the government would stop surveilling us if the authorization expired?

This kind of thing will never stop. And those who control it have all the leverage and power.

Perhaps all the spying data should just be publicly accessible and easily accessible for all to use and abuse.

Would democratizing it all so there is never an expectation of privacy from the public vs a select few in power be better in the long run?

I'm increasingly of the opinion that state secret classification of our law enforcement systems should only exist for a year max. We've abused the system to shield evil people from accountability and to hide evil actions by our government, and that has to change.

He should go further and describe or read these secret rulings on the Senate floor, where the speech and debate clause protects him.

They don't want the public to see the big green "APPROVED" rubber stamp that the FISC uses.

This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas, Julian Assanges, <insert national activist of your choice>, etc. gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class. This is why the owners of every country come together to support these technologies, without exception and regardless of political coalition membership.

A ruling belongs to the judicial branch.

The article could have been interesting but by fundamentally misrepresenting the structure of the American federal government they made it impossible to take seriously.

This headline has been relevant since 2001.

So grateful to have Wyden in my corner. Especially for the last decade or so it sparks joy to fill his bubble in on the ballot.

what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do.

fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.

the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.

> The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators.

How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.