US surveillance agency NSA collected data on 122 int'l leaders in one month
29 March, 19:58 -- The US surveillance agency NSA collected data on 122 international leaders in a single month, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Saturday, quoting from a document in the trove taken by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The names of the top-level targets in May 2009 were apparently arranged alphabetically by first name, from Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, to Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime minister at the time.
Spiegel said the document showed more than 300 items collected on Merkel. Last year it was alleged and not disputed by Washington that that NSA, or National Security Agency, monitored Merkel's mobile phone.
The magazine said only 12 names were on the document it saw. Others included Abdullah Badawi, who had just resigned as Malaysian prime minister.
New NSA spy scheme to show even more severe violation on privacy
With NSA scandal still fresh in people's minds, the NSA itself is trying to find a loophole to make their actions legal. Previously, it has been stated many times in media that the NSA spying goes against the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. However, if to take general warrant into account, the whole perspective changes.
In general warrant there is no need to include all those details. The probable cause there is in person who endangers the state and has been targeted by the government. While looking for such person, officials have the authority to involve and take into the account all the other people who might or might not be involved with the main suspect. Thus, their properties, phone conversations may be targeted as well.
For now, in order to legally search a person or his property, the government has to show to the judge the so-called probable cause, based on which the judge issues a warrant. Under the Fourth Amendment, the government also has to identify the person who it wants to search or the property of that person as the warrant has to contain the address or the place that needs to be searched.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court has been issuing general warrants to the National Security Agency (NSA) since 1978. However, last June the whole world became aware that these general warrants included half of the population of the world with their phone conversation, bank accounts, credit cards and what not.
Probable cause is the constitutional requirement, invented to prevent people from being victims of tyranny.
Last week, Robert S. Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which runs the NSA, got into the serious debate with members of the president's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
Mr. Litt claims that the whole procedure is too difficult to be conducted. It takes a lot of paperwork to present the case of every single person that needs to be checked to the judge. It was astonishing to hear this from a person who along with his 60,000 employees took an oath on the Constitution not to spy on people. Yet after all this scandal, the procedure still seems to remain too difficult for him.
This also means that NSA is well aware of the fact that issuing a warrant is a more complicated matter than working with general warrants. Meaning, the NSA knows it is violating the Fourth Amendment because the Amendment doesn't state a difference between a search warrant and a general warrant.
Meanwhile, in his speech Mr. Litt has also admitted of the use of general warrants, at the same time the White House leaked news on curtailing the NSA spying. He changes in the work of NSA will come in three main parts. First part will look into general warrants, second will cover main telecommunication companies and third will issue a requirement of a warrant from the judge before the NSA can access the data.
It was obvious that Mr. Litt was well aware of the White House leaking that information as his complain about 'too difficult' procedure fits perfectly in the new information that was leaked from the authorities.
The second part of the change in the work of NSA will allow them get access to the telecommunication companies information from their computers with just a few clicks. What makes it even more unbelievable that the NSA is conducting the spying on everyone in America starting from general public up to policemen, Congressmen. Will that be enough for the Congress to reject these changes?
Voice of Russia, Washington Times, dpa
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