Such a casual disregard for Fourth Amendment privacy — Attorney General Lynch spreads the NSA's spy data far and wide

20 January 2017

"Take this, suckers"

President Obama, on his way out the White House door, had Attorney General Loretta Lynch scatter NSA surveillance data to any other intelligence agency lusting for a peek at it:

The changes [PDF] are tacked onto executive order 12333, which was enacted by then-President Ronald Reagan to allow intelligence agencies to share information on non-US nationals.

The new rules will allow the NSA to share unfiltered signals intelligence with other members of the intelligence community if it is deemed necessary.

The offered rationale appears to have been that it would be a pity, if the sheer mass of collected data so overwhelmed the NSA that unseen bad guys slipped through.

Given that the NSA's probable cause-lacking spying was Constitutionally illegal in the first place, this hardly seems like a step in the right direction.

Somewhat humorously, however

The following justification emerged:

But while the changes may subject more Americans to warrantless surveillance, the last-minute timing of the announcement actually might have been designed to cut future privacy losses.

Susan Hennessey, a Brookings fellow and the managing editor of Lawfare, says firming up the changes before [President-elect] Trump takes office makes it harder for the incoming president to encroach even further on civil liberties.

"I think it is a good sign that these procedures have been finalized, in part because it’s so hard to change procedures once they’re finalized."

Evidently, we have to initiate and spread illegalities, so as to protect y'all from an even more expansive stomping of the Fourth Amendment.

Say what?

Ms. Hennessey's reasoning is flawed, I think. Just why cannot President Trump re-amend the pre-existing executive order himself?

If President Reagan wrote the original 12333, and President Obama added to it with new rules for expanding the distribution of NSA-collected information — why cannot President Trump to whatever he wants to 12333, as well? Or even write a new executive order more to his liking?

That's what executive ordering means.

Tradition, we are told, encourages new presidents to honor the executive orders of their predecessors. But insofar as I can tell, nothing lawfully prevents President Trump from undoing what he does not like. Unless, of course, the preceding order was in part tied to statute, or its implementation runs down so many administrative tiers that undoing it would take significant administrative time and procedural modifications to implement. Even then, the order can be reversed. The reversal just takes some time to put into effect.

The bottom (negative) line

Trying to control 16 "spook" agencies — rather than only 1 — from misusing masses of private personal data for a variety of conceivably bogus reasons — so as (for example) to harass, imprison and murder people — just makes the emerging American Autocracy that much more difficult to fend off.

Former New Jersey superior court Judge Andrew Napolitano took issue with the Obama Administration's expanded data sharing for the same reason that I do:

Notwithstanding all of the above gross violations of personal liberty and constitutional norms [— which Napolitano describes in the preceding paragraphs of his article —], the NSA traditionally kept its data . . . to itself.

[I]f an agency such as the FBI or the DEA or the New Jersey State Police, for example, wanted any of the data acquired by the NSA for law enforcement purposes, it needed to get a search warrant from a federal judge based on the constitutional standard of "probable cause of crime."

Until now.

Now, because of the Lynch secret order . . . the NSA may share any of its data with any other intelligence agency or law enforcement agency that has an intelligence arm based on . . . the non-standard of governmental need.

President Barack Obama, in the death throes of his time in the White House, has delivered perhaps his harshest blow to constitutional freedom by permitting his attorney general to circumvent the Fourth Amendment, thereby enabling people in law enforcement to get whatever they want about whomever they wish without a showing of probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires.

The moral? — Barack Obama should hope that he is favorably and symbolically remembered as the First Black President

Virtually everything else he accomplished in office reinforced the oligarchical, totalitarian tendencies of his recent American predecessors.

PeteFree.com

Such a casual disregard for Fourth Amendment privacy — Attorney General Lynch spreads the NSA's spy data far and wide