Thought better of it: NSA can get rid of evidence, judge says

Written on June 11th, 2014 in politics Comments Off

Published on Russia Today RT, June 7, 2014.

A federal judge who ordered the National Security Agency to retain all records of its secret telephone surveillance related to an ongoing case has reversed the order – just a day after it was issued.

“In order to protect national security programs, I cannot issue a ruling at this time. The Court rescinds the June 5 order,” US District Judge Jeffrey White said from the bench on Friday.  

The NSA had been prohibited from destroying any of its records of communications surveillance on Thursday – specifically under the government’s Section 702 program.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been used by the NSA to justify widespread collection of phone calls and emails.

White first ordered that the agency retain records in March, to which the NSA responded that it was legally obliged to destroy all documents after a five year period.

White issued the temporary restraining order (TRO) in March to prevent the destruction of evidence. However, on Thursday, EFF filed an emergency motion, stating that in the past week interactions with government lawyers demonstrated that the destruction of records had continued.

Records could form a basis of evidence for two pending lawsuits posing a challenge to the surveillance program. One was filed by AT&T customers and the other by 23 Californian organizations … //

… (full text).

Links:

Assange may stay in Ecuador embassy ‘forever’ as £6mn policing bill keeps growing, on Russia Today RT, June 7, 2014;

Assange, NY forum talk Orwellian future, internet as ’suppression’ tool, on Russia Today RT, June 7, 2014;

NSA Knew about the Heartbleed Bug and Exploited it for Years, on SCGnews, April 11, 2014;

Heartbleed on en.wikipedia is a security bug in the OpenSSL cryptography library. OpenSSL is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. Heartbleed may be exploited whether the party using a vulnerable OpenSSL instance for TLS is a server or a client …; External Link;

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