{"id":181100,"date":"2016-09-30T17:29:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T22:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/09\/30\/pardon-him-now\/"},"modified":"2016-09-30T17:29:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T22:29:00","slug":"pardon-him-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/09\/30\/pardon-him-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Pardon Him Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

It appears that one of the effects of the Snowden disclosures was to make the US State Security Apparatus significantly less likely to abuse the provisions of the Patriot Act<\/a>:
<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>Edward Snowden\u2019s disclosures were partially responsible for reversing a massive growth in the use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act for acquiring email and other so-called \u201cbusiness records\u201d, the US justice department\u2019s internal watchdog has found.<\/span>
<\/span>
The Patriot Act provision, known as Section 215, permits intelligence and law enforcement agencies to acquire from a service provider records of someone\u2019s communications \u2013 such as phone calls or email records \u2013 that are relevant to a terrorism or espionage investigation.<\/span>
<\/span>
In June 2013, the Guardian, based on Snowden\u2019s leaks, revealed<\/a> that the Bush and Obama administrations had secretly been using Section 215 to acquire Americans\u2019 phone data in bulk. The revelation led Congress to significantly curtail<\/a> domestic bulk phone records collection in 2015. <\/span>
<\/span>
The new report<\/a> from the justice department inspector general reveals that around 2009, the FBI began encountering resistance from email providers and others to a highly controversial nonjudicial subpoena for records, known as a National Security Letter<\/a>. In the wake of this, the FBI began acquiring the information it sought through warrant requests to the Fisa court, a secret surveillance panel, using Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the inspector general notes is a slower process.<\/span>
<\/span>
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>
But Snowden\u2019s revelations, beginning in mid-2013, helped shift the FBI<\/a> away from using Section 215 to acquire email and other metadata. The Fisa court approved warrants to collect non-bulk business records 179 times in 2013, a number falling to 142 times in 2015 \u2013 though this was still a vast increase on the 21 approved in 2009.<\/span>
<\/span>
A senior national security official with the justice department told the inspector general that a \u201cstigma\u201d had been created around the Patriot Act provision, even outside of the bulk collection that privacy advocates rallied to stop. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Edward Snowden is an American hero and a patriot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears that one of the effects of the Snowden disclosures was to make the US State Security Apparatus significantly less likely to abuse the provisions of the Patriot Act: Edward Snowden\u2019s disclosures were partially responsible for reversing a massive growth in the use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act for acquiring email …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[791,779,796,827],"class_list":["post-181100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-civil-rights","tag-espionage","tag-law-enforcement-misconduct","tag-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}