FISA Court Believed NSA Spying Was Unconstitutional As Far Back As 2011

According to declassified documents revealed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation the USA’s FISA court found that NSA spying had been unconstitutional since 2011. Three years after congress authorized the surveillance the FISA court found that the collection was unconstitutional and it ordered the NSA to find ways to limit what it was collecting and how long it kept that information for.

The declassified report stated that the volume and nature of NSA data collection was “fundamentally different” in practice to what the NSA said it was actually doing. While the document shows the FISA court challenging the NSA, in the end they inevitably signed off and approved everything and allowed constitutional violations to continue unabated. In 2012 of the 1789 applications to the FISA court by the NSA, all were approved.

Check out the full declassified report here.

Image courtesy of The Washington Post