Microsoft Lawyer Slams Secret Surveillance Court, FISA

Microsoft’s Top Lawyer Slams Secret Surveillance Court - Digits - WSJ: "The U.S.’s secret surveillance court is unaccountable to the public and not “inclined to promote justice,” Microsoft’s top lawyer said Tuesday. General counsel Brad Smith said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews applications and appeals involving U.S. government data-collection efforts in the name of national security, acts unlike most other courts because “only one side gets to tell its story.” The surveillance court also effectively creates law “that the American public is not permitted to read,” Smith said Wednesday in a speech at the Brookings Institution. The 35-year-old court was cast into the spotlight following revelations about National Security Agency’s (NSA) data-collection programs. The court’s decisions and most documents submitted to the court are secret, which Smith said made it tough for those opposing the government’s data demands to have a fair hearing. “This is not an approach inclined to promote justice,” Smith said, as he showed an image of what he implied was a government document before the surveillance court, with all text blacked out...." (read more at link above)


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Dr. Joseph Bonneau: NSA incompatible with a free society

Dr. Joseph Bonneau Wins NSA Award, Criticizes NSA | Electronic Frontier Foundation: "On July 18th, Dr. Joseph Bonneau, a software engineer at Google, received the National Security Agency’s award for the best scientific cybersecurity paper.  According to its stated mission, the competition was created to help broaden the scientific foundations of cybersecurity needed in the development of systems that are resilient to cyber attacks. But Bonneau was deeply conflicted about receiving the award, noting on his blog that even though he was flattered to receive the award he didn’t condone the mass surveillance programs run by the NSA: “Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form.""

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