[Lamplighter]

Some Dwellars may remember this post....

Ron Wyden is still at it... hinting, but not disclosing.
This weekend new issues may be becoming public.

With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague warnings about privacy finally become clear
It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill:
For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy.
But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret.

Today another article clarifies more of what Wyden was all about...

Washington Post
Ellen Nakashima
9/8/13

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011
to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails,
permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases,
according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban
— at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches,
that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.<snip>

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications,
“we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview.
“We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching
of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer
expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate
or any specific authority from Congress.<snip>

The court’s expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released,
but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators,
Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a “back-door search loophole”
that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans.
They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules
from disclosing the court’s authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.
<snip>