A brief refresher is needed for those new to the story. In April 2017 Judge Collyer wrote a highly critical FISA Court opinion following discoveries by Director Admiral Rogers of government contractors accessing the NSA database, and extracting illegal search results from the electronic records of every American.
The scale of abuse was incredible [SEE HERE] and the surveillance issues had been covered up for years. Collyer cited the Obama administration as having “an institutional lack of candor” in their responses to her and the FISA court. The judge focused her criticism after a review of the period 2012 through April 2016.
Using the non-compliant admissions by NSA Director Mike Rogers and the results of the compliance audit, Judge Collyer used the period of November 2015 through April 2016 to gauge the scale of abuse at 85 percent. Eighty-five percent of all database search queries were unlawful, and she extended her analysis to say:
Also this very important:
“many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges.”Eight-five percent of all use/extraction of the NSA database was unlawful; and they were searching many of the same Americans (“identifier”), repeatedly, over different dates. This means specific Americans were being targeted, tracked and monitored… unlawfully.
Within the 99-page opinion from Judge Rosemary Collyer she noted none of this FISA-702 database abuse was accidental. In a key footnote on page 87: Collyer outlined the years of unlawful violations was the result of “deliberate decisionmaking“:
