We're finally going to get some honesty on how the NSA spies on innocent Americans' communications.
A federal judge late last week in Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s landmark case against mass surveillance, ordered [PDF] the government to provide to it all relevant evidence necessary to prove or deny that plaintiffs were subject to NSA surveillance via tapping into the Internet backbone. This includes surveillance done pursuant to section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act since 2008, which is up for renewal this year. It also includes surveillance between 2001-8 conducted pursuant to the Presidents Surveillance Program.
In 2016 the Court had ordered that the plaintiffs could seek discovery. After over a year of government stonewalling, the Court has now ordered the government to comply with a narrowed set of discovery requests by August 9, 2017. The discovery is aimed at whether plaintiffs' communications were subject to the mass NSA program tapping into the Internet backbone called Upstream. The court also ordered the government to file as much of its responses as possible on the public court docket.
The Jewel v. NSA case continues to mark the first time the NSA has been ordered to respond to civil discovery about any of its mass surveillance programs. Since the first EFF case against NSA mass surveillance was launched in 2006, the government has abandoned or dramatically reduced three of the four key programs addressed by the lawsuit:
Internet metadata collection,
Mass collection of telephone records collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act which was ended by passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015,
Full-content “about” searching of information collected from the Internet backbone.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/judge-orders-government-provide-evidence-about-internet-backbone-upstream