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Originally Posted by Griff
I think you can drop the (allegedly).
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It actually seems that PRISM is not illegal and has been approved by pretty much all three branches of government. This data mining is a definitely a true slippery slope and it can be strongly argued to violate the 4th amendment, but this seems to be a bi-partisan move that is well known among all elected officials.
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In fact, it's a near certainty that the legal theory behind orders of this sort has been carefully examined by all three branches of the government and by both political parties. As the Guardian story makes clear, Sen. Ron Wyden has been agitating for years about what he calls an interpretation of national security law that seems to go beyond anything the American people understand or would support. He could easily have been talking about orders like this. So it's highly likely that the law behind this order was carefully vetted by both intelligence committees, Democrat-led in the Senate and Republican-led in the House. (Indeed, today the leaders of both committees gave interviews defending the order.) And in the executive branch, any legal interpretations adopted by George W. Bush's administration would have been carefully scrubbed by President Barack Obama's Justice Department.
Ah, you say, but the scandal here isn't what has been done illegally -- it's what has been done legally. Even if it's lawful, how can the government justify spying on every American's phone calls?
It can't. No one has repealed the laws that prohibit the National Security Agency (NSA) from targeting Americans unless it has probable cause to believe that they are spies or terrorists. So under the law, the NSA remains prohibited from collecting information on Americans.
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...calls?page=0,0
Note: That article is an obvious defense of PRISM and there will likely be a lot of political spin on this in the next few weeks but I think it is important to try to look at PRISM for what it really is (in a factual sense).