After receiving a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Jason Smathers, via Muckrock, the NSA has released a series of "talking points." What's incredible is that the talking points themselves are heavily redacted. Considering they're all about what to tell the press, you have to wonder how they could possibly include anything that should be redacted. It seems that, by definition, the info included in the talking points should be public. The only reason to redact is embarrassment. The snippets you can read are sort of random boosterism about how awesome the NSA is... if only they could tell us. Amusingly one entire page of the document is redacted... except for one single line reading:

These are sobering findings.

Indeed. The document also shows that the NSA has written out talking points for members of Congress and the President for when they have to talk about NSA programs. Yes, when you hear a Congressional Rep. defending the NSA, it's likely based on the following talking points: In looking around to see who has actually made these claims, it turns out that the NSA actually released these publicly back in 2006, and they were even entered into the Congressional record at the time. Either way, it's an odd little glimpse into the NSA's world.

A couple of months ago, Julian Sanchez wrote about the ridiculous situation in which he filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to reveal the latest semi-annual report from the Justice Department concerning how it was implementing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. As we've been discussing, for a while, how the FISA Amendments Act broadly expanded the ability of federal law enforcement, in particular the NSA, to spy on everyone. While there is some language that suggests it's only supposed to be used on foreigners, it's been revealed that there is a secret interpretation of the bill, that likely allows them to use a loophole (plus the secret interpretation) to collect and review tons of data on Americans. The FAA is up for renewal, and it's likely that Congress will rush through a five year extension -- despite overwhelming evidence that many in Congress don't know how the NSA is interpreting the bill (and even making statements that directly contradict the evidence of how the bill is being used).

The law does require the "semi-annual" report mentioned above, and thanks to a lawsuit by the ACLU, the courts have said that the government is required to release redacted versions of those documents. Which is why it was crazy when Sanchez initially filed his FOIA request to see the most recent versions, arguing (quite reasonably) that such documents were inherently important in the debate over the FAA's renewal, that the DOJ initially told him that it had to deny his request because it could "neither confirm nor deny the existence of records in these files responsive to your request." That was obviously bullshit. Once again: the report is required by law, and the courts have already said that the content is subject to FOIA requests. Thankfully, after Sanchez went public with the ridiculousness of the situation, the DOJ quickly admitted the original response was a mistake, and promised they'd get right on finding the documents.

Sanchez now has an update of the situation, which is almost as ridiculous as the original story.

By mid-September, just under three months after my initial request went in, I was informed that they’d identified the reports I was looking for and forwarded them to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for a declassification review, which they expected would be completed by early November. Joy! Would we actually get information about an intelligence program out of the government without a lawsuit? Maybe even in time to have a semi-informed public debate?

Well, no. ODNI informed me earlier this month that they were wrapping up their review and redaction Any Day Now, at which point… their redacted version would be forwarded, one at a time, to every other intelligence agency whose activities were referenced in the report. At each agency, it would go to the back of the line of FOIA requests, exactly as though it had just been submitted for the first time. Estimated time before a heavily censored version of these reports see the light of day: Another six months. At least. By which time, it won’t matter much what these reports say about NSA’s use of its sweeping powers, because Congress will have already given them another five years of spying authority.

Notice what this means in practice: Even though a court has already established, thanks to an ACLU lawsuit, that they are legally required to release redacted versions of these reports to the public on request, a cumbersome bureaucratic process effectively guarantees that it takes a solid year to get this information out, which means at best you’re working with what the assessment found two reports ago, allowing the government to assert that they’ve fixed whatever problems were found. In this case, the timing of the review process conveniently guarantees that whatever we learn will come far too late to influence this year’s vote on FAA powers, but be old news by the time Congress takes up the question again. It’s a little hard to swallow the claim that all this delay is remotely necessary: Are we really supposed to believe that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will be so slipshod about letting sensitive classified information through that their work has to be independently double checked by every other intelligence agency? And that this process has to take six months or longer, even after ODNI has done their initial review and redaction? Of course it doesn’t: This is a bureaucratic procedure designed, not to protect national security, but to allow stalling on the release of politically inconvenient information that the courts won’t allow to be completely hidden from the public.

Once again, this seems to raise questions about the process here -- and how much of it really has to do with law enforcement officials being careful... and how much of it is purely political, seeking to hide damaging information that might impact the FAA renewal.

Furthermore, as Sanchez notes, the very idea that he had to file a FOIA for this information is troubling by itself:

What we should really be asking is why I had to submit this request at all. In his first days in office, after all, President Obama issued a directive not only urging agencies to err on the side of disclosure, but to adopt a policy of proactive release of documents likely to be of public interest. Surely if there were any doubt about the public interest in the use of sweeping surveillance powers, it should have been put to rest after the ACLU won release of the earliest compliance reports. So why didn’t the Justice Department follow President Obama’s directive and draft these reports with an eye toward preparing a declassified public version, knowing full well that civil liberties groups would come asking? Well, because then they wouldn’t be able to obfuscate and delay for months and months. Because then the public might be able to have an informed discussion about the secret surveillance powers we’ve given our spy agencies before we vote to extend them. Heaven forfend.

While we're hearing that the Senate is likely to take up (though not pass) the Cybersecurity Act yet again either today or tomorrow, and the White House is still sitting on a cybersecurity "executive order," in the meantime it's being reported that President Obama has signed a "secret directive" to allow the military to "act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks." This is limited to the military, but that means we're talking about the NSA (which is a part of the Defense Department). Considering that it seems to view a stronger offensive effort (i.e., collecting all data) a key part of a strong "defense," this is worrisome.

The really troubling part in all of this is the really unnecessary level of secrecy. We keep being told scary bogeyman stories about online attacks without any evidence or proof. And now the President is signing a "secret" order allowing the military to do more in response? Without any real scrutiny, it's not difficult to see how these things expand unceasingly and are wide open for abuse. Given the NSA's track record here, it's inevitable that these efforts will be massively abused.

We recently talked about how the House voted to approve the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) by a pretty wide margin, and noted some of the more bizarre and inaccurate statements that Representatives made in support of the renewal. Julian Sanchez has put together a nice summary of some of the more outrageous claims. The key here is that many Reps. seemed to take the FISA Amendments Act at face value, that it would only be used to target foreigners in foreign lands -- in other words, those with no 4th Amendment protections. But, as Sanchez has pointed out repeatedly, former Deputy Attorney General, David Kris, more or less revealed the Act is interpreted to mean that as long as the information they get might be useful in targeting foreigners in foreign lands, it's fair game. That means -- contrary to the direct claims of many FAA supporters -- the law is used to spy on Americans.

Sanchez also highlights another sneaky interpretation. The law claims that it prohibits the interception of "purely domestic" communications. But there's an additional clause with one hell of a loophole: "Known at the time of acquisition." As Sanchez notes, you can drive quite a large truck through that loophole, because if you're, say, scooping up all email communications, you don't know -- at the time of acquisition -- if it's purely domestic... and therefore, you're good to go. Basically, ignorance is bliss for the NSA.

But these two massive loopholes and sketchy interpretations seem to be totally ignored by the Congressional reps who spoke out most strongly in favor of renewing the FAA:

The most common refrain from FAA supporters was that the law only concerned surveillance targeting “foreigners in foreign lands”—meaning it could not possibly affect the rights of Americans. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), in an impressive display of lung power, delivered a five minute floor shout to this effect. “This bill has nothing to do with Americans on American soil,” Gowdy thundered, “This bill doesn’t implicate the Bill of Rights, any more than it implicates any other part of our Constitution, unless you think that foreign nationals who are on foreign land fall within the protections of the United States Constitution.” But Gowdy has to know that this is false, because the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has already ruled on at least one occasion that surveillance authorized by the FAA did violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Similarly, we've seen how the NSA absolutely refuses to say how many Americans have been spied upon using these tools, claiming that it's impossible to know (or that it would violate their privacy to find out -- seriously). But, Sanchez notes that, despite the NSA insisting it's impossible to know, that didn't stop Representatives from claiming they just knew.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) was slightly more equivocal, seemingly acknowledging that the law might permit surveillance of Americans, but that this would happen only very rarely.  The mystery here is how he could possibly know that. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has repeatedly asked the NSA for a rough ballpark estimate of how many Americans—100? 1,000? 100,000?—have had their communications caught up in the agency’s FAA dragnets. If Rep. Rogers were correct, you’d expect the answer to be “almost none”—but instead the agency has repeatedly insisted that it is unable to provide even an approximate figure. Unless Rep. Rogers somehow knows things about the NSA’s databases that the NSA does not know, he can’t have any real basis for this claim.

And then there's Rep. Dan Lungren. Earlier, we had noted that when there were discussions during hearings about the FAA, he brushed off concerns about spying on Americans by saying he hadn't seen any such evidence so it couldn't be true. Of course, he didn't bother to seek out any such evidence by asking the NSA to provide the data. And here he was even worse, making bizarre claims in support of expanding the FISA Amendments Act that seem to go completely against reality.

Finally, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) suggested that the necessity of the FAA was demonstrated by the failures of intelligence leading up to 9/11. After all, the 9/11 Commission had again and again emphasized the central failure to “connect the dots” that would have revealed an imminent attack before it occurred—and to “connect the dots,” Lungren asserted, intelligence agencies would need still more expansive power to first “collect the dots.” This is, in a way, the most breathtakingly erroneous statements heard during Wednesday’s floor debates, because turns the 9/11 Commission’s findings completely on their head. Their report conspicuously did not identify a lack of legal authority to conduct surveillance as a serious problem: If anything, the trouble was that agencies were drowning in information they lacked the capacity to analyze and put to use. Perversely, Lungren trades on a familiar phrase—”connect the dots”—to utterly invert the Commission’s diagnosis of the causes of 9/11.

So... if you're keeping track at home, the reasons the House approved this horrible bit of legislation with massive loopholes that allows the NSA to spy on us is because it can't be used to spy on us (even though it can), it bars the collection of domestic communication (except in nearly every case that it does not), it's barely been used on Americans (except that the NSA claims it's impossible to tell how many Americans it's been used on) and we need it to "connect the dots" on terrorism (even though it doesn't help connect the dots, but merely to provide even more dots, many of which will distract from the important dots).

How do these people get elected?

As was expected, despite not knowing the details of how the feds interpret the FISA Amendmens Act, which grants massive spying and surveillance power to the feds -- in fact, while proactively stopping any efforts to find out more about the interpretation, the House of Representatives today approved Lamar Smith's FISA Amendment's Act by a vote of 301-118. You can see which representatives voted which way at that link. The bill would extend the current rules (and the secret interpretation) for another five years. Republicans, who are supposedly against bigger government, only had 7 members vote no, while the remaining 111 no votes came from Democrats.

There had been an attempt to introduce amendments, but that was shot down procedurally. And an hour debate did little to get to the heart of the matter. Rep. Zoe Lofgren fought the good fight, pointing out that "I think the government needs to comply with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution all the time... We can be safe while still complying with the Constitution of the United States." However, Rep. Dan Lungren -- who previously had insisted that there was no evidence that the NSA was abusing its powers, while refusing to even ask the NSA for basic info on how it was using the powers -- insisted based on absolutely nothing that "this is critical to the protection of the American people."

Even worse, Rep. Terry Gowdy made a ridiculously ignorant statement in response to Lofgren's highlighting of the 4th Amendment:

”Intelligence is the lifeblood of our ability to defend ourselves,” he said. Moments later, he added: “Are we to believe that the Fourth Amendment applies to the entire world?”

But, uh, the concern isn't with the rest of the world. Even without the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA already had the right to seek info on foreign communications. They have no 4th Amendment rights, so that's not even an issue. The issue is that the FISA Amendments Act appears to include some weasel words that have been twisted by the government to suggest that it can spy on Americans too. But Gowdy misleads the public by pretending, falsely, that this is about foreigners? It's not. Has he asked the NSA how many Americans it's spied on? Even the NSA has admitted that it's violated the 4th Amendment under the act in spying on Americans... but Gowdy pretends this is just about foreigners? How do you stand up and call yourself a "Representative" when you can't even get the very basics right?

Of course, House approval is just one step. The Senate version remains on hold thanks to Senator Wyden, who is one of the only elected officials who is actually asking the NSA and the Obama administration to (a) reveal the secret interpretation and (b) disclose how many Americans are being spied on under the rule.

As Julian Sanchez explained recently a former DOJ official has basically revealed part of the secret interpretation, which more or less says that if the target is al Qaeda, then anything goes:

For example, an authorization targeting “al Qaeda”—which is a non-U.S. person located abroad—could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about al Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with al Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with al Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone.

Take that and expand it, and you've basically given the feds and the NSA a blank slate to spy on Americans by claiming that if it believes the spying will yield information about a threat, then it's fine. And our "Representatives" are standing up and -- either through ignorance or straight-up dishonesty -- are pretending that this is about spying on foreigners only. Shameful.

This is getting more ridiculous by the day. We've been covering how the NSA refuses to admit how many Americans are being spied upon via a secret interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act -- and how Congress' response is to pretend that as long as they stick their head in the sand, the NSA couldn't possibly be abusing the law. Rep. Dan Lungren literally said that he sees no reason to be worried because he hasn't seen any evidence that it's being used to spy on Americans. But that's only true if you are being willfully blind. The NSA has refused basic requests to reveal non-confidential info, ridiculously claiming it would violate the privacy of Americans to admit how many Americans were being spied upon. Meanwhile, Julian Sanchez's attempt to reveal some info via a Freedom of Information Act request is being stonewalled by the feds.

And yet Congress still wants to move forward. The House is planning to vote on extending the FISA Amendments Act in the next day or two, despite the fact that the vast majority of elected officials do not have the information on how the law is being interpreted and those who are in the know have hinted very, very, very strongly that it is being widely abused. Now, if Congress actually represented the public, it might try to stop this process and ask for some of the details. Instead, it seems to be focused on just re-upping support for this tool that has more or less enabled domestic spying on Americans.

After four years, you’d hope that some basic information or parameters of such a massive spying program would be divulged to the public, or at least your rank-and-file member of Congress, but they haven’t.  Only a small handful of members have either personally attended classified briefings or have staff with high enough clearances to attend for them.  Sen. Ron Wyden—who has been on the Senate Intelligence Committee for years—has even been stonewalled by the Obama administration for a year and a half in his attempts to learn basic information about the program, such as the number of Americans who have had their communications intercepted under the FAA. 

Yet the House ambles on, ready to rubber stamp another five years of expansive surveillance that can pick up American communications without meaningful judicial oversight and without probable cause or any finding of wrongdoing.  Instead of blind faith in the executive branch, every member of the House should demand that the administration publicly disclose the following before proceeding with reauthorization:

Copies of FISA court opinions interpreting our Fourth Amendment rights under the FAA, with redactions to protect sensitive information (the Department of Justice can write summaries of law if necessary);

A rough estimate of how many Americans are surveilled under the FAA every year;

A description of the rules that govern how American information picked up by FAA surveillance is protected.

Can you believe that 435 members of Congress who have sworn to uphold the Constitution are about to vote on a sweeping intelligence gathering law without this basic information?

If you find this worrisome (and you should), the ACLU has set up an an action page to contact your elected officials and ask them to do their jobs and find out the details before just rubber-stamping the extension of the FISA Amendments Act.

Last year, in writing about the US government's vindictive lawsuit against whistleblower and former NSA employee Thomas Drake, we also talked about William Binney -- another ex-NSA employee and whistleblower (who was also raided by the feds, though they failed to find anything they could pin on him in a lawsuit). Binney is the mathematical genius behind one of the key algorithms the NSA is using to track everyone. Here's what the New Yorker said about Binner over a year ago:

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the "little program" that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., "got twisted," and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: "I should apologize to the American people. It's violated everyone's rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world."

Now, the NY Times has something of a following, including a short documentary feature about Binney and his whistleblowing over the NSA's domestic spying. It's really worth watching as it very simply highlights how vast the domestic spying effort is, however powerful it can be -- and also how the NSA dances around the fact that it's not allowed to spy on Americans. They claim that as long as they're not actually looking at the content they record and store directly, it's just collecting the info and not actually spying on people. That is, they think that acquiring all this data is fine, so long as they don't directly query the info. But... as Binney explains, his algorithms (which have likely been updated quite a bit) can still go through all this info and build basic "profiles" of just about anyone. It's really worth watching, if only to wonder how anyone thinks this is acceptable.

I'd embed the video here, except the geniuses over at the NY Times seem to have not figured out how to allow embeds with their video player.

The documentary was put together by Laura Poitras, who notes that thanks to some over-aggressive surveillance she, too, is on a "watch-list," thanks to a documentary she did about Iraq.

I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

All of this attention, by the way, is to question why Congress is so intent on re-authorizing the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) which is what gives the NSA a pass on much of this spying, thanks to a "secret interpretation" of the law, which the public is not allowed to even know about. If this sounds like the sort of thing that shouldn't be allowed in a free and open society, you're just beginning to grasp the problem.

You may remember that almost exactly a decade ago, the news leaked that key Iran-Contra political operative John Poindexter, still working for the US government, had been working with the NSA to create a system called Total Information Awareness or TIA. The news quickly went viral, with people (quite reasonably) worried about the government snooping on their private data. Suddenly everyone was against this program, Poindexter was soon out of a job, and the TIA was officially put on the shelf. Except... that's not quite what happened. As you should be aware by now, the NSA has been Hoovering up pretty much every bit of data it can, sometimes using confusing loopholes or legal changes to make it possible.

As a writeup at the NY Times notes, the NSA is basically doing everything that was promised in the TIA program... but without the basic safeguards that were included with TIA:

What’s missing, however, is a reliable way of keeping track of who sees what, and who watches whom. After T.I.A. was officially shut down in 2003, the N.S.A. adopted many of Mr. Poindexter’s ideas except for two: an application that would “anonymize” data, so that information could be linked to a person only through a court order; and a set of audit logs, which would keep track of whether innocent Americans’ communications were getting caught in a digital net.

And let's not even waste time discussing how the NSA actually had a much cheaper program that actually did have safeguards, because the guy who exposed the world to that almost end up in jail for a few decades.

Of course, the bigger issue here is that in gathering pretty much everything they can, actually making sense of the data is becoming more and more difficult:

The N.S.A. came up with more dead ends than viable leads and put a premium on collecting information rather than making sense of it.

Of course, that doesn't mean people's privacy isn't being violated (something even the NSA itself will admit when forced -- though it still refuses to say how many Americans are having their privacy violated). So the end result is that the NSA is collecting all of this data, violating people's privacy (and, most likely, the 4th Amendment). And, out of that they're turning up very little in the way of useful leads.

That's not exactly a compelling pitch.

But, as the NYT piece notes, even though the NSA built a system more powerful and privacy invading, and less effective (and probably more costly) than the original, much decried, Total Information Awareness program, very few people seem to be raising the alarm or particularly concerned about it. Apparently, the NSA has learned the best secret of all. If you don't actually name the program something creepy and Big Brotherish, and don't have a conspiracy-theory-inspired logo to go with it, you can get away with all sorts of stuff. There. Now don't you feel safer knowing that your tax dollars are funding this kind of thing?

We've written many times about the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), of which there is a secret interpretation that certainly appears to allow the NSA to spy on all sorts of email communications without a warrant -- something that is not at all obvious upfront (and, in fact, which many in Congress apparently do not know about). While Senators Wyden and Udall have been working hard to try to force the government to reveal either the secret interpretation or how many Americans have been spied on, the rest of Congress appears to not want to know, while rubber stamping the renewals to let the effort continue.

There have been some questions about how all of this came about, and just why law enforcement officials keep insisting the FAA is so vital. Julian Sanchez may have worked out some key details, and provides a very compelling explanation. Seven years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in the Brand X case (the same day the Grokster ruling came out), basically saying that cable networks did not qualify for "common carrier" status, because they were "information services" rather than telco services. The direct end result was that broadband providers no longer had to share lines with service providers. But, as Sanchez notes, there may have been an unrelated indirect impact: by removing the common carrier designation, the NSA may have lost its legal authority to "tap" live communications on such networks without a warrant. Sanchez explains the nitty gritty:

“If FISA’s reference to ‘common carrier’ were interpreted in accord with the Communications Act,” Kris and Wilson explain, explicitly citing the Brand X decision, “information (such as e-mail) being carried on a cable owned and offered by a cable modem service provider would not be a ‘wire communication’ under FISA, and acquisition of such information would not be ‘electronic surveillance’ under” the definition that applies to traditional phone calls.

Sanchez provides a lot more detail, which is worth reading in full, because it's quite complex. However, it suggests that the Bush administration's focus on "deregulating" cable may have undercut the NSA's "spy on everyone" program through a simple definition change. The FAA, then, was put in place (partly) to once again enable the NSA to get access to a bunch of live communications legally, whereas it's quite possible that the FISA court had found, in light of Brand X, that the efforts had been against the law. Now, you can argue that the change due to the Brand X decision is no big deal, because it was just clarifying some rules, and dealing with antiquated language in the statute. But, again, since so much of this happened in secret, if Sanchez's story is accurate, it more or less allowed the government to write very broad rules, such as those now allowing such broad surveillance.

So the FISA Amendments Act allows the government to target foreigners and capture conversations with Americans — with no warrant required, so long as they aren’t actually trying to wiretap the American via a technical loophole.

But if the government’s problem is an inability to reliably determine the location of parties to a communication, it’s not clear why we should be confident that interception under this broad new authority can reliably avoid acquiring many purely domestic communications. Even if it can, blanket authority to acquire the international communications of Americans — with no requirement that the foreign side of the conversation be suspected of any connection to terrorism or espionage‹seems like an incredibly broad way of addressing the issue.

Perhaps Kris and Wilson are correct that a narrower solution to the problem would have been unworkable. On the other hand, perhaps legislators would have tried a bit harder to craft a viable narrow solution if they, and the general public, had clearly understood exactly what the problem was.

Sanchez goes on to point out that if this story is accurate, and if the FISA court had basically upended the feds' spying program becuase of some definitional issues, a more reasonable and transparent approach would simply be to work together with lawmakers and civil liberties experts to actually focus in on the specific problem. Instead, it appears they may have used this loophole to massively expand spying capabilities, with no public oversight at all.

You may remember the ridiculous Thomas Drake case, in which the US government went after a former NSA employee under the Espionage Act, threatening him with decades in jail. However, as the details showed, Drake was really being targeted not for leaking information, but as a vindictive response for talking to Congressional staffers about what he saw as abuse and waste by the NSA. Jane Meyer, in the New Yorker, wrote a wonderfully detailed account of the case last year. It highlighted how the charges seemed pretty trumped up, claiming that having a certain document on his home computer was illegal, even though the clear target of the investigation was whether he had leaked info to the press.

Drake's story intertwines with that of a Congressional staffer named Diane Roark, who plays a role in his story. A snippet from that New Yorker piece:

Not long after Binney quit the N.S.A., he says, he confided his concerns about the secret surveillance program to Diane Roark, a staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the agency. Roark, who has flowing gray hair and large, wide-set eyes, looks like a waifish poet. But in her intelligence-committee job, which she held for seventeen years, she modeled herself on Machiavelli’s maxim that it is better to be feared than loved. Within the N.S.A.’s upper ranks she was widely resented. A former top N.S.A. official says of her, “In meetings, she would just say, ‘You’re lying.’ ”

Roark agrees that she distrusted the N.S.A.’s managers. “I asked very tough questions, because they were trying to hide stuff,” she says. “For instance, I wasn’t supposed to know about the warrantless surveillance. They were all determined that no one else was going to tell them what to do.”

While Roark was not charged in the same process that resulted in charges against Drake, there was a search conducted, and computers taken. She's now sued the US government, seeking the return (many years later) of the computers seized, as well as findings that the feds actions were unconstitutional.

Plaintiff asks that the Court find unconstitutional the following Government actions and claims:

the Government's activities and assertions... that infringe on citizen speech and communications under the First Amendment to the Constitution and on property rights under the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments.

the manner in which the Government investigated, managed and prolonged her case. Plaintiff contends that the actions taken against her constitute retaliation for her whistleblower activities and execution of her Congressional oversight responsibilities that revealed inefficenicy, contract fraud, the persistent waste of billions of dollars on a single ill-conceived program that was never built, plus illegal and unconstitutional operations.

To be honest, these kinds of lawsuits rarely get very far, but it should be interesting to watch either way...