{"id":310184,"date":"2017-05-28T09:20:40","date_gmt":"2017-05-28T08:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-merry-life-of-dragnet-surveillance\/"},"modified":"2017-05-28T09:20:40","modified_gmt":"2017-05-28T08:20:40","slug":"the-merry-life-of-dragnet-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-merry-life-of-dragnet-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"The Merry Life of Dragnet Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>In the aftermath of Edward Snowden\u2019s revelations in 2013, a grudging acceptance was made by the Obama administration that something had to be done about a roguish surveillance complex unhinged from its foundations.\u00a0 The National Security Agency had overstretched its powers, to the point where it was not only conducting its standard mischief against foreign targets, but against US citizens roped into the exercise.<\/p>\n<p>The NSA has been in the news again, this time with the reversal by a US appeals court of a lower tribunal\u2019s decision that the Wikimedia Foundation has standing to object to the Upstream program in court.<\/p>\n<p>The central problem to any legal challenge against dragnet surveillance has been proof \u2013 proof, that is, of violation and damage to the subject in question.\u00a0 This was the case in <em>Clapper v Amnesty International<\/em>, where the Supreme Court observed, almost disdainfully, that Amnesty was mounting a novel approach based on a \u201cspeculative chain of possibilities\u201d that could not \u201cestablish that injury based on future surveillance [was] certainly impending or [was] fairly traceable to [Section 702 surveillance].\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In October 2015, the point was further tested by Wikimedia and eight other organisations, among them Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, who faced another sceptical judicial survey.<\/p>\n<p>Alleged again were points that the NSA\u2019s interception, collection, review and storing of the communications by the groups constituted a violation&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2017\/05\/the-merry-life-of-dragnet-surveillance\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the aftermath of Edward Snowden\u2019s revelations in 2013, a grudging acceptance was made by the Obama administration that something had to be done about a roguish surveillance complex unhinged from its foundations.\u00a0 The National Security Agency had overstretched its powers, to the point where it was not only conducting its standard mischief against foreign [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-310184","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}