Snowdon is a dummy

Apparently it warrantless spying from foreign data they already possess which was approved by the secret court in 2011. I think the way it connects to US citizens is if they run some kind of data search that connects the foreign conversations to US citizens.

approved by the secret court

The German parliament has just started examining the NSA affair with the help of an investigation committee. But the panel members have not been able to agree on the role Edward Snowden should play in the process.

The United States is currently not a big help when it comes to resolving the NSA affair, despite several appeals from Berlin. Attempts to create a no-spy-agreement have reached a dead end, according to Clemens Binninger (pictured above with German Bundestag Vice President Petra Pau), who will lead the parliamentary committee charged with investigating the mass surveillance of German data by foreign intelligence services; in particular, the NSA.

The question catalogue that the German government sent to US authorities remains unanswered thus far, as a letter from the German Federal Ministry of the Interior suggests.

Binninger assumes that this won't change in the course of his panel's investigation either, which began its work on Thursday (03.04.2014). After all, the committee can do little more than appeal to the Americans and British to participate in the process. The eight members of the committee have no legal recourse to summon foreign witnesses and force them to testify.

But Binninger hasn't given up hope yet. In his view, replying to the question catalogue would be "an important first step toward restoring trust." ...

What the members of the investigation committee can't agree on is whether Edward Snowden should testify before the committee or not.
[...]
Binniger is skeptical whether Snowden would really be able to help. After all Snowden himself said that he doesn't know anything else. And he only answered the questions of the European Parliament very generally.
[...]
Binninger hopes that the dispute over Snowden won't result in a hardening of fronts within the committee. That's why he wants to use the first two months to interview experts first. After all, the inquiry is broad in scope, he said.
Where are the limitations of international cooperation of German intelligence services? What are Americans allowed to do in Germany and what not? Did German authorities know about the practices of the NSA? Who operates and secures the Internet hubs - the sites that were used to get information? The investigation committee has to tackle all of these questions.

But what should also be part of the discussion about intelligence agencies is the realization that intelligence agencies are always interested in the data of their citizens, according to Binninger. What should be done is correcting the movement away from mass collection of data and towards targeted identity checks.

are people who would have our Constitution become a suicide note.

Well, he is not president, so it really don't matter what he would do. I wouldn't pardon him and I doubt Obama will. Snowden revealed things which were good but in the process he probably let things out of the bag which put people in danger or otherwise compromised operations or who knows what else.

Only a fraction of the NSA's spying activities has been revealed to the public, claims German journalist Holger Stark in his new book. In an interview, he tells DW more about how the "surveillance matrix" functions.

[...]
Germany is a victim on the one hand and a co-perpetrator on the other. In various areas, the German government is one of the NSA's targets. The most spectacular of these was definitely the bugging of the German chancellor's cell phone, but the files also contain records of other Germans being monitored. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) - the special US court for these matters - issued a verdict that monitoring Germany is legitimate.

At the same time, as a member of a joint secret-service operation, Germany is one of the NSA's partners. The Federal Intelligence Service conducts various activities together with the NSA related to the fiber optic cables carrying Internet data. The Federal Intelligence Service organizes access and then shares the data with the NSA.
[...]

Well, he is not president, so it really don't matter what he would do.

EU court rules against requirement to keep data of telecom users
(Reuters) - The European Union's highest court ruled on Tuesday that an EU directive requiring telecoms companies to store the communications data of EU citizens for up to two years was invalid.

"The Court of Justice declares the Data Retention Directive to be invalid," the court said in a statement.

The data-retention directive was introduced in March 2006 after bombings on public transport in Madrid and London. The aim was to give the authorities better tools to investigate and prosecute organized crime and terrorism.

It required telecoms service providers to keep traffic and location data as well as other information needed to identify the user, but not the content of the communication. The records were to be kept from six to 24 months.

Austrian and Irish courts asked the European Court of Justice to rule if the law was in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. The law also caused a public outcry in Germany.

"It entails a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data, without that interference being limited to what is strictly necessary," the court said.

"The Court takes the view that, by requiring the retention of those data and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, the directive interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data," it said.

"Furthermore, the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the persons concerned a feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance," it said.

(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski; Editing by Philip Blenkinsop, Larry King)

It states that the retention of data required by the directive is not such as to adversely affect the essence of the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data. The directive does not permit the acquisition of knowledge of the content of the electronic communications as such and provides that service or network providers must respect certain principles of data protection and data security.

Furthermore, the retention of data for the purpose of their possible transmission to the competent national authorities genuinely satisfies an objective of general interest, namely the fight against serious crime and, ultimately, public security.

However, the Court is of the opinion that, by adopting the Data Retention Directive, the EU legislature has exceeded the limits imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality.

In that context, the Court observes that, in view of the important role played by the protection of personal data in the light of the fundamental right to respect for private life and the extent and seriousness of the interference with that right caused by the directive, the EU legislature’s discretion is reduced, with the result that review of that discretion should be strict.

Some more background information - "privacy is gone" as Frank likes to say.

The court ruled that the directive - passed by he Council of Ministers in 2006, after terrorist attacks in London and Madrid - amounted to a grave intrusion into the private lives of citizens in the 28-nation EU.
The court declared the directive as "invalid".

This "Directive 2006/24/EC" had been challenged by an Irish human rights organization, the government of the Austrian state of Carinthia and tenthousands of Austrians.

Already in In 2010, the German Federal Constitutional Court annulled German law stemming from the EU directive.

Just a short time ago, the European Commission had threatened to fine Germany for failing to uphold the 2006 directive.

This judicial ruling is likely to impact on trans-Atlantic debate over the mass surveillance by intelligence agencies, notably the NSA.

Snowden ...

President Andrew Jackson, who disagreed, (supposedly) said after the ruling:

“John Marshall has made his decision…now let him enforce it.”

I suspect that same kind of question will arise here, Walter.[/b]

The US has spied on the staff of prominent human rights organisations, Edward Snowden has told the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Europe's top human rights body.

Giving evidence via a videolink from Moscow, Snowden said the National Security Agency – for which he worked as a contractor – had deliberately snooped on bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

He told council members: "The NSA has specifically targeted either leaders or staff members in a number of civil and non-governmental organisations … including domestically within the borders of the United States." Snowden did not reveal which groups the NSA had bugged.

The assembly asked Snowden if the US spied on the "highly sensitive and confidential communications" of major rights bodies such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, as well as on similar smaller regional and national groups. He replied: "The answer is, without question, yes. Absolutely."

In live testimony, Snowden also gave a forensic account of how the NSA's powerful surveillance programs violate the EU's privacy laws. He said programs such as XKeyscore, revealed by the Guardian last July, use sophisticated data mining techniques to screen "trillions" of private communications.

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