USA Freedoms

Remember back just a short way (last summer) to when post-Snowden reforms (otherwise known as the USA Freedom Act) to our scandal-ridden domestic spying machinery included appointing a civilian's representative to the FISA court.  Here's how that's working.

An independent lawyer assigned to represent Americans’ privacy interests before the nation’s top-secret spy court failed to persuade a judge to block FBI agents from searching intelligence databases to hunt for evidence of traditional crimes rather than restricting them to national security probes, according to a newly declassified court opinion.

  LATimes

Case closed.  I bet that attorney tried really, really hard.

FISA judges have approved the spying effort each time it has been submitted for review since 2008. But Hogan’s 80-page opinion was the first to rely on advice from an outside privacy advocate, known as an amicus curae, to help him determine the legality of the initiative.

The advocate was attorney Amy Jeffress, a former top national security prosecutor at the Justice Department who is now a defense attorney in Washington.

  LA Times

A privacy advocate who was a top national prosecutor at the DOJ. Hmmmm.

It is only the second publicly disclosed instance in which the court has used an outside lawyer to examine an aspect of the government's spying programs.

Last September, the court asked attorney Preston Burton to examine whether the government could retain bulk telephone metadata that it had been told to destroy. Investigators wanted to keep the data for an extra few months so it could ensure the accuracy of information it would attain under the more targeted procedures enacted last year by Congress. Burton agreed that it was permissible to do so.

Keeping Americans free.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.