“Checks and balances” thrown in the garbage: A new out-of-control spying loophole

Emptywheel’s Marcy Wheeler writes on Salon:

It has been a month since former State Department section chief for Internet freedom John Napier Tye wrote a Washington Post Op-Ed warning about Executive Order 12333 — the order the executive branch uses to self-authorize spying overseas. “The order as used today,” Tye wrote, “threatens our democracy.” Since that time, his concerns have generated enough attention — in part because of his testimony to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and a New York Times article on the order — that the Director of National Intelligence Civil Liberties Officer Alexander Joel has seen fit to try to rebut Tye’s claims.

In a column at Politico, Joel engages in some of the same old misleading jargon the intelligence community has used for 14 months, emphasizing that the NSA won’t “target” an American without the assertion he has some tie to a foreign power.