Slashdot Mirror
NSA Overstepped the Law On Wiretaps
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that legal and operational problems surrounding the NSA's surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees, and a secret national security court, and that the NSA had been engaged in 'overcollection' of domestic communications of Americans. The practice has been described as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional. The Justice Department has acknowledged that there had been problems with the NSA surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems, but said in a statement that 'when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.' The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July to the law that regulates the government's wiretapping powers, as well as the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects. Joe Klein at Time Magazine says the bad news is that 'the NSA apparently has been overstepping the law,' but the good news is that 'one of the safeguards in the [FISA Reform] law is a review procedure that seems to have the ability to catch the NSA when it's overstepping — and that the illegal activities have been exposed, and quickly.'"
I wind up in trouble. I hope the NSA does too
Nullius in verba
Telephone switches have had specific features to support this type of activity since at least the 1980's. The only difference, now, is that these practices are seeing the light of day.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Isn't this the same Obama administration that recently defended warrantless wiretapping?
I mean, wow. They violated the law the first time, and then after the law was changed to allow that, they did it again?
I mean, holy crap, who'da thunk?
Duh? Did anybody besides those who voted for this think differently?
Who bend the laws of freedom to fit their needs.
Bush was no conservative.
"When inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them."
If such systemic negligence resulted in loss of employment, fines, and/or quality time in a federal PMITA prison, then perhaps they would take it seriously and make sure it didn't fucking happen in the first place.
Okay, so what? What's to stop the next Bush/Cheney right wing douche-o-rama from doing the same thing? If there are no consequences, the next time they get a chance they'll do the same thing. We know we can't count on the FBI and NSA to police themselves, the Supreme Court is loaded with people who don't care about the Constitution, so NSA gets a slap on the wrist and new guidance. Big hairy deal. They'd do the same thing again if some sock puppet Attorney General told them it was okay.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/obama-doj-worse-than-bush "The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Adminstration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes."
Just one example of newspeak framing:
"The practice has been described as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional."
"one official" -- makes the following sound like an "official" statement without anyone putting their name on the line. Who is the official?
"said it was believed to be" -- implies that others agree and that this is the general belief. Governmentsprech for "some people say."
Just reading this frames the subject, even if you know the announcement is full of s***. And framing is 90% of the battle. (Google George Lakoff on that one)
But you will notice that he didn't say it will stop!
We have secret laws and secret courts convicting you with secret evidence. Is there anyone here who STILL thinks we are doing the right thing?
Power granted is power abused.
I know that slashdot believes that information should be free. (And AP was wrong in accusing google because IIRC, Google does indeed license AP material from AP and they do pay AP money), but this is precisely the kind of story that you wouldn't get from bloggers or non-paid (free) journalism.
I wonder how much money NY Times paid for this story? $500k, $1m? So, remember, I will be modded down for this, but as you rail against the government for over-stomping our rights, this was the work of a paid Journalist or paid Team of Journalists who used their Journalism Major to bring home a paltry paycheck (well, paltry for those of us in the IT or engineering industry).
Stories like these make me hope that the newspaper industry finds a way to make money, because reporting like this takes money, but in a rare move by Big Content, that charged money benefits us all. (Unlike the latest Britney Spears release or Hollywood Movie).
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
...and the pope is unintentionally catholic and bears unintentionally poo in woods.
No sig today...
The practice has been described as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.
My 10 year old daughter uses that excuse. 'I didn't mean to throw cookie dough at my friend.
'For 10 minutes.'
Joe Klein at Time Magazine says the bad news is that 'the NSA apparently has been overstepping the law,' but the good news is that 'one of the safeguards in the [FISA Reform] law is a review procedure that seems to have the ability to catch the NSA when it's overstepping -- and that the illegal activities have been exposed, and quickly.'"
Yeah, quickly. They were exposed almost 5 years [1] ago. An entire term of office for the US chief executive, for those of you keeping score. The FISA Reform act was not required to expose the activity. It was required to stop the activity. Maybe Time Magazine doesn't remember history very well, but we do. And we prefer not to implicitly lie with our choice of verb.
Nor do we believe for a moment that the activity actually was stopped. Secret (kangaroo) courts and secret meetings and the utterly worthless assurances of the US Justice Department. Of course it's still on-going. I don't even have to wear a tin-foil hat to proclaim that. I don't sound the least bit nutty, saying that, because even major media reported the story, in detail, for months, and nobody cared.
You think they're going to stop now? Of course they're not. Nobody was shot for treason when they endorsed a program that raped the US Constitution. Nobody was sent to jail when they designed a spying program that raped the US Constitution. Nobody lost their job when they implemented a surveillance program that raped the US Constitution. Nobody had their pay docked for listening to the phone calls of random citizens. Nobody got their knuckles rapped with a ruler for reading the email of random citizens. No, instead, they got condemned in the press. Oooooooo. The horror.
They got away with it. Completely and utterly and totally. So why would they stop? When there are no negative consequences whatsoever, there's no reason at all to stop.
The saddest part of all is that it can not be stopped. If Congress chose to do something about it, the members who led the effort would be pilloried as partisan and would lose reelection. Daring to stand on principle would result in losing their job, because that's what the voters think is right.
Oh my people...
...than to ask permission.
When you let the fox guard the hen house. Some chicks are bound to disappear. If you did not expect this then you had you head up your A$$.
The Navy Motto "IF it ain't broke Fix It" "A day is wasted if you don't learn something new"
.
They need some better IT folks.
.
Ok, being serious now, laws aren't going to do much when you have people at the helm of filtering data on a infrastructure based on today's technology. The agency knows it and any technology wonk does too. FISA laws are more passive and do not give you non-linear 'powers': to reverse something already done in this context is pretty much impossible (just like credit fraud situations). Just give everyone 256-AES where we make the keys and it's a done deal.
When were U.S. citizens given rights to privacy over a public infrastructure such as phone lines. If you are out on a public street talking to someone and a cop hears you talking about doing something illegal, you should get in trouble. Telephone lines are public infrastructure and thus are a controlled by the government. We are given privacy in our own private homes, but I am not sure when this right to privacy has been extended to public areas (including public infrastructure such as the internet or telephone lines). The government can police there roads and get you for doing illegal things if they are road related or not. Why should other public infrastructure be different. If you are not doing anything wrong then it shouldnt matter.
Since my phone is in my home I have every right to privacy to talk to whom I please in there home without having the gooberment listen in.
The Navy Motto "IF it ain't broke Fix It" "A day is wasted if you don't learn something new"
My bank has a record of every purchase I make, my doctor has my medical history, and my ISP knows what web sites I visit, but I'm not worried. So why do I care if the federal government has that information? Because I don't trust them, and for good reason. The Patriot Act was supposed to protect us from terrorists, but as soon as it was enacted the government used it to enforce copyright violations, kick homeless people out of a train station, and investigate drug dealers. Demonstrate some integrity and you'll earn people's trust.
aha!!!!!1111
Obama is scrutinizing NSA wiretapping!!!!
You fools thought there would be Change! I am so cynical and clever!! Ron Paul 2010!!
I dunno 'bout you, but when I accidentally turn logging on some high-volume task, I usually find out about it pretty quickly when /var/log fills up.
Now, while I doubt that the high-volume task the NSA was monitoring -- like, oh, let's say all voice and data communications in the US -- went to /var/log, the fact is that when most folks build out storage for data collection, it tends to be built in proportion to the amount of data to be collected, plus some moderate wiggle room for unexpected overages. Exactly how much wiggle room you allocate depends, of course, on how big you think a plausible overage is, but since cost is a factor, even for -- or so I presume -- organizations with black budgets, you don't build out multiple petabytes to hold a couple of gigs worth of data, for example.
So if the NSA was really only intending to capture a few, carefully targeted communications, you'd think someone would have noticed very quickly if they'd accidentally recorded more than they'd intended. For fucking years.
I'm not sure what's worse: the original crime, lying about it, or this gross insult to the intelligence of everyone listening to their transparent fictions.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
You're familiar with careers right? If I break the law to further my career am less guilty? Something always motives both good and bad behavior, the idea with the bad I think is not to reward it.
Quack, quack.
. . . who were his biggest supporters (and are now pretty much his only supporters).
who were his biggest supporters (and are now pretty much his only supporters).
Name names.
The NSA cannot "do" anything because it is nothing more than a legal fiction.
It is the people who are employed under that legal fiction that commit the crimes.
So, who will be fired for those crimes? It should be very simple to find the people who did it. And the people who authorized it. Etc.
In God We Trust. All others we monitor.
They also listen to our soldiers have phone sex when they call in from (overseas), which makes them possibly homosexual, but definietly perverted.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
suddenoutbreakofcommonsense
They have been doing this for over a decade now. And nobody is going to go to prison for it. Good times.
What if I make the "mistake" of killing somebody? Should I get away with an "Oopsie, I admit there was a mistake made, but it's been corrected, I'm not going to kill anybody from now on"?
Too martial? Ok. Then I make the mistake of not paying for that shiny DVD player on my way out of Walmart. Think "Oopsie"'s gonna work?
Even more trivial: "Oopsie, I wasn't making available any copyrighted content. I just accidentally left my MP3 folder world-readable. But that's been fixed now" is *definitely* going to spare me 150.000 USD/song lawsuits... right? Right?! RIGHT??
Laws are there for a reason, whether I (or the NSA) like it or not. You break them, you go to jail. It's as simple as that.
. . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception.
And there is one case where this functionality was used by someone who was not authorized to do so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_telephone_tapping_case_2004-2005.
Or maybe they were authorized, but by someone who was not authorized to authorize them.
These spook stories become intentionally murky as they progress.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
. . . he is stationed in a RAID array in our data center. He keeps me company, when I'm doing the graveyard shift.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's interesting that surveillance and data retention by the government is framed as a moral issue in these discussions. I happen to think that laziness is at least as big a factor, and it's what really drives behavior in many cases. It's all about the path of least resistance. In the old days of paper-based records, you had to go through several extra steps to keep a record, using a copier, for example (or carbon paper before that). Even the old computer systems had bulky, expensive tape drives which held fairly little data. Assuming you wanted to keep any given bit of information around once you'd grabbed it, you then had to file it, keep it dry, and so on. This meant that data retention cost money in terms of creation, storage and indexing (which they used to call "filing," and it took even more people), so you had to justify the expense of keeping a record of an event.
Fast forward a few decades: nowadays, if you run a network of any kind (even a small one at home), you have various servers, firewalls, daemons, and so forth running all the time, each writing the details of their activities to various logfiles which sit on disk and cost very little to index, search and store. In addition, since the records are created automatically, you have to actually *do something* to get rid of them. That means adding an extra "deletion step", whether it's writing a script or otherwise, which means at least some expertise is required, which means you have to pay someone, and, if you are in government or business, you have to justify to someone why you are spending money to have less information about your systems, users, what-have-you. This is especially problematic if someone can find you blameworthy for doing so. Which they will, especially if it is politically or financially advantageous to do so. And it always is.
All of this is obvious; I'm not saying anything new or interesting here.
C-x C-c
Who was in charge of Congress last July, who is in charge of the DHS now, and who is in charge at the White House (hint: it ain't the guy who sits in the Oval Office).
Society subjectively defines the lines that should not be crossed; apparently, this society has decided the lines for Nazi's is different from our own side.
Soldiers lose their lives for useless causes, missions, or by accident-- that is reality! It is the risk they take. One can only hope their bad luck results in something worthwhile. Most people die for nothing and some of them are soldiers.
I can not see why consequences less than death are so horrible we can not dish it out to even well intentioned grunts. Obviously, if you place yourself in a double-bind situation you risk two bad outcomes; but it can be worth the risk. (If politicians had real risk would most the cowards we have today even have tried to get in office?)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
More accurately, it would be:
"Excuse me Mr.ISP, we need to get a tap on your network."
"Do you have a warrant or court order?"
"No, I don't need a warrant for up to 7 days if it is a US citizen or up to one year if it is not. Here is my authorization from the Attorney General."
"Ok, can you point me the law?"
"The US government has conveniently published it online at http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/50c36.txt" The pertinent section is Sec. 1802.
Sec. 1802. Electronic surveillance authorization without court
order; certification by Attorney General; reports to
Congressional committees; transmittal under seal; duties and
compensation of communication common carrier; applications;
jurisdiction of court
-STATUTE-
(a)(1) Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the
Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a
court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence
information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General
certifies in writing under oath that -
(A) the electronic surveillance is solely directed at -
(i) the acquisition of the contents of communications
transmitted by means of communications used exclusively between
or among foreign powers, as defined in section 1801(a)(1), (2),
or (3) of this title; or
(ii) the acquisition of technical intelligence, other than
the spoken communications of individuals, from property or
premises under the open and exclusive control of a foreign
power, as defined in section 1801(a)(1), (2), or (3) of this
title;
(B) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance
will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United
States person is a party; and
(C) the proposed minimization procedures with respect to such
surveillance meet the definition of minimization procedures under
section 1801(h) of this title; and
.
.
.
except that the court shall not have jurisdiction to
grant any order approving electronic surveillance directed solely
as described in paragraph (1)(A) of subsection (a) of this section
unless such surveillance may involve the acquisition of
communications of any United States person.
The proper response is "I don't believe you have a warrant." The burden of proof is on them. Sounds like someone was all too happy to roll over.
News flash: You can not trust the government to follow its own laws.
Also in tonights headlines, Clay Aiken is gay.
This just in: Black people have been spotted in Harlem.
Story at '11.
Not "even if". It is treason. It is a direct, intentional violation of the constitution and a willful violation of the oaths of office of everybody involved. There isn't anything to be debated, because there is no counter argument possible. It is treason. Everybody involved needs to be put to death or we need to admit that America has no respect for the rule of law or for its founding principles. Personally, I don't support the death penalty, but the law demands their deaths for their willfully chosen treasonous actions, so my statement is an absolute fact.
*
Levying war against the U.S. absolutely includes willfully violating the Constitution under color of law: such actions rely on the arms of other governmental traitors committing treason against the Constitution. As they are actively levying war, unless they are prisoners, they are no more entitled to a trial before being shot than invading soldiers would be. If the acts are overt, if they are perceived by more than one person, reliant on the arms of a group and serving to attack the States or the provisions of Constitutional government that define the United States, or adhering to or giving aid and comfort to those who do so, then all parts of the Militia - that is the whole body of armed citizens - have a duty under the supreme law to defend the United States and its Constitution with military force, and all citizens have the duty to withhold aid and comfort to the perpetrators of such treason and not to adhere to their cause; any lesser law is inapplicable, and any attempt to punish such defense of the United States under the color of law backed by armed groups is itself treason and levying war against the United States.
Those who hold offices under the Constitution and rule against the plain provisions of the Constitution - whether taking powers for the government which were not delegated by the people or abridging rights of citizens - when they issue such usurping orders enforced by the arms of bailiffs, sheriffs, marshals, or others, these officers are levying war against the people, the Constitution, and the United States; they are guilty of treason, as are their adherents and those who aid them.
It is the right and duty of all citizens to defend the United States against the armed attacks of these traitors and to war on them as they war on our rights as a nation.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Not saying it is a good law. If you don't like it vote the politicians out of office who voted for it. I tried to! IANAL but the law also does not say the company is obligated to comply with the authorization by the Attorney General which is why the government felt the need to grant immunity to the companies who do. I suspect the company does have to comply with a warrant or court order or face financial consequences. I personally think that it is written poorly. It does not say, that once the wire tap occurs, you are required to file for a warrant or court order for the wire tap and explain your reasoning even if you no longer feel the need for the wiretap and/or have discontinued the wiretap. If the reasoning is poor and the warrant/court order is not granted, the government should be required to notify the victim and pay restitution. There is also nothing saying you could not wiretap for 7 days minus 1 minute and skip one minute then wiretap for another 7 days minus 1 minute and skip one minute and repeat, all without a court order. I personally think it is set up to steal intellectual property from people so that it can be given to the politician's buddies. That said, there is no law saying you cannot listen in on wireless communications, so always assume cell phones and wifi networking are "wireless tapped" by the government. Yet another thing I think is wrong.