US Senators Concerned With Surveillance Bill "Loophole"

zer0point writes "The law lets U.S. agencies monitor the communications of foreigners outside the U.S. But two senators are questioning whether a loophole allows the storage and search of messages from Americans that are picked up inadvertently while foreigners are being monitored. The intelligence community has repeatedly said it takes steps to minimize the data collected on Americans. Among the senators’ concerns: that the administration hasn’t been able to estimate how many people in the U.S. have had their information reviewed under the program."

Comments

Hasn't been able to?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I suspect the truth is "hasn't been willing to".

People have been willing to ignore these sorts of things since they can at least pretend it's probably doesn't involve their own information. If the truth came out, and the government admitted it was electronically sifting through virtually all internal US communications... I suspect people would start to get riled up over it.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[mr1911]

You underestimate the apathy of the average citizen. Or overestimate their intelligence. It is hard to tell them apart sometimes.

This is to protect the children from the terrorists. The government said so. They even nudged me and winked, so I know it is true.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[cpu6502]

It is the natural order of things for people in charge to want MORE power, not less. They are not about to give-up the ability to record Americans conversations. In fact the current government is stone-walling Congress not just on this issue (how many messages were caught "accidentally"), but also the gun-running program into Mexico.

Congressman: "I have an email here that says you were aware of the program. It's addressed to you."
Holder: "That refers to the previous Wide Receiver program under Bush."
Congressman: "Uh no, the email says right here, and I quote, 'Fast&Furious'. That would be under President Obama's and your watch."
Holder: "The email is wrong. It was Bush." :-o

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[Charliemopps]

I don't really think it's apathy or lack of intelligence. There are plenty of people that are incredibly intelligent that do not have degrees or high paying salaried jobs. Have you ever operated heavy equipment like an excavator? I know guys that are nearly savants with those things. Not a one of them cares about politics. They chose to apply their wisdom and wits to something tangible, something they can change directly. I can understand that. So much of politics is slight of hand, trickery, lies and deceit that many people just refuse to participate any longer. I can understand that as well.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[drinkypoo]

If more of those people actually particpated, put themselves into the mix, then perhaps they would be able to change more.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[__aaltlg1547]

The left yells you the right is trying to take away your rights. The right tells you the left is trying to take away your rights. They both tell you the other side is wrecking tgr economy. Unless you are paying VERY close attention, it's hard to sort out fact from paranoid fantasy.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[Anonymous Coward]

The government wants to know what you think of it so it can help you more.

It's being a caring big brother, see.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[s.petry]

I read a great article on something much bigger than what they currently do, and it's all perfectly legal according to the article. The NSA super compute center being built currently, scheduled to be on line 2013 has links already in place by agreements with the only provider for major telecom hubs in the US which is AT&T. According to the article the NSA will be snooping, storing, and even trying to crack the encryption for all internet traffic both foreign and domestic, and all without a warrant.

Simply put, if it's not legal now it will be next year with the activation of this new center.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[lightknight]

"They shout at each other across the aisle during the day" -> Of course they do. The Democrats are trying to broker a compromise with the Republicans whereby they can get access to the 'Candy Desk,' and the Republicans want nothing to do with it, because Senator What's-His-Face ends up eating all the cherry licorice.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[dkleinsc]

They're both kinda correct, and the reason is that they're focused on different sorts of rights.

The American right is trying to take away the ability to get an abortion, to organize a union, to communicate and travel freely without being spied on by the US government, to use recreational drugs, and to protest in any meaningful way.

The American left is trying to take away the ability of just anybody to own deadly weapons, to make contracts or sales that they consider harmful to the overall economy (particularly involving labor), to pollute the water and air, and in some cases to see anything really disturbing.

Different people care about different sets of those, and that's the kind of thing that determines where you sit on the political spectrum.

Re:Hasn't been able to?

[mcgrew]

The left is trying to take away some rights, the right is trying to take away different rights, both are trying to take away some of the same rights, but as to the economy, that one's simple: Bush was the only President to leave office with fewer Americans employed than when he took office. He went into office in a booming economy and left the economy in the worst shape it's been in since the Great Depression. Of course, Clinton is partly responsible for the housing/banking collapse (along with the Republican congress that passed the deregulation that caused it). Two wars depleted the treasury, Bush inherited a balanced budget and left Obama with the biggest defecit in history.

And now the Republicans are running another businessman like Bush. One who says "I like to fire people" and who got rich doing just that.

Neither side cares about you. It's who gives the biggest campaign bribes.

Of course, nobody's completely to blame for the shitty economy, right now the European debt crisis is dragging the whole world down.

Ron Wyden

[NoKaOi]

When I clicked on the article I was wholly unsurprised to find Ron Wyden was one of the senators. Every time there's something in the news about a bit of sanity coming from a senator, it seems to have Ron Wyden's name. It's encouraging that there's a senator like that out there, but it's discouraging that it's only 1% of them. I wish we could get one or two of those for my state.

Re:Ron Wyden

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Bernie Sanders. I first learned of him back in the 90's when I would watch C-SPAN. Every single vote they ever held I would see the I-Yea, or I-Nea exactly as I would have voted. I later learned that the "I" was Bernie Sanders.

What...?

[Mitreya]

But two senators are questioning whether a loophole allows the storage and search of messages from Americans that are picked up inadvertently while foreigners are being monitored. The intelligence community has repeatedly said it takes steps to minimize the data collected on Americans.

What does that 2nd sentence even mean and why was it included? Either they are allowed, which case no need to minimize the data on Americans or they are not allowed to. "Taking steps to minimize" means nothing quantifiable (up to 100% reduced!).
Even assuming I trust everyone here, that is still a totally meaningless and irrelevant statement included in the article.

Re:What...?

[L4t3r4lu5]

The simple solution to this problem is to throw out anybody who doesn't state unequivocally that they will stop the collection of data on US citizens.

Senator 1: "We will take steps to minimise the collection of US communications."
Voters: "Get out."
Senator 2: "We will drastically reduce the scope of the project to exclude the communications of US citizens as much as possible.
Voters: "Get out."
Senator 3: "We will stop collecting data on communications made to and from US citizens."
Voters: "How will you do that?"
Senator 3: "We will scrap the program, and put in legislation ensuring that this kind of warrantless tapping of communications is heavily punished in the future."
Voters: "Give that man a job!"

Can you folks please just grow a backbone and get this shit sorted out?

I never would have guessed...

[bobbied]

What this article leaves out and the reader should know, is that it is illegal for the federal government to monitor domestic communications without a warrant. There is no such protection afforded non-citizens outside of the USA. At issue is when the CIA (or other foreign intelligence gathering organization of the Federal Government) is monitoring a foreign national outside of the USA who may be talking to someone inside the states. The "loophole" they are talking about basically is that as long as the collection target is not a domestic US citizen, any information gathered is legal to keep, even if it involves a domestic party. It must also be understood that such evidence would NOT be admissible in court for a criminal trial having not been obtained though a warrant. I wonder if it could legally be used as probable cause to obtain the warrant though.

I personally don't see the huge issue with this, unless we are seeing a rash of prosecutions based on such evidence. I have heard of no such cases. Further, unless the Fed is really not trying to filter the data at all, it is unlikely that they have much data that they have to purge. After all, this IS an investigative effort that targets non-US-citizens so it makes sense their filtering is pretty good, or this effort would be useless.

I'll guess that the guys with the tinfoil hats who are looking for the black helicopters won't like this, but I'd be much more worried about Google or Facebook collection efforts than this.

Re:I never would have guessed...

[Mitreya]

I personally don't see the huge issue with this, unless we are seeing a rash of prosecutions based on such evidence.

"We have sought repeatedly to gain an understanding of how many Americans have had their phone calls or emails collected and reviewed under this statute, but we have not been able to obtain even a rough estimate of this number," Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado wrote ... The senators said in the report that the Director of National Intelligence had told them it was not feasible to come up with such a number.

If nothing else, I worry that even the few senators who may be interested in protecting American rights are blatantly snubbed by the CIA when trying to do so. That doesn't concern you?

Re:I never would have guessed...

[cheekyjohnson]

I personally don't see the huge issue with this

I do. It allows the potential for abuse, and I see it as an unnecessary power to have. Especially when it allows them to spy on citizens. No, I'm not going to blindly trust the government or their filters that are supposedly "pretty good."

I'll guess that the guys with the tinfoil hats

You needn't have a tinfoil hat to see that humans tend to abuse their power when given too much of it. History is filled with such things, and I certainly don't want to take any unnecessary risks.

Re:I'm concerned

[bobbied]

So do you suggest that we apply the same rules of evidence used in our courts to inelegance gathering overseas? So shall we just go to the international courts to get warrants? I don't think that's a workable solution.

Re:I'm concerned

[Tanuki64]

with the fact that they are not concerned with the rights of people outside the Holy Land of the United States of America. Typical.

No problem. I am not concerned with the rights of Americans, e.g. I feel free to ignore their copyrights.

NSA Response:

[Greyfox]

"Nothing to see here Senator Likes-to-be-spanked-by-nuns-while-wearing-diapers and Senator Visits-livegoatporn.com-every-fifteen-minutes. No personally-identifying information is being collected and certainly wouldn't get out unless completely by accident."

I hate to do it

[Charliemopps]

I hate to do it, but someone has to.
How many people have been killed by international terrorists on US soil in all of history?
How much have we spend on counter-terrorism efforts in the past 10 years?
Do some math... and we're spending billions per civilian life to stop terrorist attacks.
Lets just stop for a while and see what happens.

Now you're going to jump up and yell "That's cold! It's horrible! How could you?!?!"
Well, yea... fine, I'll accept that. But what if we instead spent all those billions on cancer research?
Not only would we save far more lives, over a much longer term, but dieing from cancer is plain and simple a worse way to die that having your plane blown up or crashed.
Counter terrorism is an excuse to maintain our cold-war levels of military readiness that simply are not needed any longer. We need to stop, and think before we spend and bomb.

Re:I hate to do it

[s.petry]

You know, I really really hate straw man arguments. Especially when you are brainwashed in to thinking that's the only answer.

Did you know, that we have chemical detection units that could be installed in airports that detect chemicals in the air without intrusion. We also have numerous types of animals trained to do the same. Did you know that using either of those two methods would have caught the underwear bomber before they boarded a plane. No current methods including the naked scanner will pick up a surgically implanted bomb, so don't bother. Did you know that the naked scanner would have done little good in finding the allegedly used plastic box cutters in the 9/11 hijackings?

Did you know that using dogs, or the airborne detection would save loads of money? But you, you only see the option of the TSA. Yes, groping grandma is the only option right?

I won't even go further for an AC. Just do some research, people much smarter than you have already pointed to answers.

Re:I hate to do it

[dkleinsc]

Consider a much more clear and present danger than terrorism: drunk driving. It kills 11,000 people (including 3000 people who aren't the drunk driver) and costs approximately $115 billion worth of damage every year. That's roughly 1 9/11's worth of non-drunk-driving victims, 1.5 Hurricane Katrinas, and another 8000 drunks on top of that, every single year. But because it's something that happens at a rate of few dozen a day, we don't notice it as much (unless, of course, it's you or somebody you love who got caught up in it).

Imagine what might happen if we spent as much time and resources stopping drunk driving as we did stopping terrorist attacks.

Shock: secret court decides itself is legal.

[whoever57]

She pointed out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has repeatedly found that the collection program is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution

Secret court decides that its reason to exist is legal..... news at 11:00

Re:Sure...not!

[whoever57]

Don't make international calls.... Specifically, don't call somebody in the list of countries where the bad guys frequent....

Like, uh.. the United Kingdom (7/7) or Spain, or, pretty much any large country in Western Europe.

The US is not then prying on the traffic of S.AM?

[jon_doh2.0]

Oh no, god forbid "Americans" are subject to the same treatment as that which they mete out. The self perceived exceptionalism of the US is so jarring, created equal indeed.

Re:Crsnk up the FUD to 11.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Before 9/11, the government already had a law in place allowing them to place wiretaps FIRST and then request a warrant up two two weeks after the fact. Post 9/11, after the Bush administration got caught systematically placing and maintaining wiretaps without a warrant, they asked for legal approval for US security agencies to use their own discretion on placing wiretaps without need of a warrant, ever. They argued the current law, requiring the eventual issue of a warrant after the fact, to be unworkable because of the sheer volume of communications they wanted to monitor.

At that point, a lot of people who don't normally buy into conspiracy theories came to the conclusion the government intended to data-mine all telecommunications traffic in some manner. Now, we have an NSA facility being constructed in Utah - slated for completion next year, I believe - that has the openly stated purpose of doing just this.

So, yeah - I think it's safe to assume the government is monitoring me, you, and every other US citizen.

Re:I'm concerned

[dkleinsc]

to inelegance gathering overseas

Man, do we have to outsource everything? If I need to gather inelegance, I can just go to my local Wal-Mart.