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NSA's Role In Terror Cases Concealed From Defense Lawyers
Rick Zeman writes "'Confidentiality is critical to national security.' So wrote the Justice Department in concealing the NSA's role in two wiretap cases. However, now that the NSA is under the gun, it's apparently not so critical, according to New York attorney Joshua Dratel: 'National security is about keeping illegal conduct concealed from the American public until you're forced to justify it because someone ratted you out.' The first he heard of the NSA's role in his client's case was 'when [FBI deputy director Sean] Joyce disclosed it on CSPAN to argue for the effectiveness of the NSA's spying.' Dratel challenged the legality of the spying in 2011, and asked a federal judge to order the government to produce the wiretap application the FBI gave the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify the surveillance. 'Disclosure of the FISA applications to defense counsel – who possess the requisite security clearance – is also necessary to an accurate determination of the legality of the FISA surveillance, as otherwise the defense will be completely in the dark with respect to the basis for the FISA surveillance,' wrote Dratel. According to Wired, 'The government fought the request in a 60-page reply brief (PDF), much of it redacted as classified in the public docket. The Justice Department argued that the defendants had no right to see any of the filings from the secret court, and instead the judge could review the filings alone in chambers."
So have NSA denied their involvement in taking facebook down today?
why showing your hole cards before the hands are actually played?
Welcome to Democratic People's Republic of America.
And by the way who the FUCK is overseeing the chain of evidence?
The right to face your accuser. In a regular court, all evidence being used against a person has to be in both the prosecutors and defenses possession. I watch enough Law and Order to know this :) (Also, my neighbours are lawyers)
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
NSA is now shown to be an anti-american organisation, anti-constitutional, illegal in its very nature.
It should be shut down, spending on NSA should be brought down to 0 and people working in it should be looked at individually, because each one of them is violating the law and the management should be imprisoned (but at least impeached) for lying to Congress.
NSA has a role in terror cases alright, it's creating terror. It's terrorizing Americans (and others as well by the way, not that it matters to Americans much).
roman_mir
I felt I needed a dose of stupidity, so I tuned into one of the news channels to see what they were saying about this case. After they were done with their character assassination of Edward Snowden (as if it has anything to do with the NSA's spying), they decided to apply some brilliant logic to the situation: Since Snowden is so clearly a dirty traitor and can't be trusted, we should all trust the guys from the NSA to do what's right. Evidently, if one person cannot be trusted, you must trust the secretive guy who is in direct opposition to the other guy...
And this comes from the people who claim to want small government. Yeah, okay. Small government... unless we think something will help stop the terrorists, and in that case, the government should do whatever it wants and violate the constitution as it wants!
So you lose the right to know your accuser, the basis on which you're accused, and the ability to see the evidence against you.
But you have to trust us, if he wasn't a bad person we wouldn't be watching him. We're just not allowed to tell you why.
This is getting pretty scary, and it seems like it undermines some pretty basic rights of the accused. Because apparently you could be tried and convicted without ever being told what for.
The US (and sadly by extension most every other country) is ceasing to be free, and starting to get to the level of the of Soviets in terms of being able to do anything in terms of state security.
Sad. This freedom thing has been a nice experiment, but not we're moving towards the global police state -- or at least a globe filled with a bunch of different police states.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Congress should be impeaching the President, and then in an act of real patriotism impeach themselves.
99% of Congress went along with Bush's illegal anticonstitutional plan, and then went along a second time to Obama's tune.
Fucking traitors that they are.
Confidentiality is critical to national security.
Call tracking is critical to national security.
Email tracking is critical to national security.
Location tracking is critical to national security.
Financial tracking is critical to national security.
Social network tracking is critical to national security.
tracking is critical to national security.
I bet some dictators are feeling silly of not thinking of this before...lets call it democracy and then rollback the changes saying "critical for national security"
Why? Because they let it happen.
You don't give a toss about your own constitution, if you did, you would have done something by now.
For starters, the government are the ones making the law and they are usually elected, that together with knowing everything about you is asking for trouble. Especially since I believe in the US, you lose the right to vote once you become a "criminal".
Not saying that people are doing the right thing on facebook, but because people are idiots there doesn't mean we shouldn't protect them from government. People simply don't know about this all happening in many cases, and its their fault and the fault of the people that do know. They really should be more interested, but the people that know should show more concern. If you never tell anybody you actually value your privacy a lot and they should as well, why would they, they probably assume you don't care either. Making a lot of commotion around all these things on slashdot isn't exactly going to make many more people aware of the facts.
An individual cannot "wage war." An organization that can only field a few attackers here and there cannot "wage war." Waging war implicitly means the ability to attack an enemy, occupy their land and drive out their political authority. Most terrorist organizations cannot field an army capable of occupying a one camel town for more than week, and their affiliates that can are not making war on us.
If the President can use his war powers on them, then he sure as heck can use them on MS13 or any other large scale criminal gang in the US as most of them have more power to inflict severe loss of life and property than 90% of the Islamic terrorist groups.
1. Has evidence from PRISM been used to indict citizens of the US or its NATO allies. 2. Have any of those accused been denied trial and classed as "enemy combatants"? 3. Do any of the above now reside in Guantanamo Bay ? If all the above is true then PRISM has already been used in the worst way imaginable. I think you'll find that there are 2 Canadian citizens were held in Guantanemo, with a further 16 candidates for immigration or refugees. That's just Canada, I am sure there are more from other NATO partners. I'd be curious to know who was caught with PRISM or ECHELON?
It's yet another civil right plopping down into the toilet.
Yes, because Communist barbarism is vastly superior.
rewriting history since 2109
Isn't that a bedrock principle of our justice system? What would you do if you were on a jury where the prosecutor was allowed to talk about evidence and not even the defendant's attorney was allowed to to see the order that showed it was legally obtained?
Should the jury at that point disregard the evidence because they can presume it was illegally obtained?
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
- Hermann Goering
Communist barbarism, Capitalism barbarism ... both the Soviets and America have demonstrated that eventually you get fucked by either system of government, and both systems will conspire to take away your rights if they find it expedient.
If you think glorious Capitalism is sparing you from any of this stuff, you are somewhat clueless.
Unjust societies come in all colors and stripes, and America is already an unjust society, moving towards even more state control over the individual.
Capitalism is a system of defining who owns what, but it doesn't make any guarantees about what you get to do with the rest of it. In its current form, corporate profits are more important than human rights.
Eh, in their pure forms they are functionally identical.
withholding evidence from the defense because it's classified? That's akin to a show trial.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Communist barbarism, Capitalism barbarism ... both the Soviets and America have demonstrated that eventually you get fucked by either system of government
Capitalism is not a system of government. It is an economic strategy. Autocratic and democratic governments alike can make use of capitalism.
And yet it doesn't stop American and US corporations from doing business with and in China....
If prosecutor is allowed to present secret evidence to the judge, the defence lawyers should also have the right to present their own secret evidence that the prosecutor will not be able to see/hear. I wonder how fair they would find it...
Then why shouldn't the government have complete access to your data?
For the same reason that (some) people being exhibitionists shouldn't allow the government or some business to secretly install video cameras in my bathroom. And then when they are discovered have some idiot say (and be taken seriously) that everyone knows that you should sweep your bathroom for cameras and anyone who doesn't has no expectation of privacy.
As the technological means of snooping improve at a pace consistent with Moore's Law, and the "internet of things" increases the physical space that is internet connected, the expense and technological difficulty of maintaining any privacy will become prohibitive for any person who wishes to communicate at all.
Accepting the argument that nobody has any justifiable expectations of privacy under any conditions where a better informed person might not have an expectation of privacy is the sure path to nobody having any privacy anywhere.
I don't feel particularly terrorized, honestly.
And no, I don't want our premier signals intelligence group shut down for this.
Just pass some laws to ensure that this stuff only gets used in courts for actual terrorism or defense. I don't want to see even armed bank robbers thrown in jail due to NSA intel. Not unless they declassify it. That actually makes sense.
News flash for you.... those laws already exist, and are being willfully skirted as we type. What makes you think they will follow the "new" laws you propose?
I always find it funny how legal briefs are typically anything but.
moving towards even more state control over the individual
I was with you right up until there.
Who's the person or organization that oppresses you the most times each week? It's probably not the cops, because chances are you don't interact with cops on a regular basis. It's probably not the NSA, although they're reading your stuff and possibly listening to your phone calls and all sorts of other bad stuff. It's probably not the FBI, who you almost definitely don't interact with. Nope, it's probably your boss and the organization he or she represents that makes coercive demands on you, several days a week at least.
Now, your boss can't lock you up like the government can. But your boss can definitely screw up your life, for any reason or no reason at all, any time they want.
I am officially gone from
It is not the lack of morality in the powerful that should concern us, but rather the fact that lack of morality so often leads to power.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Then why shouldn't the government have complete access to your data? Honestly, we use Google, Facebook, ect... they all have detailed records of our activities and identities that they aggregate and sell for profit. Yet no one protests, as they enjoy the bread and circuses of free Facebook or YouTube. If people started to take their privacy seriously, to attribute a value to their individuality, then maybe we'd get somewhere. The internet is a cesspool, assume everyone is watching. If you don't want your secrets known, protect yourself. We are still in the stoneages of Internet development, imagine what it will be like in 20 years! Wake up people! Take responsibility! If the NSA doesn't get you, Chinese/Iranian/Russian/ect... hackers will.
Actually, in some ways, the most offensive thing about the whole NSA thing is that it's a one-way street. Most of us are resigned to life in a fishbowl at this stage, but they want to be outside the bowl. What's good for us ought to be good for them, within reason. Especially for a nation founded on the concept that ideas and information should flow freely. In large part because the previous government wasn't always so accommodating.
I don't really agree that "teh terrists" knowing how they can be monitored will make them more effective. If anything, I think the more ways they know they can be scrutinized, the more effort they would have to apply to avoidance instead of doing what we're all afraid of them doing, just as the software and media suppliers who obsess on DRM tend to provide lower-quality products. It isn't like we're proposing publishing a monthly "Terrorist's Guide to Avoiding Surveillance", anyway.
Then again, the whole NSA/Big Brother concept is just their version of the Cathedral. A Microsoft of Intelligence-gathering, if you will. In actuality, it appears far more plots are foiled by the Bazaar, where people on the street see something and do something. So the more information you hide from the people on the street, the more dependent they become on centralized protection. But in the Cathedral, they're using statistical methods because a relatively few people must handle a large amount of data. Anything can fail, but the more leveraged something is, the more probability that it will fail catastrophically.
Yet no one protests... If people started to take their privacy seriously, to attribute a value to their individuality, then maybe we'd get somewhere.
Protest, anger, and reservations don't occur until AFTER it becomes clear that you have been harmed. Afterall, if you aren't being harmed, it is hard to say that abuse is occuring.
It's not so much that people are enjoying the 'bread and circuses', but that human nature is to trust, until the trust is abused. While you may be right in your statement that trust is misplaced, you will find that it is very difficult to convince people NOT to trust by default.
I consider it something like trusting a Barber to give you a shave. You are trusting a person to literally place a razor sharp blade against your neck and do you no harm. That's a hell of a lot of trust to be placed in a stranger. But you aren't calling for people to implicitly distrust barbers and demand the adoption of safety razors instead of straight razors.
So why trust the barber? Because we have no actual experience with barbers slaughtering their customers. There isn't fear of abuse of that trust because there is no experience of that trust being abused (either first hand, or from friends/family being harmed).
Until people (or those close to them) are harmed by something, we won't think to care. Unfortunately for privacy advocates, the harm from having your privacy violated is hard to quantify, and therefore seems intangible and non-existent to normal people.
So don't get upset that people aren't up in arms, they won't be until the harm is either tangible, or quantifiable and relevant.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
This is the absolute worst, heart-breaking part of this slow imposition of the police state. Sure, you expect the spooks (spies) to want ever more data and unchecked power, and sure, you sadly expect elected officials to either be fascists (R) or cowards (D), but goddamnit Judges! Federal Judges are supposed to be the bulwark against blatant abuses of the Peoples constitutional rights, especially by the government!
For them to have just rolled over and rubber-stamped every FISA fishing expedition and allowing the DOJ to conduct Kafkaesque Star Chamber inquisitions is sickening and unforgiveable. Either they are as cowardous as the Ds, or they themselves have been blackmailed by data from PRISM, et al.
The reason is that people CHOOSE to share their lives via Facebook/Twitter/etc. I choose what I post on Twitter and other social networks and what I don't. If I text my wife something, I don't share that text (or the contents thereof) with everyone. I consider that private information. Were I to commit (or be suspected of committing) a crime, I wouldn't be surprised if the police got a warrant to look through my texts/call records. However, when a federal organization to look through my stuff just on the off chance that *MAYBE* I might *POSSIBLY* be doing something bad and to does so with no warrants or checks on their power, that becomes an invasion of privacy and an abuse of power.
Plus, who knows what this database is checking for. Today it is just for Terrorism and they claim they'll wipe the data after 5 years. Maybe in 2 years' time they'll decide to expand it to other crimes (actual or imagined) and keep the data for longer periods. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine this database eventually being used to "catch" suspected copyright infringers. And if the "evidence" is secret then how can you counter it at all?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Neither Google nor Facebook have the ability to confiscate everything I own and throw me in jail, possibly using lethal force if I resist.
The government does.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Then why shouldn't the government have complete access to your data? Honestly, we use Google, Facebook, ect... they all have detailed records of our activities and identities that they aggregate and sell for profit.
Not really. They have access to a lot of data and activity that I either don't care about or would just as soon let them use as going through the various other ways of performing online activities while keeping it secret. It's convenient. But I have control over what data of mine they have access to and what they don't. Less control than, say, Verizon has, but I don't expect they're opening encrypted packets to get a look at my browsing habits.
I expect most people do the same. If I want to do something in private, then I make sure it's private. It used to be private to have a phone conversation on a land line unless there was a pretty serious suspicion (with lots of LEOs and judges agreeing) that I was involved in criminal activity. But no more. We need our own government respecting our privacy before we have any hope that they will help protect it from anyone else.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The NSA pleads the 5th for violating the 4th.
And they are very happy that you believe and parrot that idea. In fact, they've spent considerable effort (and have been largely successful) in trying to convince us that capitalism as an economic system is the very reason and progenitor of what little democratic success we have had. This, however, is in marked departure from the fact that capitalist interests have at every step resisted as strongly as possible any drift towards democratic reforms (suffrage, workers' rights and safety, corporate liability, public health and social servies, environmental regulation, etc.). The fact is that capitalism requires a state that nurtures its interests, and defends its inequities using an exclusive claim to "legitimate" violence. Capitalism could not sustain itself without these structural supports. In general, the fact that anyone believes there is a distinction to be made between economic and political systems is itself a great victory for our glorious leaders – devoted students of Bernays to the last.