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When the NSA Shows Up At Your Internet Company
Frosty Piss writes "When people say the feds are monitoring what people are doing online, what does that mean? How does that work? When, and where, does it start? Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, an internet service provider in Utah, knows. He received a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant in 2010 mandating he let the feds monitor one of his customers, through his facility. He also received a broad gag order. Says Mr. Ashdown, 'I would love to tell you all the details, but I did get the gag order... These programs that violate the Bill of Rights can continue because people can't go out and say, This my experience, this is what happened to me, and I don't think it is right.' In this article, Mr. Ashdown tells us about the equipment the NSA installed on his network, and what he thinks it did."
The company, a comparative midget with just 30,000 subscribers, cited the Fourth Amendment in rebuffing warrantless requests from local, state and federal authorities, showing it was possible to resist official pressure says it all http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/09/xmission-isp-customers-privacy-nsa
You may be required to cooperate with their investigation, but space in a data center is not free, and the electricity certainly isn't, either. If they're taking what's yours, they should pay fair market value, and that includes space, power, cooling, and such.
National Security Letters, which are similar, result in a lot of difficulty challenging the gag order without violating the gag order.
At the eff, they talk about national security letters. They have made some progress in challenging the gag orders, but this is years later. The recipient of this gag order would likely not have even been able to get it into court before they had already removed it 9 months later.
The OP was served with a FISA warrant, which is apparently more rare and somewhat different. I don't know much about these, but the eff has some info here.
As is described in the article, they will happily pay that. However this particular ISP was against profiting in any way from monitoring their customer
Normal people worry me!
You do what they say, or else they come shoot you and plant drugs on your body.
FISA court is incompatible with the Constitution. You CANNOT have secret courts in a democracy, it must and will end.
Good-bye
Since the gag order is unconstitutional in the first place the feds would just let it go rather than risk a loss in court.
There are already companies that offer cloud storage that has customer side encryption that prevents them from honoring a nsa letter or a search warrant. So writing such a contract is not illegal. See SpiderOak.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That would violate the order as well. I've not got the law committed to memory, but "tipping off" the subject is illegal, no matter how you tip them off. So a billing change would be illegal. Terminating the service on receipt of an order to tap wouldn't tip them off of tapping, but prevent it. That may get you an obstruction charge. Or not. I'm not a lawyer, just an expert in designing and implementing lawful intercept.
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Kinda hard to do any hosting if your only connection is a port mirror, you can watch, but you can't talk over said port.
I'm Xmission customer for 18 years and they are the best. They always notified subscribers of any interruptions of the service even if it happened for 5 minutes in the middle of the night, decribing what went wrong and what have they done to prevent similar problems in the future.
And I still drive with Pete Ashdown sticker on the back of my car since he ran for the US Senate - but it is not easy do win for a Democrat in one of the most Republican states.
Those companies are not refusing to cooperate, and they are not circumventing the order. They deliver what they are asked to deliver; too bad that it's zero bits - and here is why...
But the proposed solution would be an obvious obstruction of justice, and any first minute law student can tell why - because you chose to terminate the service instead of following lawful instructions from the court. Hello, conspiracy charges.
The founders went further than simply creating a supreme court to decide what the law is. That route was surely open to them. But they chose a different route. Why: Because the people would not accept the Constitution with out it:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
No possible subsequent law can get around that, and any judge who rules otherwise has violated his oath of office.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Having worked for an ISP and at one point having to deal with these myself, you don't really. You send it up to the lawyers. They can do some basic checks. The request comes in, there's an agents name and where he/she works. The lawyers call there, talk to someone that's NOT him about it... that's about as far as you can check it. The main thing you're trying to prevent is someones ex-husband requesting his ex-wives call logs and such... that actually happens more than you'd think. Once it was even a cop and the case number and everything were bullshit. But if the entire law enforcement agency in question is up to no good, there's no way to prevent that. It's not like you can call up the judge and ask them about it.
I've mentioned this in the past but it bears mentioning again, we RARELY got requests. There were very very few. It always suggested to me that had better/easier ways to get the same info and it was only in rare cases that they needed to come to us.
Guess you missed Snowden's press conference he did last Friday from Moscow.
The governemnt has explicitly ruled this legal. It isn't communicating to a specific customer, and in the airbags lawsuits the car companies initially argued they met federal regulations. The car would be illegal without the airbags. The court ruled that if they were unsafe, the company should have shut down, rather than sell cars that were unsafe, even if that unsafety was required by law.
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