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."

Comments

Ethics versus Legality

[girlintraining]

The NSA's corrupt and unethical activities have shown a bright light on the blackened and burned out husk of our ethics within the justice system. Which is to say, there really aren't any left to speak of.

The law has absolutely nothing to do with right or wrong anymore. It's just a prescription for what is allowed and isn't, not whether you should or shouldn't. It's not unlike owning a gun; By itself, it's harmless. Put it someone's hands, and what they do with it can be catastrophic. Laws are just tools. It's what is done with them we need to look at.

So far, I'm not encouraged by what I am seeing those tools used for. Perhaps its time to take them away, until they can learn to handle them responsibly.

Re:Ethics versus Legality

[gmuslera]

The problem with that law is it is meant for people, it depend on people to be honest, not wanting extra money, not being able to be blackmailed or social engineered, not falling into common human bias like the ones shown in the Stanford prison experiment. You maybe could manage to find a few people that could cope with that. But if you have up to up to 5 millon people to access that information (including 500k with top secret access that work at for profit contractors), then you are doing the equivalent of giving guns to all prison inmates and setting them free in all the big cities. You know that people will get killed, abused, robbed and so on with that action. So in the actual context, that law is legalized robbery with impunity.

Re:Ethics versus Legality

[girlintraining]

The problem with that law is it is meant for people, it depend on people to be honest, not wanting extra money, not being able to be blackmailed or social engineered, not falling into common human bias like the ones shown in the Stanford prison experiment.

If people were honest, not greedy, and incapable of having any vices, and weren't stupid... there'd be no need for laws! The problem isn't the law, it's the people enforcing it. Think about the legal texts of old -- the Magna Carta. The Constitution. Hell, why not even throw in a few holy texts -- the Bible, Koran, etc. My point is a basic code of conduct took one book or less to draw the boundaries for most situations. Now, I don't want to discuss their relative merits, coz that'll take us to nasty flaming troll of doom land, it's just there to illustrate that the legal process doesn't have to be complex to be fairly complete.

This extra complexity is meant to blunt the minds of its critics and enable people to operate under color of authority to do things that many of us consider unethical or immoral. And that is the problem. The judicial process no longer has any feedback mechanism -- no way of saying "good" or "bad". Laws are written, but rarely repealed. They have no expiration date. So the system grows more and more complex, and people's ethics and morality slowly erode. Slow enough, anyway, that it's not obvious to anyone what's happening... at least until most of it has been lost.

Secret laws enforced by secret courts

[jbolden]

He is absolutely right that we shouldn't have secret courts issuing secret laws. Temporary gag orders are fine but they should expire rapidly and then what happened be subject to public scrutiny. Faretta v. California talked about how many of our laws for trial procedure and rights in the constitution evolved from a reaction against the Star Chamber. The core idea of the Star Chamber was secrecy to deal with defendants who were too powerful to be tried openly for fear the the realm could not control the impact, and we have decided to replicate this in full.

Re:stand up

[jbolden]

That could also be read as a widespread conspiracy involving multiple companies to coordinate to commit felonies. The problem is the American people, have until recently been strongly supportive of this nonsense. The companies can't stand up to it until they know for sure a jury will never convict and they can't know that yet.

Where exactly is 'outside US jurisdiction' now?

[rts008]

Ask Eric Snowden, I hear he has some experience with this very thing.

The ONLY reason Snowden is not a resident of GITMO, is the US can't invade Moscow Airport.
If he was in a less powerful country, like Panama, for example, he would already be in custody.

...can't they just go to Mexico and tell people there?

Times have changed somewhat, Butch Cassidy....Mexico, or Canada, are no longer safe havens to escape the US.

The first amendment trumps the gag order.

[jcr]

Say whatever you want to say, and demand a jury trial if they want to punish you for it. The great lesson of the fall of the Soviet Empire is that the people outnumber the thugs, and the thugs' power depends entirely on the people's obedience.

-jcr

Re:No Surprises Here

[tftp]

How does one authenticate their authenticity?

When men with guns say it's authentic, it is.

Re:Challenge the Gag Order

[Rich0]

Most gag order statutes have been voided for being unconstitutional.

Great, so all you have to do is go ahead and violate an order (publishing some single event that on its own is trivial), then watch the powers descend on you, take away all your stuff, and possibly lock you up as well. Then you can begin a 5-10 year court battle to get it all back, facing the risk of a long prison term the entire time. That battle will likely cause you to lose your job and waste away a good portion of your adult life.

But yes, in the end there is a decent (but far from certain) chance that you will win. If so, you won't even get an apology - they'll just let you return to life with little more than the clothes on your back so that you can start saving what little you can for your retirement.

Re:Harder done than said

[0111 1110]

The terrorists won on September 11, 2001, although not in the way they planned.

More like not in the specific way that they had hoped. IIRC they hoped to get the US military out of Saudi Arabia. But the sort of stuff in the news now is also the kind of thing they were hoping for. A rather nice consolation prize. It is certainly a revenge of sorts. The entire country has been punished. Countless generations of Americans will be forced to live in an Orwellian dystopia. They could not have done it without help from our own politicians, but nevertheless it is undeniably a very real victory for Bin Laden's group. No honest person can continue to call the US free and there is no going back.