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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
Wonder what the consequences of that would be? Do two skeevy acts add up to a good act?
You can't contest these FISA orders because even acknowledging them is a federal crime.
First rule of FISA: Don't talk about FISA
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Most gag order statutes have been voided for being unconstitutional.
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What the NSA is actually doing is blatantly ignoring our bill of rights. These gag orders are not legal because they are not constitutional, regardless of what the NSA insists.
I would like them to see them -- and the court officials that go along with their little scheme, pay for their crimes against humanity (and yes, that's what it actually is). Hilarious that this organization has become the very monster it was created to destroy: a terrorist network.
What if the contract had a clause that said services would be terminated with no notice and no explanation if we receive a lawful warrant to participate in monitoring said customer?
Sort of canary?
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.
it is about time for companies to start standing against the NSA. as long as what they do keeps being a secret to the population, we will never be able to get a lawsuit in front of the supreme court. companies need to stand up enmasse and say screw the NSA. then, when they start getting sanctions and stuff for standing against the NSA, they start a class action lawsuit against the american government. at this point, they will get infront of the supreme court eventually and we might actually get our rights back.
So, in TFA he said he was not allowed to make a copy of the order, but just take some notes about it. His attorney said it was legitimate . . . how?
I mean, you can't take a copy yourself to a secret court to ask them if they authorized it. You could call up a number that they give you, but what does that prove? And the whole damn thing is supposed to be secret, so that nobody knows nothing anyway.
Does anyone know how this works?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
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.
Or they could say they were monitoring Maddox, when in reality, they were snooping on someone else, or just mooching server space to use in a distributed network they were running. You have no idea, and neither do most people working at the NSA, or the FISA court, etc, etc.
For all anyone knows, this "monitoring equipment" could have been hosting (and let me just go for the Godwin Gold here) a child porn darknet for a ring of senior paedophiles operating inside the NSA. And if anything went wrong, or was discovered, the NSA could ahve just pinned it all on XMission, Mr. Ashdown, and his attorneys. After all, there's no official record, all are gagged from revealing what they know, and the NSA would just lie about it.
And in case this seems hyperbolic: If the NSAs programs continue for long enough, this will happen. History is the definitive proof.
May the Maths Be with you!
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!
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.
Times have changed somewhat, Butch Cassidy....Mexico, or Canada, are no longer safe havens to escape the US.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
There is absolutely [a] need for secrecy when you are dealing with a criminal investigation. You don’t want to tip off criminals being monitored. But you can’t say, “You can never talk about this ever, for the rest of your life.”
The criminals may never know exactly how they were caught. Some of the tapped information may come out but the authorities may have enough other evidence derived from this tap not to reveal all their methods. The better criminals know how they are being monitored the better the criminals can avoid the monitoring.
As to being a benign web site, the actual site may have noting to do with the criminal activity. It may just be a transit point for communications between criminals and the authorities are after those communications.
As for the tap being on 9 months; there are criminal investigations that take years to gather enough information on enough people to take down an organization.
As for the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment in particular;
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
By law A FISA warrant is a warrant and therefore the Amendment has not been violated. How exactly is the Fourth Amendment violated?
The FISA court should be a public court, and documents should be sealed for a set period of time, [to] let people audit the actions later.
I disagree. When one make public who and how someone else it being watched it it makes the suspects more difficult yo watch in the future. Maybe this investigation didn't gather enough for a conviction but the next one might. I may agree if the set period was 30 years or so but that is not what you seem to be talking about.
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
> "go fuck yourself"
More likely, "Go fuck yourself, eh?"
Bark less. Wag more.
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.
If we had a functioning justice system in this country, and a population fully aware of and prepared to defend our rights, this kind of thing would go like this:
"Hello, 911 emergency. What is your emergency?"
"Hi, I've just made a citizen's arrest. The perp came in here posing as a federal officer, but he couldn't even recite the oath when he was looking down the barrels of my shotgun." I disarmed him and hog-tied him. The press is on the way, could you send a deputy over here to pick him up, or should I bring him in to the jail?"
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Indeed, what is the fair market value for smearing excrement on the Constitution? $50/month?
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.
Hello, NSA?
Remember that box we put in our server room for you a couple of weeks back? Well last night, four heavily armed masked men broke into our facility and held our techs at gunpoint while they removed your box. When they left, all we heard was the sound of their helicopter. It was night, so we didn't see anything. I think they had Russian accents.
We would have filed a police report, except we are not supposed to discuss the details of you activities with anyone.
Have gnu, will travel.
... they leave with pallets of stuff- they leave us pallets of money. Great guys.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Dear AC.
You are being recruited by the intelligence services due to your deep insights into the Trayvon Martin case. You will provide us with assistance and your personal insights into the politics and evidence surrounding this incident.
However, for purposes of national security, we will be placing a gag order on all of your communications regarding this case. You will not be allowed to divulge the scope of your knowledge, or the content of our communications in any matter regarding Trayvon Martin or Barak Obama.
Thank you for your support in making this country a safer place.
Have gnu, will travel.
...see a possible 3rd Amendment issue with this? Can the Federal Government force you to quarter a digital proxy of a federal agent? Too big a stretch?
The subject of my comment is a direct quote from the website. I'm curious as to why the author believes a "guns and ammo" website would warrant this type of surveillance. It seems everywhere you look these days the left is looking to encroach on our rights as American citizens (the provider is based in Utah). The irony here is that the main point of the article seems to be that this type of surveillance is an invasion of someone's privacy and at least an inconvenience to the provider.
The founding fathers wrote that they tried to create a system in which greed and other human failings would end up resulting in good. The Consitution is designed that way. The principle is sound, as shown by our economic system. (ppeople are greedy and want "stuff". Society wants work done, investment made, and educated people. Set up system where greed results in investment, education, and hard work.)
A Constitutional example is balance of power.
Congress critters are power hungry. So are presidents. So they set it up where one of the best ways for a president to gain power is by taking it from Congress, and Congress can get power by taking it from the president. Each politician's quest for power takes it from other politicians, so it keeps them balanced, avoids dictatorship.
Of course some people live in "wouldn't it be great" land and keep passing laws that only work if everyone is highly moral. For example, they assume if you pass a law paying people who "can't find" work for three solid years, you and I will keep paying their bills for years, no-one will put off working just because we're paying their bills for them.
They pass laws putting government bureaucrats and politicians in charge of the most important, private things in our lives, and assume that not only will the government bureaucrats be good guys, they'll also be highly competent and do a good job. Those are the bad laws, in my opinion, because politicians are neither magnanimous nor highly competent.
It started out sounding like an interesting article but I wanted to stop reading and write the guy off as an bigot and an idiot here ... "The customer they were monitoring was a particular website that was very benign. It seems ridiculous to me. It was beyond absurd. It wasn’t like a guns and ammo website."
There are not stupid forced gag orders in Canada. If some government official asks to install unknown equipment on a private companies network, the company can effectively say "go fuck yourself", and the courts will back the company.
That's not to say it doesn't happen because of corruption and bribes and general shadiness with all the big ISPs, but it's not universal among companies, and no can force small ISPs to comply.
Fuck America is screwed up.
OTOH, at least the average American isn't under the delusion that this sort of shit doesn't happen in their country.
A big visible camera - and a smaller hidden one - at the entrance to your building with microphones, so you make sure that the identity of the agents is very public information when they present themselves at your front door. Reading out of the warrant at the time of reception as is legally acceptable, would probably blow the investigation as soon as it starts. We need to play legal games the same as they do.
When I read Leviticus and Deuteronomy, what struck me the most about them was how fair they were to the defendant. Modern liberals and even many conservatives roll their eyes and treat the Old Testament Law as barbaric, but in reality it was actually more advanced in protecting the defendant than our system. Nothing equivalent to a felony (that I can remember) in the Old Testament was convictable with less than two credible eye witnesses and the punishment for false testimony was to be punished according to the standard for the charges. That means anyone who bears false witness in a murder case is automatically going to be executed no matter the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The "testilying" cops of today would be mercilessly stoned to death under Old Testament Law and if the defendant could prove that the prosecutor knowingly brought their perjury into the case could possibly get the prosecutor executed as well.
I'd like to see that standard of perjury brought to our legal system and I'd also like to see the Old Testament's open court proceedings where more than one person can be convicted simultaneously in the same proceeding as well. Cases would take longer, but it would provide a lot of balance. For example, today a defense attorney would be allowed to bring charges against a testilying cop and have the jury consider the perjury charges during their deliberations.
At one point, I saw a stat saying that there about 600-700 laws in the Old Testament that cover the entire civil-criminal-religious legal life of ancient Israel. There are approximately 4,200 federal criminal acts one can commit. Many of these are not even genuine crimes but charges that can be used to get around the 8th amendment like "possession of a firearm while committing a drug crime." Really. Either you are actually committing a violent felony with said firearm or it's just a way of overcharging someone for a fact that is at best ancillary to the primary criminal act.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT2fQu50sMs
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4263.en.html
The importance of resisting Excessive Government Surveillance [27C3]
About "National Security Letters".
New things are always on the horizon
The idea of explicitly stating that you aren't under a gag order has been addressed a few times, and I'm not sure it works - can you really not be forced to explicitly keep lying about it? After all, you'd have to lie in response to a direct question as well. Otherwise you could just tell your customers to regularly ask you about gag orders.
However, consider this: If you are not under a gag order, then it is not illegal to lie and say you are. (Except under oath.) Yet if you are under a gag order, saying you are would be illegal.
Thus, if you publically and untruthfully state (in messages or on your website) that you are under a gag order, then an actual gag order would force you to remove that statement. That removal then becomes the warning.
The gag order couldn't reasonably force you to tell people about it and not tell people about it.