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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
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
You'd probably be charged with a wide range of crimes, like tampering with evidence, disrupting an investigation, espionage and wiretapping (because the NSA is authorized, but you aren't).
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
FISA court is incompatible with the Constitution. You CANNOT have secret courts in a democracy, it must and will end.
Good-bye
It was only when they popped by with the full document from the FISA court that it became "legitimate". Before then it was simply a piece of paper that cannot have provenance attached to it, so what the attorney should have said is "it is probably legitimate".
I've got a number of emails from Nigerian princes and domain renewal documents that are just as "legitimate"...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
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.
How does one authenticate their authenticity?
When men with guns say it's authentic, it is.
That's NOT how the Constitution works. It GRANTS powers to government. Everything that is not given as a power in the Constitution is NOT a legitimate function of government. There is no power to make courts secret.
On the other hand the Constitution does NOT contain a list of all the rights of citizens. The 9th Amendment makes this quite clear. There are many rights NOT enumerated. Due process IS listed as a right.
How the hell can you have due process if a court and laws can be secret? The idea is preposterous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flying on an aircrift is a right. Or more to the point preventing people from flying on an aircraft is a right that the government does not possess. Or can you point out the part of the constitution that grants the government that right? You cannot because it doesn't exist and not just because aircraft didn't exist. Because they would have considered the idea of preventing people from traveling within the borders of their own country to be tyranny almost beyond their ability to imagine. To them it would have been like asking the government permission to breathe.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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.