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US Federal Judge Rules NSA Data Collection Legal
New submitter CheezburgerBrown . tips this AP report:
"A federal judge on Friday found that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of millions of Americans' telephone records is legal and a valuable part of the nation's arsenal to counter the threat of terrorism. U.S. District Judge William Pauley said in a written opinion (PDF) that the program 'represents the government's counter-punch' to eliminate al-Qaeda's terror network by connecting fragmented and fleeting communications. In ruling, the judge noted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how the phone data-collection system could have helped investigators connect the dots before the attacks occurred. 'The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world. It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program — a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data,' he said."
You heard it here first: Fourth Amendment defeated 5-4.
I don't have much confidence that the Supreme Court would rule any differently, especially considering other rulings this supreme court has made. Have to try though, and if not time to start throwing people out of office.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I think (long) this article provides the right background.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
This will bounce back and forth until it reaches the Supreme Court. I'm sure they are already dreading it.
Were I in possession of the Snowden documents, I would simply wait and see how this plays out. If it simply goes back to "business as usual" for the NSA by being declared completely legal by our bought-and-paid-for judicial system, I would simply pull another juicy document or two out of the pile and add it to the growing pool of public knowledge. Wash, rinse and repeat until the government finally does the right thing ( or you run out of documents I suppose )
Either way, it's a win for privacy. ( We get a little bit of it back, or learn how much of it we've lost )
What makes you think the real mission of the NSA is to track terrorists?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Even if we disregard the obviously nasty privacy implications, in what way is a completely and utterly ineffective program "valuable"? I mean, come on. This extremely expensive program has stopped precisely zero attacks (source). I seriously hope the ACLU's lawyers are up to the task of arguing the idiocy of this program.
More likely just plain judge selection. Common enough technique, though usually used by prosecutors. For someone well-connected into the legal system - someone who knows schedules, who will be busy and when - it isn't hard to have some influence over which judge a case will come before. Just got to bias events towards one sympathetic to the government position.
How does if something is useful or not have any bearing on if it's legal or not?
NSA has dirt on Judge William Pauley.
You are the the idiot with the torch.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Terrorism is irrelevant. Whether the programs work or not is irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not it's constitutional, and it's not.
But even if this nonsense does eventually get shut down, there's clearly a problem with our system if it takes decades to get rid of unconstitutional garbage.
TFA didn't appear to go into the matter of law - does the program violate the 4th or not, and why. The decision must have done so. It's little short of bizarre that a judge went on about matters not of law - how the program is valuable or a "counter punch" for 9/11 or whatever. Surely such talk is all about an end justifying a means. I'm not allowed to break the law just because I've got a valuable end in mind; the government, the same, one would think. If the end justified the means, then, heck , allow cops to search every house at will for evidence of child-molestation.
The NYT article says specifically that he ruled that the 4th does not apply to information given to 3rd parties. TFA notes that he went on about how we give info to 3rd parties all the time so that they can profit from them. What the heck voluntarily and openly giving over information to vendors in return for free services or whatever has to do with the government taking information non-voluntarily and without notification, he doesn't seem to have explained.
So one comes back to the "end justifies the means" parts of his comments. There seems to be capture of the 3rd-branch "regulator" here: he believes the program is saving lives, or something, whereas the judge two weeks ago noted that he was cleared for all possible secrets, yet was shown no cases where they'd averted a crime that would otherwise have occurred. So much for the "54" terrorist plots averted.
[assuming the summary is accurate] each of the main points can be easily shown to be factually incorrect and logically incoherent. We've done this a thousand times here, so it's not useful to do it again.
What people should realize here is that the "Justice" system is in place to, primarily, protect the power structure. If you're still accepting that "justice is blind" and "rule of Law" fairy tale they taught in government schools, it's time to wake up and smell the tyranny.
Just watch - when it gets there SCOTUS will put a very mild restraint on the NSA to placate the masses and give cover to the politicos and leave the majority of the programs in place. Note that making such a prediction does not depend on interpretation of The Law - The Law will be be bent to achieve the per-ordained outcome.
When that happens, you'll have to decide if you're going to do anything substantive about it. Now's the time to think about what that might (or might not) be.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Authorities should just send speeding tickets to all drivers, since we all do it?
Win if you can... Lose if you must... But always CHEAT!
The good old ends justify the means justification for violating the 4th amendment.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
"In ruling, the judge noted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how the phone data-collection system could have helped investigators connect the dots before the attacks occurred."
Oh please. It has been said time and time again that the dots were in front of their faces but they didn't take notice. Same with the Boston marathon bombings. More tugging at the heart strings of America.
" 'represents the government's counter-punch' to eliminate al-Qaeda's terror network by connecting fragmented and fleeting communications." ....Said the CIA man in the judges chamber during judge Pauley's coaching before returning to the bench to read his ruling. It couldn't sound any more insincere and staged. Now I sound like a conspiracy theorist.
Seriously. After all of these shenanigans have been exposed, who can trust anything the government says? They will keep on happily pissing on our rights while the courts fall in line with them telling the people "look how good this is for you! You should be happy and embrace it!" Fuck you William Pauley for selling us up the river you sackless pussy. (had to rant for a sec.)
That data is given voluntarily. People may be pretty glib in giving the information, but it is still their choice. Maybe I do want Facebook knowing everything, but don't want my government to. Still, my choice. I never opted-in at the NSA web site.
Is a threat to the Constitution. And should be removed from his post.
The problem is the third party doctrine which holds that voluntary disclosing information to 3rd parties removes any expectation of privacy.
That works more or less pre-digital age. However the idea that disclosing all of this information now is voluntary is ridiculous. You would have to live like Thoreau did in his shack on Walden Pond to avoid this.
There needs to be legislation or even better an amendment to fix this.
Lots of things are legal, for a time, before they are struck down as being unconstitutional.
Anybody want a peanut?
Citation: BOSTON MARATHON
Are you telling me that the US government has decided that that US government is indeed allowed to do anything it wants with regards to total surveillance on every living person in the world without any actual cause? I didn't see that one coming at all.
Seriously, if anyone, even for one second thought that checks and balances existed with it comes to the government grabbing power for it self, you are out of your F'ing mind.
Historically, there is only one way to curb the power of an out of control ruling class. That, however, is something most people won't have the stomach for until things get far worse.
From the article: "Every day, people voluntarily surrender personal and seemingly-private information to transnational corporations, which exploit that data for profit," Pauley wrote in . Few think twice about it, even though it is far more intrusive than bulk telephony metadata collection.
So, you know, some people tell everything to Facebook and Google. It's totally cool if just spy on everyone now, right? Because terrorism and stuff. We are just going to keep feeding off of something that happened over a decade ago.
This judge's opinion reeks of corruption of personal feelings. Judge's are supposed to interpret what the law says to determine if a particular activity or Law fits within the narrow confines of constitutional authority.
This judge is a proponent of "anything is okay as long as it's for the War on Terror(TM)" and didn't seem to read one word of existing case law and simply ruled from the perspective of their personal agenda.
Excuse me, but FUCK YOU.
The ends do not always justify the means. If something is illegal for government to do, it is illegal for government to do, even if they really really pretty please with a cherry on top want to, and even if the outcome might be positive sometimes. It's still illegal.
The thing is because nothing happened, we can never tell if it worked and stopped a terrorist attack or didn't. We can only say nothing happened on X day.
In general this is true -- but in this case, it shouldn't be. This is a passive system that "works" when it connects dots and flags suspects. The fact that it has not done so for any potential or real terrorist threat shows that we can tell it didn't work -- considering there WERE plenty of potential and real terrorist threats that it DIDN'T flag up.
Of course, the system isn't designed to flag threats in the first place -- it's designed as a forensics tool, to clean up after a threat has been realized. Anything else it does is just a "bonus". Thus, if 9/11 happened again, it wouldn't prevent it -- it would just be a very quick method of rounding up many of the (still alive) people who were involved and getting insight into how big the thing was in the first place.
Take a look at the article. It isn't just that nothing happened, but they didn't even have any positive detections. And it only takes a little bit of knowledge of neural networks and statistics to understand that this kind of program is doomed from the very start: the signal these data collection systems are looking for is exceedingly tiny. There are at most dozens of actual terrorists seriously working on plans to attack somewhere in the US at any given moment, compared to a population of over 300 million. In order for the system to actually detect those terrorists, then, it needs to have a detection accuracy that is better than the ratio of the non-terrorists to the total population. Otherwise, most of the "detections" will actually be false detections that do nothing but mislead law enforcement and infringe on the rights of innocent citizens. If we assume 50 terrorists, that means the system would need a precision better than 99.99998%.
It's almost impossible for any learning model to have a precision that high. Learning models in general have this problem with what are called long-tail errors. If you want to know what these errors are, check out Google's or Apple's speech recognition software on a smartphone (you can also access Google's speech recognition on the web on any PC with a microphone). Most of the time, it's pretty good. But sometimes the mis-detections are so far off it's ludicrous. Why in the world would you ever trust a system that needs obscenely high precision to an algorithm that has such nasty errors?
To be fair, it is possible to reduce the needed precision by filtering out people in the population who are unlikely to be terrorists (e.g. children, the elderly, women), but it's just not possible to reduce it enough to make sifting through large pools of information worthwhile.
The implication of that quote is that such information is given out so freely that it's not a Fourth-Amendment-covered "search" to gather it, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Note the paragraph directly above:
He also found that the right to be free from search and seizures "is fundamental, but not absolute."
That part has been upheld by the SCOTUS repeatedly.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I'm guessing the NSA had some juicy details about this judges private life.
I doubt it's that complex - just look at which circuit this guy is in charge of: New York, New York.
You know, that police city-state on the East Coast, the one where people are regularly shot by cops just for standing in the wrong place, assaulted with chemical weapons for speaking out against the corrupt government, stopped and searched without any regard to the 4th Amendment, arrested for expressing their 2nd Amendment right, and oh yea, tried to ban big fucking sodas.
Taking all that into account, I'd be surprised if the judge didn't decide in favor of the elite ruling class.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You should be even more outraged if you live outside USA. This is about if US citizens have any kind of right, but what is not even considered is that foreigners have human rights at all for them, outside borders is free hunting area.
Answer this question: Is there any data that you want to be **completely unavailable** to law enforcement with **proper warrant**?
There will be a lot more of it now. This is not a zero sum game. If people know their shit is being abused they will not use it or develop alternate solutions which can only be cracked with a $5 wrench. By overstepping you actually create a feedback loop whereby your capability is eroded. Warrants are useless if the capability to execute does not exist.
Our military and law enforcement absolutely must be able to use all means to catch the bad guys.
Just a second there you can't just lump Military and Civilian systems together. NSA is supposed to be military. They are not supposed to be in the LEA business.
Remember who is actually being killed by whom in this country. I'll give you a hint >12k are not being killed by terrorists in the US every year.
The problem is *how* the data is collected and used....which is controlled by regulations.
The problem is the NSA has warrantless access to all of it. How they get it is irrelevant the fact they have it is what matters.
The answer is **transparency** of the process, not allowing criminals a walled garden that law enforcement cannot have access to.
The government has already lost its legitimacy in this regard. I hope it tries to recover some of it..that would mean at minimum stopping secret (interpretation of) law, secret courts and secretly collecting data on everyone without cause.
I agree we should have expected it, not because it *had* to happen, but because US judges are just as corrupt and self-interested as US politicians. They won't ever do anything to rule against the system, no matter how screwed up the system's behaviour has become, because its the same system thats giving them their power, status and wealth.
>> Our military and law enforcement absolutely must be able to use all means to catch the bad guys.
Sorry but thats crazy talk. You've totally bought into the brainwashing. Yours is exactly the same excuse all dictatorships, terrorists and psychopaths use. Once we start acting like them, even just in order to beat them, we have already lost because we have become no different from them.
Nuke the crap out of the middle east.
I mean, hey, the end justifies the means, right? And it would be cheaper and more expedient than spying on the whole world waiting for a bit of data to connect to another bit of data that proves (and stops) nothing.
And really, we wouldn't be violating the rights of anyone any more than we are now. Right now we selectively target people we 'think' are terrorists and drone strike them. Whether they are or not is irrelevant and they can't have their day in court because we blew them up (and anyone else around them). So, what's the difference between that and just simply killing every muslim?
And hey, let's start with Saudi Arabia if you're going to quote 9/11. Plus we get free oil if you don't mind it slightly radioactive.
So how is my idea any different? In fact, my idea is better because you aren't affecting Americans, right? And only Americans "count" in this world.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Our military and law enforcement absolutely must be able to use all means to catch the bad guys.
Well, they'd probably kill a couple of bad guys if they dropped nukes on all of our major cities. So, is that OK with you, sparky?
You're an idiot.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The NSA spying on Americans en masse without warrants is a counter-punch to 9/11?
Well, maybe.
Al Qaeda provided the initial punch on 9/11 and now the NSA is delivering a "counter-punch." Only problem is that the American people are the targets of both punches!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You're misunderstanding a key part of the process. The system doesn't need to be perfectly accurate. It just needs to be accurate enough to fit the workload of the humans involved. The system may identify 10,000 "terrorists" in a month, which can then be passed off to a team of 100 humans who can pull up more records to see if there's anything actually suspicious, or if the system's just inaccurate as usual. The dozen or so each month that have enough evidence could then be submitted for real search warrants to start a full investigation.
The problem with such a human-moderated system is the imbalance in consequences between finding or dismissing an actual terrorist. None of those 100 reviewers wants to be the guy who let a terrorist escape, so they're likely to have lowering standards of evidence. Schneier has covered the problem well.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It is, for varying definitions of "terrorist", up to and including "you there, reading this Slashdot article".
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
It's a WASTE of taxpayer money. America was just hit with a terrorist attack and the NSA has done nothing. 40 Million Credit and Debit cards were stolen from "Target". And you don't think that's economic terrorism??
And the good 'ol NSA has no leads, and no clue on how to solve this, despite having access to everything. The Boston Bombers? They had to set up a warehouse full of FBI agents looking at 7-11 surveillance tapes to find those guys. Facial recognition software did nothing.
The USA will be attacked again and again, and the NSA will continue to sit on its hands doing nothing. Why should they ever do anything after all? They keep getting unlimited money to do what they want in the "war on terror", but when the time comes to do something, they mysteriously won't be able to do squat.
I have a feeling a lot of your taxpayer money is going up someone's nose. Any data out there on what the head honchos at the NSA get paid? I bet their lifestyle exceeds their income, and they aren't even trying to hide it, and it will come out, it may take 20 years, but it will come out that half the money going into the NSA is being spent on hookers and blow.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Which logical fallacies apply to this?
False Cause - They perceive that 911 happened because we didn't have enough info so their solution is to collect "ALL THE INFO".
Appeal to Emotion - You don't want another terrorist attack, now do you?
Black or White - Either we collect all of the information on everyone or the terrorists win. Whose side are you on?
Additionally, courts have used Burden of Proof before. Want to prove this is illegal? Well, first you need to have been negatively impacted by this uber-secret program. Since it's an uber-secret program, you aren't allowed evidence that they spied on you. Since you have no evidence, you can't prove anything. Lawsuit tossed out. Next!
Finally, I propose a new Logical Fallacy - the More Information Fallacy. This one presumes that we'd be able to do X if only we had more information or less roadblocks to obtaining information. This is true in a sense. The police could arrest a lot more people if they didn't need to worry about so many rules about evidence. Do you know how many criminals would be behind bars if they didn't get off on a technicality? However, the flip side to this is lowered rules lead to corruption and abuse. Lower rules on evidence handling and you can have cases where evidence is planted or tampered with and innocent people get convicted.
In the case of the NSA, they think that "more information" will help them spot terrorists. In an ideal situation (for them, not us), knowing everything about everyone *would* let them spot and stop terrorist attacks. However 1) this would lead to abuse and mission creep to the point that the program would be used for non-terrorism related crimes or for attacking people the NSA didn't like and 2) the NSA would never be able to parse through that much data in the real world. So the claims that "more information will stop attacks" are just plain false.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The implication of that quote is that such information is given out so freely that it's not a Fourth-Amendment-covered "search" to gather it, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.
I damn well have a reasonable expectation that the government isn't spying on my communications; this is supposed to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave," after all. Some people's decision to surrender their data to certain parties has nothing to do with my data, and furthermore, they only surrender it to certain parties, not the government. Allowing the government to essentially outsource its spying to corporations is a terrible idea and almost defeats the purpose of the fourth amendment in this day and age.
That part has been upheld by the SCOTUS repeatedly.
Doesn't matter.
What makes you think the real mission of the NSA is to track terrorists?
The real mission of the NSA is signal intelligence. I think it is safe to assume that the primary target for that intelligence collection effort is going to be the nuclear armed nations that directly threaten the US or its allies - often by explicit statements or military actions*, along with various rogue nations (Iran, North Korea) that threaten the US, US allies, free trade routes, or strategic resources. Lower tier threats and concerns are going to be things like diplomatic issues, terrorism, international crime networks, and so on.
You will note that I didn't include domestic political oppression. I'm going to go out on a limb and state that I think that is what you were insinuating as the "real mission" of the NSA. Do you care to confirm or deny that? If you want to confirm it, what is your evidence? I'm unaware of any showing that anybody in the US has been arrested and imprisoned for the act of voting for the wrong party, not even for dog catcher. The closest you could get as far as I know is the admitted abuse by the IRS in the treatment of tax exempt status applications and standing of groups opposing the Obama administration's demonstrated governing philosophy.
Do you want to know the real kicker? Based on the demonstrated level of concern it seems that few people posting here would care if the US government were to actually engage in political oppression, as long as it is by the IRS. We have had story after story after story about the NSA, and so far it amounts to the NSA collects phone bills, and it knows how to crack codes. People are hysterical about that, but not about the IRS engaging in political oppression that may have even tipped the last presidential election by some reckoning. Well, who cares if the US ends up as a one party state in practice, and the door to other abuses opens because of it, just so long as it takes the NSA an extra 2 hours to get some phone bills. There is a lot of distorted thinking going on here. A lot.
For anyone that cares: The IRS Scandal, Day 232
* China has recently published multiple articles in state controlled media showing nuclear strike maps against the United States by submarines and now bombers. Russia has decided to assume the mantle of the Soviet Union as an adversary of the West and restart probing Western defenses with bombers, submarines, and surface naval vessels. It has been threatening NATO allies for hosting a limited missile defense system for protection against Iran.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Agreed 100%. Allowing the police to conduct monthly and random searches of houses, person, and property would reduce crime and help them gather evidence but and would help them greatly but that too is illegal. What is terrorism? It is moving target. Eventually "terrorism" will mean anything, evidence and due process will mean nothing and our remaining rights will be gone. Unlike 250+ years ago in this country, people will blindly accept this because a majority are making a living off of the same government that is making these rules. Will I get my montly checks? Yes, well then no problem.
I do. See "parallel reconstruction".
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Well, perhaps it would be a good idea to read the actual opinion then?
First off, the stuff they quoted in the summary was mostly from the intro paragraph. Not going in the details of the matter of law in an intro is no huge deal.
I did notice a bit further in as the decision went more into the pre-911 intelligence a bit of a historical error. The official 911 report actually showed that there was intelligence flagging the terrorists. As one example, one of the local FBI field offices flagged the fact that a lot of Middle-east nationals were taking flight training classes, and were showing no interest in learning how to land. The main problem the official report flagged was lack of communication between agencies, not lack of data (which is why its main recommendation was to combine all the intel agencies, NOT to gather more intel). So anyone who says the government didn't have enough data is arguing directly against the government's own 911 findings.
Historical misinterpretations aside, what is the legal argument? Reading through the body, it appears to be the following:
In other words, the logic is that the (unanimous) Keith decision in 1972 established that the government could write much more aggressive laws for national defense intelligence gathering than it can for criminal cases, and subsequent laws have done so. So at the moment its is both constitutional and legal. I'll let folks who know constitutional law comment on how kosher this interpretation of things is.
The fourth amendment has been dead since civil forfeiture became common.
I'm kinda thinking along the same line. Did the NSA supply the Dept of Justice with dirt on this Judge, or the Judge's kids that might ruin their career? I would really think not. But we all know that this is the inherent issue with widespread surveillance. They can game the system whether it is against criminals or their own judges. Maybe there was no dirt, just a promise that they'll get reappointed in 7years or possibly be up for something bigger down the road and maybe their kids would get an inside track on what ever route they are taking in life. In the end of the day, you start to think these are they guys that cheated all through their lives with the idea that "do whatever it takes to win, you must be the person on top no matter what cost...it is only you that matters!" When you think about how they are finding ways to cheat the laws of the land in the name of something else, what else do they cheat at or on?
You should be even more outraged if you live outside USA. This is about if US citizens have any kind of right, but what is not even considered is that foreigners have human rights at all for them, outside borders is free hunting area.
In fairness, inside the USA is fair hunting areas for foreign intelligence agencies.
That fact highlights another issue, though, which is that even if all countries protect their own citizens from snooping by their own agencies (most don't, actually), this is easy for allied powers to work around through sharing agreements. "I'll spy on your people and you spy on mine, then we'll swap". We need to institute some protection against that as well.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What in the living hell does people's voluntary decision to share information on a corporate owned website have to do with the government grabbing people's private conversations and correspondence against their will?
This "judge" goes far beyond just being a hack or a political tool. He could serve as the figurehead for everything wrong with our overwhelming powerful and grasping Federal government. There are no, literally no, constitutional arguments to be made in favor of mass data collection. So he just weaves a big web of irrelevant bullshit and then rules the way his masters want.
Like the Boston bombers that were referred by the Russians, if I recall correctly?
if the team of 100 humans were following up real leads, instead of computer psudorandomly generated leads...
Civil forfeiture is an abomination. But most people don't really care. They just see it as free money for the heroic police which helps keep their taxes low.
Let's not forget that the Supreme court for nearly a hundred of years upheld slavery as constitutional. It took an act of congress and the 18th amendment to the constitution to ban it. A modern person reading the constitution might go, gee, doesn't "life, *liberty*, and the pursuit of happiness" constitutionally protect against slavery? But, nope, to the simple minds of those in the 1800s, slaves were property not people, unless the new 13th amendment says otherwise.
Similarly, a person from the future might read the constitution and go, gee, doesn't "unreasonable search and seizure" apply to digital content? But, nope, to the simple minds of those today we need a new amendment saying digital privacy is a form of privacy just as it took the 18th amendment to say a differently pigmented person is still a person. Just because a computer is used to generate nudie pics of you a the airport doesn't suddenly make it "not a strip search" by the TSA. Just because a computer is used to communicate with someone else doesn't make it "not mail". We have all these laws already passed protecting us against strip searches and folks opening our mail, but NONE of it applies if a computer is involved. That's why patents can be so easily passed by adding "with a computer" to take an old idea and suddenly qualify as a new idea worthy of patent protections. Only congress can pass new laws -- yes, that congress, the one with an 18% approval rating that is slowly bankrupting us and threatens to default and shutdown the government twice a year; they are our only hope for sanity, not the courts; and, yes, we're screwed.
Thankfully, at least one Supreme Court Justice seems to disagree, because it isn't like people have an actual choice in the matter -- either you live in some manifesto shack in the middle of nowhere, or you participate in modern society by having a phone, a bank account, a doctor, etc. Anyway, this is what Justice Sotomayer had to say about this topic in the Recent Jones v. US case:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing-10-1259_CONCUR_4
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You apparently have not heard about J. Edgar Hoover, nor his not so subtle methods of manipulating various congresspeople.
Yeah, I know, Hoover was with the FBI, but you'd have to be the most naive idiot in the world to think the NSA couldn't, or wouldn't, do the same shit.
In short, the GP's point was spot on. Of course, when I got about halfway through your comment, I looked to see who wrote it. Imagine my lack of surprise when I noted that the NSA's head bootlicker and astroturfer was the author.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The fourth amendment has been dead since civil forfeiture became common.
Not dead, but badly bruised and put on the cart.
That really needs to be fixed, now.
Federal Case Could Make It Easier For Victims To Defend Themselves Against Civil Forfeiture
Pennsylvania judge calls civil asset forfeiture “state-sanctioned theft”
IJ Scores Major Federal Court Victory In Massachusetts Civil Forfeiture Case
The Rise of Asset Forfeiture Abuse
Bill Would Prohibit Asset Forfeiture In Michigan Without Criminal Conviction - State has been ground zero for money and property seizures
Unless it is addressed the problem will only get worse as local and state governments face funding squeezes due to tax shortfalls and growing pension funding problems.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It said right in the constitution that no laws concerning slavery could be passed until 1808, at which time they promptly outlawed the importation of slaves. Also, the 9th amendment implicitly gave the right to regulate slavery to the states. If you'll recall, from fourth grade history, some states were "slave" states and some were "free". So, this arrangement was morally wrong, but constitutional. The sticking point came with the fugitive slave law, which many called unconstitutional because, again, slavery was in the jurisdiction of the states. But the federal government pulled out the weapon which eventually became the Swiss-army-knife of government oppression we know today: "regulation of interstate commerce". So it decided it had the ability to force escaped slaves dwelling in free states to return to their masters.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Or, to provide the obligatory car analogy - just because I loaned my car to my best friend does not mean that I have surrendered my expectation that no one else will drive it.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
Uhhh, you screwed up the slashdot car analogy -- this one makes sense, it isn't supposed to do that.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You are making assumptions that their purposes are what they claim they are. It's quite possible to presume that they lied about what their purposes are, and that they have quite successfully executed plans that succeed in achieving those purposes. They may well not be the incompetent criminals they pretend to be, but instead be rather competent ones.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Terrorism is irrelevant. Whether the programs work or not is irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not it's constitutional, and it's not.
Welcome to the invented concept of "Standing". This is the current tool that is used to prevent Constitutional challenges to this law: you're not hurt, so why should we care? And you can't prove you're hurt, go home and pound sand.
The Supreme Court is doing everything it can to NOT decide the Constitutional questions, and is inventing law to make sure it never has to.
It's really pretty depressing how credulous people are when it comes to "don't worry, this is only applied to BAD people, and we need it to stop those bad people doing evil things." But that's not just in the case of asset forfeiture. You could just as easily substitute "horrifically militaristic raids that lead to civilian fatalities" or mass surveillance or extraordinary rendition or whatever. Few people really seem to care. You get a lot of, "yes, but..."s. At least I do. From pretty smart people, too.
The places the NSA would need cooperation are the commonly-utilised SSL-accessed services, primarily Facebook and Google mail/docs. Can't just fiber-tap those, and even if you could it'd be a nightmare trying to reconstruct things from taps alone. Having access to their databases would make utilising the information a lot easier.
Google has implemented Perfect Forward Secrecy (via ECDHE) since 2011 for clients which support it. You can test sites yourself with the Qualsys tool, look for 'FS' in the cipher list.
The widespread use of PFS will mitigate a purely human vulnerability: a distinct possibility that a some few humans in each of these major providers could be secretly supplying NSA with the operational SSL private keys that are used for HTTPS/SMTPTLS/SPOP/SIMAP.
Without PFS, imagine someone working IT at a bank exchanging a tiny flash drive containing years' worth of private SSL keys for a briefcase full of money. The moment the spooks plug in those keys, years of recorded encrypted SSL intercepts become readable, instantly. We are still at this stage, and most of the Internet is still vulnerable to this approach.
Is NSA/Utah breaking encryption codes with servers in a facility that requires 1.7 million gallons of coolant water per day? To some extent maybe, but the main emphasis will be on mass collection and bulk storage. And I am sure they have a map of tap points that surround Tier One exchanges, with an ever-increasing number of pins placed on it. Stalin would be proud.
Going into telephones -- cell providers aggregate roaming and billing information in a few central COs where a stream of call data is received. Land line providers are no different, and since there are no landline-only telecom providers left, the call information is likely to be accumulated in a few central places. Just a few taps and they have all the call and roam data they are accustomed to receiving. Will those telecom providers become aggravated that NSA is tapping their central offices, as Google is? Nope, with a nudge nudge wink wink they will leave their call metadata links encryption-free and be grateful that the straw man of voluntary data sharing has been brought down.
The ONLY HOPE of thwarting this turnkey police state is to publicly expose the existence of the taps (thank you Snowden) and DEFUND and DISMANTLE them.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>