Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The fourth amendment has been dead since civil forfeiture became common.
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.
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
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.