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Calif. Court Orders Preservation of Disputed NSA Phone Records
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from a report at PC World: "A court in California has prohibited the destruction of phone records collected by the government until further orders, raising a potential conflict with an order last week by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington, D.C. Judge Jeffrey S. White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered Monday the retention of the call details in two lawsuits that have challenged the U.S. National Security Agency's program for the collection of telephone metadata. A number of lawsuits challenging the NSA program have been filed by privacy and other groups ... On Friday, Reggie B. Walton, presiding judge of the FISC, denied a motion from the Department of Justice that the current five-year limit for holding phone metadata should be extended indefinitely as it could be required as evidence in the civil lawsuits challenging the program."
How is long term storage a solution? I figure the NSA is probably immune to lawsuits anyway, like Area-51 is, under presidential determination.
Not the most straightforward tactic, but interesting nonetheless.
One court says the program must retain all metadata for more than five years, and another court says that the program must not retain metadata for longer than five years. This means that the only lawful way to run the program lawfully is to ensure that no metadata covered by these judgements is gathered, effectively outlawing the program entirely.
Even though the judgements may apply only within certain jurisdictions, the entire program is affected as phone calls may be generating metadata on people within the jurisdiction, regardless of where the other end is.
Fascinating.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
One of the problems with the judicial branch is that the appeals process is generally only limited by the size of one's purse.
Bottomless budgets, like governments and large corporations have at their disposal, make for quite the unlevel playing field.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
who's not sorry now? http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=unrepentant&sm=3 results never vary despite we lament never again? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk9mV8qBiEk never a better time to consider ourselves in relation to one another, our surroundings & the truth,,, see you there
How much time will pass before we get a SCOTUS ruling?
One of the problems with the judicial branch is that the appeals process is generally only limited by the size of one's purse.
Bottomless budgets, like governments and large corporations have at their disposal, make for quite the unlevel playing field.
Actually, appeals are relatively cheap, because all you have to do is look at the record from the court below, research a bunch of cases, and write and talk about why your client should have won.
Trials, on the other hand, are expensive and a pain in the ass. You have to do discovery--collecting millions of documents, *analyzing* millions of documents, interviewing lots of people while having at least two lawyers and a court reporter in the room, doing a bunch of motions (each basically like an appeal--look at the docs you have and research a bunch of cases and write and talk about why your client should win), and finally arguing your case in court.
Probability: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
If it is locked in a box perhaps it might both exist and not exist at the same time?
rgds
If the data is needed as evidence in the case, then the court should take custody of it and require all other copies to be destroyed. That way the information is available for the trial, but cannot be (ab)used for any other purpose by the NSA.
Another option would be for the parties to stipulate on what data has been stored, and then proceed in the trial on that assumption.
Courts always have the power to require data be preserved, ever since an Assyrian vendor smashed his clay tablets with a hammer to keep the captain of the guard from seizing them (;-))
They also have to specify exactly what's to be preserved, to avoid causing an unintentional denial-of-service attack on the recipient of the order, and they can require they be sealed, preserved in particular forms, or handed over to the court.
davecb@spamcop.net
We hold all the "evidence"? 15,000 exabytes at the least? Who's going to review all of it?
If it's wrong for 1 million records, is the court case going to be more judiciously correct with 20 trillion records?
And, without putting police on the scene where the data is stored -- how can you guarantee they don't just show you to a PC with a backup usb drive and say; "It's all there have at it." ???
If anyone were serious with oversight, they'd have a "cease and desist" on the way while black helicopters air-drop paratroopers and some forensic data specialists and then they block off all electronic access to the data storage facility while they trace any routes and private lines from the facility to where the real data might be if it isn't where we think it is. The other option is to sequester a sample of what is being stored -- take randomly with someone you send in to retrieve the data. You can use a good random sampling to represent what is going on, and then factor in the number of records -- this will change the case from a few billion to a few million to investigate.
Other than that; stop wasting everyone's time and taxpayer money with an order that cannot be complied with and serves no purpose. If they are ordered to just store the data for more than 5 years -- you just court ordered them to spend a few hundred billion dollars on something they probably intended to do. The reason they only stored 5 years is probably because they've only been storing it for 5 years so far or couldn't store any more data. The only reason the NSA didn't break any more laws - because they didn't have the technology and budget to do so, had they had a bigger budget and better tech, they'd be sucking up more data.
For instance, people with unrestrained eating shouldn't go into a buffet, and you shouldn't praise them for restraint after the kitchen runs out of food.
Pro tip; If you see a resume that says; "20 years of iPhone programming experience" -- that's also a sign that someone is fudging the numbers.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
So a Federal FISA Judge (the leaded variety) says destroy it, a Federal Judge (the unleaded kind) in a Federal Court in California (not a California Government Court) says it's evidence so keep it. What we now have is a constitutional quandary as to who has jurisdiction. I guess the Appellate Court will have to take the matter up but they have no jurisdiction over the FISA court AFAIK. All I can say is that it's a fucking mess with dueling courts playing a game of Twister.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Indeed the FISC ruling said, repeatedly, that NSA could not keep the records for a civil suit _because_ the district court hadn't ordered them to. Now that the district court _has_ ordered them to to retain it, they must. FISC explicitly said they have a duty to preserve it if and when (but not before) a plaintiff or court asks them to.
So the "conflicting" orders are a non-story. The actual story is that the district court ordered them to retain it. FISC already acknowledged that district can and might do that.
15,000 exabytes: how do you come up with that number? Each record has a date/time stamp, a calling number, a called number, and a duration, right? If you store a phone number like 707-555-1212 as a hex number, that's 9 bytes; a duration of up to 15 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds (assuming they keep the seconds, maybe the phone companies don't) would take 5 bytes. I suppose a date/time stamp might take another 10 bytes, depending on what accuracy you wanted. So that's 10+9+9+5 = 33 bytes. Add a couple for parity check.
If your number of 15k exabytes is correct, that's 1.5*10**19 bytes. Divide by 5 for the years, and 365 for the days, you get 7*10**14 bytes per day. Divide by the number of bytes per phone record, you get 2*10**13 phone calls per day. Divide by the US population (this is about domestic calls, right?) = 3*10**6, you get each of us making 7*10**6 phone calls per day (and receiving an equal number, on the average). That's seven million phone calls you and I make. Well, I might make one millionth of that, so maybe you're making 14 million phone calls?
Even if this were data about phone calls by the entire world's population of seven billion = 7*10**9, that's three thousand phone calls for every person on the Earth every day.