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The Executive Order That Led To Mass Spying, As Told By NSA Alumni
An anonymous reader writes with this Ars piece about the executive order that is the legal basis for the U.S. government's mass spying on citizens. One thing sits at the heart of what many consider a surveillance state within the US today. The problem does not begin with political systems that discourage transparency or technologies that can intercept everyday communications without notice. Like everything else in Washington, there's a legal basis for what many believe is extreme government overreach—in this case, it's Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981. “12333 is used to target foreigners abroad, and collection happens outside the US," whistleblower John Tye, a former State Department official, told Ars recently. "My complaint is not that they’re using it to target Americans, my complaint is that the volume of incidental collection on US persons is unconstitutional.” The document, known in government circles as "twelve triple three," gives incredible leeway to intelligence agencies sweeping up vast quantities of Americans' data. That data ranges from e-mail content to Facebook messages, from Skype chats to practically anything that passes over the Internet on an incidental basis. In other words, EO 12333 protects the tangential collection of Americans' data even when Americans aren't specifically targeted—otherwise it would be forbidden under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
Three years early!
that man is responsible for every disaster on the globe since he ever was president..
If it's just Facebook, then it'll be claimed as a Facebook security breach and not anything related to NSA.
You would want some sort of release of data that collates Facebook accounts to traffic offenses and something to do with cellphone data.
signature is pants
You've misspelled illuminati.
President and agencies still swear to uphold the Constitution and have no business violating it, executive orders or not.
Any orders ought to be followed to the extent the Constitution allows, not beyond, and those going beyond deserve
to be punished. That should include Presidents, though such sanctions are pretty broken.
Everyone involved made specific, intentional choices. It didn't happen on autopilot.
EO's have no real weight to create policy. They are simply instructions for federal agencies (which the President is in control of since he is the executive) to do.
Congress then up until now allowed it and the blame lies on their shoulders alone for creating the surveillance state.
None of those things existed, when the order was signed, though. And if none of the subsequent Presidents — including the current "tech-savvy" wonder — have abolished it since then (when the explosive use of computers made it truly dangerous), then is Reagan really to blame?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is crazy. It seems Executive Orders are non-legislation afforded the impact of law.
Executive Orders should expire after a couple of years, or when a Presidential inauguration occurs, whichever comes first. Continuation should require Congress to pass it as ACTUAL law. And changes outside of that period MUST be ACTUAL LAW!!!!!
WTF!?!?!?!?
Sorry for the caps, I RTFA and it pissed me off.
I would suggest Executive Orders be done away with completely, they are an "I am the King" method of ruling. Not leading, ruling, controlling.
BlameBillCosby.com
Yet Another Decent Thing Destroyed by the Reagan Administration.
I should have known.
A friend of my sister's worked for NSA for eight years in the 1960s. At that time the fact of its existence was classified - insiders said the acronym stood for "No Such Agency". He spent most of those eight years in a shack on a hill in Japan, listening and recording phone calls and telegraphs in and out of Japan. He came out of those eight years imbued with an extreme level of paranoia that he never did shake off. It cost him his marriage among other things.
So 1981 wasn't the beginning. I would be more likely to think that the directive in question was created to paper over and legalize what had been going on for decades before. The agency was founded by Harry Truman in 1952 based on signals intelligence units from WWI, per Wikipedia. I saw an article recently which asserted that spying on foreign (and some domestic) entities really came out of the period before and after World War I, and it made sense.
Having said all that, I recently learned that the NSA is not just "spooks peeking into our bedrooms" and getting everyone upset. That is just one of three branches.
- Signals Intelligence Directorate is the one that has been upsetting people, and may in fact be as crazy as people think they are;
- Information Assurance Directorate one might consider the "good guys" - they are working with US industry and agencies to prevent security breaches - one might consider this the "anti-spy" group, and you'll see guys from IAD at conferences regarding improvement of the security infrastructure of the net, to prevent spying and other problems. By all accounts the Information Assurance Directorate is working very hard to protect us, and has had some successes preventing or stopping serious hacking and other incidents against both public and private organizations in recent years that they, of course, can't ever tell anyone.
- Technical Directorate, which I assume is the people inventing the HW and SW the rest of the gang uses.
TL;DR - don't paint the whole of NSA with the same tar and feathers. Some, at least, are out there actively helping with things like Tor as we read recently - spy agencies including NSA have regularly helped Tor find and fix bugs, even while other groups in the same agency are trying to exploit them.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I mean, really, he was once head of the CIA, and once he became VP, why not persuade the President this was good for America?
FISA? That rubber stamp is bypassed while collecting masses of data on US citizens.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The simple fact is that *most* executive orders are perfectly valid, and discontinuing them would serve no purpose.
A typical executive order simply designates procedures and requirements to be followed by people working for the Executive branch of the government. (Such as requiring that they not enter contracts with companies discriminating against employees for various reasons.)
This, however, is not a typical executive order. It is, quite simply, unconstitutional, and an explicit violation of laws written and passed by Congress. This is something that Congress, the States, and the People, *should* be getting upset about. Unfortunately, it won't happen, because roughly 50% of the country doesn't want to acknowledge anything that will make Republicans look bad, and roughly another half doesn't want to acknowledge anything that makes Democrats look bad. That leaves a few rational stragglers stuck in the middle, saying "WTF is up with you boneheaded ****wads?!!"
It's good to see that EO12333 has been placed in the spotlight. It always irked me how it tries to run around the constitution. The whole order is filled with phony "prohibitions" on government power with open-ended exceptions that can be invoked at any time.
My favorite parts:
So basically any government agency can be tasked to collect domestic information without the pesky oversight the FBI has to deal with.
They've tried to be clever and hide what they did here with a double negative spread across two clauses. Effectively all defense contractor employees are subjected to domestic spying which was part of the rationale for justify creating the surveillance apparatus. They don't disclose that when you sign the contract suspending your rights when you apply for a security clearance. Note that that much of the internet enabled surveillance programs were instituted pre-9/11 under Clinton and not by Bush2 and this was going on before the PATRIOT act madness.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Bullshit. It's ILLEGAL, period. Executive orders don't trump acts of congress, and acts of congress don't override the constitution. Every NSA minion involved in collecting this data without a warrant issued by a judge naming a specific person and stating what they're looking for and why, is a CRIMINAL.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What is interesting is that order was executed in the final years of the Cold War. There was no "Internet" so it is doubtful that this was the intent. However, we were still in a Cold War with the Soviet Union. And, there were communist sympathizers here in the US who would be subject to this surveillance. Additionally, the drug cartels and weapons trade were in high gear (ala Iran/Contra). So, given this context, it is understandable WHY this order was created and issued in the first place.
I doubt President Reagan envisioned the rise of the internet and the privacy concerns that the budding .com businesses would generate.
Where the fault does lay is that when these avenues did arise, is with the continued existence and extension of the initial order. This finger points directly at GHB, Clinton, GWB and now Obama. And, I would focus more on GHB given his close affiliation and vested interest with the intelligence communities. The dangers were well known by Clinton/Gore with the desire to push the Skipjack encryption algorithm into everything...right until it was revealed that the LEA (Law Enforcement Access Key...ala LEAK) key code could be forged rendered it a non-starter - it didn't meet National security needs once that was revealed and the common folk and business community would never accept it. RSA Laboratories was the key vendor of secure encryption at this point and fought against Skipjack. With that battle lost, sights turned elsewhere and we KNOW RSA's new overloads (EMC) sold us out for $10M. It was the perfect subject of a compromise given the pervasiveness of their products. I would venture their right to continue to exist was at stake and the $10M was simply a means to cover up the coehersion.
Ultimately, nobody but the brakes on this surveillance and we know where it has since led.