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US Appeals Court Says NSA Phone Surveillance Is Not Authorized By Congress
New submitter IronOxen writes: A panel of three federal judges for the second circuit overturned an earlier ruling. The court has ruled that the bulk collection of telephone metadata is unlawful, in a landmark decision that clears the way for a full legal challenge against the National Security Agency: "'We hold that the text of section 215 cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program,' concluded their judgement." That's not exactly saying that such bulk collection is unconscionable or per se unconstitutional, but it's a major step toward respecting privacy as a default.
We have indeed tasked loyal people with a job. You misunderstand that job. The job is to keep us as safe as possible within the restrictions on methods that liberty requires.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It means that they personally are at fault, rather than that Congress overstepped it's authority.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Just because it's illegal or not authorized doesn't mean that they will stop. They'll simply continue and do their best to keep it hush hush
Senator Rand Paul, a Republican presidential candidate who has made opposition to overbroad surveillance central to his platform, tweeted: “The phone records of law abiding citizens are none of the NSA’s business! Pleased with the ruling this morning.”
How fast would his attitude towards surveillance change if were elected president?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
When that next truck bomb detonates at a sporting event or mall, or when that next muslim fan goes on an indiscriminate killing spree through a church, know in your heart that you have allowed that to happen.
I'll enjoy my freedom, thankyouverymuch, even if it does come with an 0.001% chance of dying by terrorist.
The terrorists did less damage to our way of life than this kind of government spying on its own citizens.
maybe now we can pardon Snowden?
know in your heart that you have allowed that to happen.
Show me some data showing this surveillance has worked and I might agree with you.
Other wise, if you give an ape a gun sooner or later someone gets shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The reason there are people who want to use asymmetric warfare (terrorism) is because they are outmatched. We, the USA, were the ones who threw the first punch with our occupation of Muslim countries. We can rationalize it all we want that we are fighting for "freedom", helping the oppressed or whatever the delusional shit we tell ourselves for our ridiculous foreign policy. It's all lies. We are occupying other countries and their people do NOT like it. what is so hard to understand?!
If we were TRULY fighting for those things, then we must invade Saudi Arabia, Israel, N.Korea, China, Somalia, etc ......
And if we were fighting for freedom, then why did we oust Saddam from Kuwait and reinstate a monarchy? That makes no sense.
The US' foreign policies are hypocritical and the rest of thee World knows it and sees it. Unfortunately, we Americans have been brainwashed by our propaganda - corporate for profit propaganda - because it's what we want to hear. When the fact is we're two faced bullies.
Except there's no proof that these tools are actually effective, and there are plenty of arguments made by experts that they cannot possibly be effective (too many false positives ties up scarce investigative resources). So I reject your whole premise.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
God bless America.*
*Even though I firmly believe the separation of church and state is vital and I would in no way impose religion on anyone.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It didn't stop the Boston bombing, and the government knew the perpetrators, and the same with the attempted attack the other day in Texas. Too much data is just as bad, or worse, than not enough. Hindsight is always 20/20, and in almost every attack we find that the intel was there to stop it, but wasn't acted upon. So, we're just as screwed with it as without it.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Ben F.
You've probably heard it a few times, now fucking THINK about it for a while
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Lets see how well did the spy on everyone program work when two "nice" muslim guys from Phoenix, one of which was already being watched for terrorist ties, drove to Dallas and attempted to shoot up the event that offended them. If our government can't stop terrorists they know are terrorists through all the domestic spying why do some think they are safer by having the government spy on them?
Fair point. The federal govt. did send a warning to the state (maybe city)? Didn't help much, though. Or maybe it did, and that's why the cop who shot them both was such a badass. They put a Chuck Norris on the scene.
The terrorists did less damage to our way of life than this kind of government spying on its own citizens.
Yup. Terrorism between 1970-2007: 1 in 3,500,00 chance of being killed by a terrorist. In 2007 alone you had a 1 in 22,000 chance of being murdered in the US.
Someone mod this up.
First time I've seen anyone asking the obvious question: if the guy was being watched by the FBI for the last N years, how did he ever get close enough to the event to start shooting it up? Could have turned out a lot worse.
How many of our taxpayer dollars were wasted watching this guy to no useful end? How many are spent on even more useless activities?
I disagree. They are not tasked with keeping us safe; they are tasked with safeguarding our liberties.
I'll take my chances as well. The spy program have been real successfully at stopping attacks though, oh, wait....
.... keeping in mind that what liberty requires in regard to restrictions may be different than what the mob believes.
I would argue that infringing on the privacy of the people to keep them (questionably) safe(r) is just exchanging one loss of liberty for another.
How about we disregard what EVERYONE thinks and go by what the law says. How's that 4th amendment go again?
You're missing the point... The mass surveillance makes it harder to keep track of actual threats and if the FBI did not spend all their time training fake terrorist to create fake victories they could start looking at real terrorist.
When that next truck bomb detonates at a sporting event or mall, or when that next muslim fan goes on an indiscriminate killing spree through a church, know in your heart that you have allowed that to happen.
I'll enjoy my freedom, thankyouverymuch, even if it does come with an 0.001% chance of dying by terrorist.
0.001%? That's insanely high. The real rate is a couple orders of magnitude lower. It just goes to show how completely terrible human beings are at estimate the risk of extremely rare events.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Well sure, but Al Capone and John Gotti have a decidedly odd slant on liberty and restrictions on government action.
You know my grandfather was kidnapped by Capone back in the 30's and that was because his would be wife was a court clerk. Not too hard to figure out what was going on there and my grandfather was a good boy and kept his mouth shut but in '64 the mafia on north shore Tahoe ripped off and killed both my grandparents on my fathers side anyway. He had wired 'hospital fund raiser' money for image sensors for a project that was run in absolute secrecy, my grandparents were killed in a plane crash immediately following that and the money never made it, in fact the USAF had to purchase the image sensors. In 1964 my great uncle Jack cancelled the CIA SR program due to a security breach because of that. My father on 5/1/2013 was killed by Sherriff's officers in Reno, NV. Sherriff's officers that were previously corrections officers on south shore Tahoe that were accused of rape of female inmates in their jail and were fired but also given letters of recommendation? These pricks wanted me to jury tamper my father on the Caputo case? WTF? For this reason I have contacted remaining folks that are still alive in the SR program and I have advised them I am moving to Germany because of this. They call them men of honor, not unlike Snowden, I call bullshit;
US-Regierung ist defekt, von mafia- kontrollierten, getÃtet und ausgeraubt radar mans projektfÃrderung, mein groÃYvater im jahre 1964, und radar mans neffe - mein vater auf 2013.01.05, setup ganze familie. groÃYneffe des radar- mans deser nach Deutschland, weil der mafia. Politisches asyl.
On 6/1/2013, I am out of here. The mafia runs your country and I just can't stop thinking about Naples, Italy in 1991 where the people attacked the mafia because they were not being represented and that same shit is going on here. There's a lot of people in this country and when this shit comes to a head, I'd rather be watching from across the pond and preferably working on what my family was doing pre 1964. That happened to be slated to be the best part of the JFK space program after satellite tech was to be implemented, but they are not honorable and they are greedy and quite willing to give up something better tomorrow for a quick buck today, this has only gotten worse in this country over the last 50 years and to the point that they no longer have a choice but to play it crooked. Screwed the US is, done it to them selves they have for 50 years, defecting, I am.
yes but how does the war machine make money off of that?
They are not tasked with keeping us safe; they are tasked with 'safeguarding our liberties'.
Safeguarding liberty by breaking through a constitutional boundary... That's a hot one! Thanks for the belly laugh.
The Bill of Rights is the set of proscriptions deemed necessary by the founders to ensure that the citizenry was protected from the tyranny of its own unrestricted government. The fourth amendment was enshrined to limit police power to that which could be rationally supported by evidence of wrong doing. I.E., the wrong doing must logical occur prior to the collection of evidence, in a system where provision against 'unreasonable search' is in force. Blanket surveillance of all electronic communications for as many channels as possible is so completely beyond the pale of reason for anyone who claims knowledge of liberty, that it's hard to believe anyone would question the legitimacy of such an attempt. But here it is...
If we work with nice round numbers and say that there were 300,000,000 people in the US and that on 9-11-2001 terrorist killed about 3,000 people then that number is about right. But keep in mind that something like 9-11-2001 is a once in a lifetime event so the 0.001% chance of death by terrorist would be for one's entire life and would seem to be a good enough ballpark number. On an annual basis it would be a couple of orders magnitude less.
Time to offend someone
Because none of that warrantless spying contributed in any way to stopping him.
Actually the terrorists did win in a way. They achieved their goal of "terrorizing" us into enacting the policies now damaging our way of life. They caused the environment that allowed the government to pass the Patriot Act enabling/justifying their spying on us.
They made us suspect ourselves and each other and we now live in a state of paranoia and distrust.
Seriously, the worst part is that it's doesn't achieve it's stated objectives.
Intel gathered in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and some other rogue states like Bahrain, yields actionable intel.
Intel gathered in the US has somewhere around 99 percent false leads that hide the 1 percent we would have found if we only used the above intel instead, and then used specific warrant leads.
That to me is the take home from this Illegal and Unconstitutional NSA data collection program.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You can figure out the chance you'll die from terrorism with some statistical math if you choose an expected lifetime length and your chance to die from terrorism each year. The math is fairly simple if you assume that your chance of dying from terrorism is roughly constant over your lifetime. It's not perfect but it can give you an idea of the magnitude of the risk involved.
Let P(terrorist kills you in your lifetime) be the probability of a terrorist killing you in your lifetime. Then,
P(terrorist kills you in your lifetime) = 1 - P(terrorist doesn't kill you in your lifetime)
If we assume that the likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack is fairly constant over your lifetime then:
P(terrorist doesn't kill you in your lifetime) = P(terrorist doesn't kill you in a specific year) ^ N
Where N is the number of years you expect to live. Lets overestimate the number of people that die from the kinds of terrorists you see on the news in the United States in a year. I do not see headlines about 100 people dying a year from actual terrorists but still I am going to overestimate and say it's a 1 in a million chance. So around 300 people dead a year in the U.S.A.
P(terrorist doesn't kill you in a specific year) = 1 - P(terrorist kills you in a specific year) = 1 - 0.000001 = 0.999999
So the formula looks like this:
P(terrorist kills you in your lifetime) = 1 - ((1 - P(terrorist kills you in a specific year)) ^ N)
For a lifetime of 75 years:
P(terrorist kills you in your lifetime) = 1 - (0.999999 ^ 75) = 7.4997 x 10^-5
Which is 2 (a.k.a a couple) orders of magnitude lower than your 1 x 10^-3.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not