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FBI Quietly Changes Its Privacy Rules For Accessing NSA Data On Americans (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The FBI has quietly revised its privacy rules for searching data involving Americans' international communications that was collected by the NSA, U.S. officials have confirmed to the Guardian. The classified revisions were accepted by the secret U.S. court that governs surveillance, during its annual recertification of the agencies' broad surveillance powers. The new rules affect a set of powers colloquially known as Section 702, the portion of the law that authorizes the NSA's sweeping "Prism" program to collect internet data. Section 702 falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and is a provision set to expire later this year. A government civil liberties watchdog, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, alluded to the change in its recent overview of ongoing surveillance practices. The PCLOB's new compliance report, released last month, found that the administration has submitted "revised FBI minimization procedures" that address at least some of the group's concerns about "many" FBI agents who use NSA-gathered data. Sharon Bradford Franklin, a spokesperson for the PCLOB, said the rule changes move to enhance privacy. She could not say when the rules actually changed -- that, too, is classified. Last February, a compliance audit alluded to imminent changes to the FBI's freedom to search the data for Americans' identifying information. "FBI's minimization procedures will be updated to more clearly reflect the FBI's standard for conducting U.S. person queries and to require additional supervisory approval to access query results in certain circumstances," the review stated. The reference to "supervisory approval" suggests the FBI may not require court approval for their searches -- unlike the new system Congress enacted last year for NSA or FBI acquisition of U.S. phone metadata in terrorism or espionage cases.
The sad thing is, it's only Americans who are serfs in America. Canadian and citizens of the EU have real privacy rights guaranteed by US/Canada and US/EU data treaties, which are binding.
They can even sue for their rights.
You can't.
Oh, wait, serfs had the right of appeal. You don't even have that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Fightclub, Is, Secret, Alright?
tl;dr
The FBI just added itself to your fiends & family share plan.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
So a secret court stamped 'legal' on a classified set of rules governing what access the FBI has to the data that the NSA officially does not collect?
I think, comrade, that we might have made an error somewhere in the process of implementing this 'representative government' concept...
The team that's implementing these "classified revisions" just needs to have it explained to them that we don't want security in exchange for reduced freedom.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In short, a section of the patriot act allows the FBI access to data collected by the NSA. A privacy group has been on the FBI's ass and the FBI finally submitted a new plan outlining the data access policy to the FISA court. The FISA court accepted the new rules but the details is being kept secret. The privacy group claims partial victory but won't give enough details on how they know that amount to much more than a guess.
Short enough?
FBI got look into all the NSA "collect it all" material that held US citizens communications.
No records got kept of what the search was or was for, the amount of searching, no US courts needed.
After been exposed by whistleblowers, secret rule changes did something in secret to restore the missing internal oversight of domestic searching.
Terms like "additional supervisory approval" would point to the same vast domestic access just with more staff and a better domestic bureaucratic paper trail.
ie the "backdoor search provision" stays for domestic spy use but more bureaucrats have to ensure they have the internal, secret powers to reauthorize and log their own staff.
Same vast domestic spying, just better records on what was searched for domestically and who did the search.
Think back to something like MAIN CORE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... now with a secure log in and new logging of all searches.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Section 702 facilitates targeting and collection on non-US Persons outside the United States whose communications enters, traverses, or otherwise touches the United States, as over 70% of international internet traffic does, or as does any non-US Person outside the US using any US-based cloud or internet service.
Where US Persons come in is because US corporations and organizations are also "US Persons". But if we suddenly say that doing foreign intelligence collection on non-US Persons outside the US should require the same individualized warrant protections as Americans citizens living in the US, it absurdly turns the entire purpose and function of foreign intelligence collection on its head.
And if you already don't trust the government, you won't care about anything in this explanation anyway.
who the fuck wrote this awful summary. was it really that hard to add a little about what the fuck the changes actually are
Then why such a massive uninformative overly wordy summary? this all could have been achieved in a couple of sentences. FBI made changes, it was accepted by secret court but we don't know what the fuck they changed but privacy groups are somewhat happy about the changes they can't tell us about.
Did anyone else's next-word predictor colour 'enhance' as 'eliminate' ?
Requiem for the American Dream
I think Hilliary prefers triangles......
Wait, what does this mean for climate change and net neutrality? OH LOOK! A SQUIRREL!
Legislation by regulation is lazy law. This is legislation by secret regulations.
Troubling.
Regulations are supposed to be reviewed by congress.
A bunch of lazy or impertinent thugs inserted language that allows regulation
to pass into the status of law if unchallenged.
It is impossible to challenge a secret change....
Kafka is giggling.
Joseph Heller is giggling.
George Orwell did not author a plan, don't ya know... it was a cautionary tail.
Wait someone is knocking on the door.
I was nine and asked the grandmother of the neighbor kid what those numbers on her arm were.
I was an ignorant silly nine year old. Not stupid... I did listen the next day to her daughter.
Pay attention.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.