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Wikimedia Is Clear To Sue the NSA Over Its Use of Warrantless Surveillance Tools (engadget.com)
The Wikimedia Foundation has the right to sue the National Security Agency over its use of warrantless surveillance tools, a federal appeals court ruled. "A district judge shot down Wikimedia's case in 2015, saying the group hadn't proved the NSA was actually illegally spying on its communications," reports Engadget. "In this case, proof was a tall order, considering information about the targeted surveillance system, Upstream, remains classified." From the report: The appeals court today ruled Wikimedia presented sufficient evidence that the NSA was in fact monitoring its communications, even if inadvertently. The Upstream system regularly tracks the physical backbone of the internet -- the cables and routers that actually transmit our emoji. With the help of telecom providers, the NSA then intercepts specific messages that contain "selectors," email addresses or other contact information for international targets under U.S. surveillance. "To put it simply, Wikimedia has plausibly alleged that its communications travel all of the roads that a communication can take, and that the NSA seizes all of the communications along at least one of those roads," the appeals court writes. "Thus, at least at this stage of the litigation, Wikimedia has standing to sue for a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And, because Wikimedia has self-censored its speech and sometimes forgone electronic communications in response to Upstream surveillance, it also has standing to sue for a violation of the First Amendment."
maybe someday we can bring it back again.
Yes. The government is not above its own law. It MUST be held accountable. If the government cannot be restrained by the courts, any semblance of democracy is gone.
Furthermore, monitoring itself does not interfere with speech in any way.
Excuse me?
I'll tell you what, create an account here on Slashdot using your real name - DOX yourself so we can be sure you who you say you are - and post what you honestly think of our government.
On the Fourth Amendment claim, the search must be unreasonable in order to be a violation. An unreasonable search is one that is not supported by a warrant. Contrary to the claim, the NSA has always had a warrant to conduct mass surveillance issued by the FISA court.
Did you miss the phrase "warrantless surveillance" in the summary?
The actual court ruling is here: https://www.aclu.org/legal-doc...
If we ever get a functioning justice system in this country, civil litigation of this sort would be redundant. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that the NSA employs people to commit billions of felonies every day. Until and unless they actually get punished for it, this shit will continue.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Being paranoid about government surveillance does not mean your rights are violated.
With Snowden's and Shadow Brokers' revelations, being paranoid about government surveillance means you underestimate the extent of 4th Amendment violations less than the general population.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The fact that the system of checks and balances sometimes works ineffectively doesn't mean that the system of checks and balances doesn't work at all.
In fact, the courts do present a barrier to abuse of power on the part of executive agencies. Not a perfect system-- and the ability of agencies to withhold information what they are doing, for security reasons, is indeed a serious barrier to court oversight-- but nevertheless, it is not completely broken.
You would be better to direct your cynicism toward the people. A large portion of the population (very likely the majority of the population) wants greater surveillance of communications, and wants the agencies hunting terrorists to do so secretly: they want to catch and shut down the terrorists whatever it takes. This isn't a "failure" of democracy-- this is democracy. IF it's a failure, it's a failure of the restraints on democracy.
If you want to change that: figure out how to make people less scared. (Good luck with that.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Trade Federation: "is it legal"
Palpatine: "I will make it legal"
Government is above the law, because it makes the law. We don't elect people to write laws and execute them, we elect people to monitor the legislative and executive actions of the shadow state.
Far too many people are enjoying the fruits of this illicit governance, and therefore don't care how bad our liberties are being raped.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"An unreasonable search is one that is not supported by a warrant."
A warrant "...particularly describing the place to be searched..."
The Fourth Amendment is written in such a way as to preclude a court from issuing any sort of "general" warrant. Searching the records of millions of people or collecting vast amounts of internet traffic is not a "particular" place to be searched.
"It does not matter whether that warrant is valid, only that it exists."
You could argue that an invalid warrant means the NSA personnel were acting in good faith and should thus not be subject to disciplinary action or criminal charge, but it doesn't make their activity legal. Yes, any warrant allegedly permitting this sweeping surveillance activity would be central to the case.
We need to bring these important claims to court because the courts have never issued a ruling on the Constitutionality of the NSA surveillance programs. Thus far, the government has successfully argued that the programs cannot be challenged in court because the plaintiffs don't have legal standing. Sounds like that argument didn't work this time.
Technically, the US is a Democratic Republic. Tyranny of the majority (Democracy) is still tyranny.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
They get around this by not really needing a warrant (technically). A lot of the internet traffic goes through computers they control, meaning its technically a publicly owned intersection. They're argument in this will be that they aren't performing anything beyond what a beat cop does on a walk-through patrol of a neighborhood in observing the ongoings in the public space.
Does that mean this shit is ok? Hell no. However, it isn't as cut and dry as people want it to be.
The main issue isn't the lack of a warrant, its the lack of observed privacy. Where do you define your private space to be in the digital domain? Your own personal computer files stored locally, sure. But once you get onto the internet, now you are utilizing a lot of publicly funded infrastructure. How do we clearly define this differently than if we are traveling in a car on a public road, visible to all? Your car is maintained as a semi-private space. However, the privacy ends if something illegal is observable through a window. One could argue that unencrypted packets running on a public network through a packet sniffer operated by a policing agency isn't a whole lot different.
The only way to truly mitigate this sort of issue is to have privacy clearly spelled out in our constitution. And good luck with that too. I can definitely see politically motivated millenials getting this sort of thing into place. However, the current high school seniors do not even know a world where privacy is valued. So if its going to happen, it'll need to happen in the next 15 years.
In the US this is not exactly true, the government is not above the law. The executive does not make the laws, it only enforces them. Even though congress makes the laws it changes its mind very often. The courts can also step in and declare the a law conflicts with other laws. Presidents often discover that things aren't so easy to implement as they think they are before coming to office.