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name_here
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Post by name_here » Sat Jun 15, 2013 4:01 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:I must admit that I'm more than a little disturbed by the fact that courts secretly rubber stamp the collection of millions of phone calls lasting over a period of months. I am unable to imagine what the NSA could possibly be telling the courts that would legitimately justify the power the courts apparently routinely give them.
> The FISA system has failed badly. It has failed everyone badly.
> -Username17

It should be pointed out that the data they're gathering has not been considered private for over three decades, and the order specifically states that names, addresses, etc. are not collected.
In isolation, the order is only mildly concerning; it's just a record of how long and frequent calls were and which numbers they were between, and there's just so much of it compared to the number of people who can access it that they're not going to be looking up numbers in school directories or anything. Probably they feed it all into a database and then stick in the phone numbers of people believed to be members of the same organization and run an algorithm designed to find someone they both report to.
What I want to see is the orders authorizing more detailed investigation on people using the dataset.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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Drolyt
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Post by Drolyt » Sat Jun 15, 2013 9:59 pm

I'm confused about something here, from what I hear the various companies involved in PRISM have not denied giving information, they have only said that everything they give is done in order to comply with court orders. That doesn't really mean anything, since apparently the government can obtain secret court orders whenever the fuck it wants.

> name_here wrote:It should be pointed out that the data they're gathering has not been considered private for over three decades

That is because the government is great at claiming they aren't doing something by redefining words. Also known as bullshitting.
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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Sat Jun 15, 2013 10:24 pm

> Drolyt wrote:

> > name_here wrote:It should be pointed out that the data they're gathering has not been considered private for over three decades

> That is because the government is great at claiming they aren't doing something by redefining words. Also known as bullshitting.

Actually, that's the Supreme Court's fault. Smith v. Maryland holds that the numbers you call aren't private (that is, that the government, in monitoring and recording those numbers, did not conduct a "search" under the 4th amendment).
Of course, with a large enough data set, metadata is really all you need to do all the tracking you could want. But don't expect the court to revisit the issue any time soon.
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Drolyt
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Post by Drolyt » Sat Jun 15, 2013 10:27 pm

> Whatever wrote:

> > Drolyt wrote:

> > > name_here wrote:It should be pointed out that the data they're gathering has not been considered private for over three decades

> > That is because the government is great at claiming they aren't doing something by redefining words. Also known as bullshitting.

> Actually, that's the Supreme Court's fault. Smith v. Maryland holds that the numbers you call aren't private (that is, that the government, in monitoring and recording those numbers, did not conduct a "search" under the 4th amendment).

I'm aware of that. It is not news that SCOTUS makes awful decisions.
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Sat Jun 15, 2013 11:33 pm

> Drolyt wrote:I'm confused about something here, from what I hear the various companies involved in PRISM have not denied giving information, they have only said that everything they give is done in order to comply with court orders. That doesn't really mean anything, since apparently the government can obtain secret court orders whenever the fuck it wants.

They've also denied receiving blanket court orders a la verizon, and claimed the number of requests they get is pretty small and unremarkable. The orders they do comply with are coming from secret courts, and that is bullshit, but PRISM is not turning out to be a frightening insight into the abuse of that system in anyway.
The Verizon bullshit is far more interesting, in that it shows an arbitrary collection of domestic information.
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Drolyt
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Post by Drolyt » Sun Jun 16, 2013 3:47 am

> DSMatticus wrote:The Verizon bullshit is far more interesting, in that it shows an arbitrary collection of domestic information.

True, but I think most people confuse the two.
Edit:This article talks about some of what the NSA is up to. Based on a few articles I've read it looks like the tech companies aren't cooperating for most of the data gathering, the NSA is getting access without their help for the most part. PRISM seems to be just a data collection program, and the information requested from the tech companies is not blanket but related to the information the NSA had already collected. It still looks pretty bad, it is just that PRISM seems to be just an auxiliary program rather than what we should be focused on.
Last edited by Drolyt on Sun Jun 16, 2013 4:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Sun Jun 16, 2013 8:13 am

The specific Snowden claim of PRISM is that the NSA had a magic backdoor into everything that allowed people with NSA contractor clearance to open up their laptop and read your email. That appears to be false.
The much more interesting thing about the Verizon court order is that the NSA apparently gets rolling permission to gather all phone records on a three month extension format just in case they feel like data mining them at some point in the future.
And it's entirely possible that those gathered phone records can be datamined by contractors with laptops if they felt like it, as they are apparently stored on NSA servers. The issue of what the NSA can get court orders to do and what random dudes with access to NSA computers could do with the system if they felt like jeopardizing their jobs by not following the rules are different issues. Snowden doesn't have a whole lot of credibility because he made some specific claims that are probably exaggerations. But it does bring up the issue that no one appears to be watching the watch men, and they do have lots and lots of data that was "lawfully" acquired via the process of getting rubber stamped by a secret kangaroo court.
-Username17
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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Mon Jun 17, 2013 5:14 am

> FrankTrollman wrote:The specific Snowden claim of PRISM is that the NSA had a magic backdoor into everything that allowed people with NSA contractor clearance to open up their laptop and read your email. That appears to be false.

Just wait.

> Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez wrote:"What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . . . I can't speak to what we learned in there, and I don't know if there are other leaks, if there's more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it's the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too."

Also:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589 ... one-calls/
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Surgo
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Post by Surgo » Wed Jul 31, 2013 5:49 pm

Hey, look what came out today! Something that is very specifically not metadata. DSMatticus, please proceed to suck a barrel of cocks. Whether or not they need a court order (a secret court order, mind you) to access stored information is immaterial because they are collecting it in the first place and could do it any time they wanted. Plus, it's not even clear that a court order is even required (secret or not).
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Wed Jul 31, 2013 9:09 pm

> Surgo wrote:Hey, look what came out today! Something that is very specifically not metadata. DSMatticus, please proceed to suck a barrel of cocks. Whether or not they need a court order (a secret court order, mind you) to access stored information is immaterial because they are collecting it in the first place and could do it any time they wanted. Plus, it's not even clear that a court order is even required (secret or not).

Well, first off, I reject the notion that people's speculation can be validated by evidence they don't actually have but emerges later. The number of statements you can assert when you hold yourself to no standards is limited only by how much time you're willing to spend saying words, and eventually someone somewhere is going to get lucky. So here is a snide nonpology for refusing to share your brand of wild speculation.
Anyway, discussing the article. Here's the core claim:

> Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person', though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

This isn't remarkable. Police officers have had the "technological capability but not the legal authority" to murder any civilian they can find for longer than I have been alive because they carry firearms. People who are willing to break the law can do bad things: news at 11:00. This is only interesting if you believe the NSA has de facto authority to perform those sorts of searches due to obfuscation and lack of accountability, and then it is only interesting because of the obfuscation and lack of accountability. It's unclear if that's true at this point in time, but it is clear that the only real accountability the NSA has is self-imposed/tied into a system of absolute secrecy and that is both total bullshit and long-term unsustainable.
Stepping past the incredibly uninteresting assertion that NSA employees willing to break the law can do bad things with government tools, it's unclear what data XKeyscore collects and how it collects it and who is cooperating with the NSA to get them this information (though, if you believe the denial of content providers and notice the silence from communications providers, you can start making educated guesses). But regardless of specifics it is unambiguously a blanket collection of actual data and not just metadata, and clear that it captures the communications of U.S. citizens, sooo... yeah. The NSA just unequivocally admitted to the blanket collection of the internet data of U.S. citizens. That is something that happened.
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ishy
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Post by ishy » Wed Jul 31, 2013 10:06 pm

> DSMatticus wrote:

> > Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person',

> This isn't remarkable.

That sounds pretty scary imho.
What limits are there concerning non-US citizens?

> Gary Gygax wrote:The player’s path to role-playing mastery begins with a thorough understanding of the rules of the game

> Bigode wrote:I wouldn't normally make that blanket of a suggestion, but you seem to deserve it: scroll through the entire forum, read anything that looks interesting in term of design experience, then come back.

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Wed Jul 31, 2013 10:34 pm

> ishy wrote:

> > DSMatticus wrote:

> > > Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person',

> > This isn't remarkable.

> That sounds pretty scary imho.
> What limits are there concerning non-US citizens?

None. If the U.S. is physically capable of getting its hands on non-U.S. communications (which it is) it can do whatever it wants with them. They've been upfront about that from the start. And yes, that is pretty much bullshit, but a separate kind of bullshit that reflects the weakness of national laws on global communications. I don't disagree with you, but I was focusing on the domestic perspective because the domestic perspective is the only thing Americans will ever get worked up about.
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Koumei
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Post by Koumei » Thu Aug 01, 2013 1:21 am

Given they don't have the ability to search through their own emails, I'm not terribly worried about the NSA being able to look through anyone else's.

> Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.

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Surgo
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Post by Surgo » Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:10 am

Even if you believe a word that comes out of their mouth about that and anything else they say, their email problem is not really surprising between various classification levels, need-to-know issues, and even just a negligence of "we're not going to spend the time/money necessary to make a workable system for something rather useless for us."
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Thu Aug 01, 2013 6:22 am

> ishy wrote:

> > DSMatticus wrote:

> > > Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person',

> > This isn't remarkable.

> That sounds pretty scary imho.
> What limits are there concerning non-US citizens?

As DSM pointed out: none. There are no global treaties governing the privacy of individuals. Every country in the world is under zero legal restrictions in spying on the citizens of other countries.
The global communications grid has no protections at all for the privacy of anyone. There are specific laws in some countries that give limited privacy protections to the citizens of those countries, but those privacy protections only apply to those agencies covered by their own national laws.
Hungary recently passed a law allowing them to listen to the phone conversations of their own people, but they never needed a law to listen to any phone conversations of non-Hungarians they managed to get their hands on.
Note that the European Union has data protection laws (which the Hungarian law is flagrantly flaunting), but those only apply to interactions between European agents and European citizens. If you're not a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (say, you're Russia or China), those limits do not apply to you. If you're not a European inside Europe, those protections don't apply to you. Not that the protections are worth much, considering that Hungary can apparently just decide to take them away and not receive sanctions for it.
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RobbyPants
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Post by RobbyPants » Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:29 pm

> DSMatticus wrote:This is only interesting if you believe the NSA has de facto authority to perform those sorts of searches due to obfuscation and lack of accountability, and then it is only interesting because of the obfuscation and lack of accountability. It's unclear if that's true at this point in time, but it is clear that the only real accountability the NSA has is self-imposed/tied into a system of absolute secrecy and that is both total bullshit and long-term unsustainable.

I was going to say that your police shooting analogy wasn't that good, but it looks like you're addressing the difference here. That being said, what do you mean about the obfuscation and lack of accountability as being unsustainable?
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:32 pm

> RobbyPants wrote:

> > DSMatticus wrote:This is only interesting if you believe the NSA has de facto authority to perform those sorts of searches due to obfuscation and lack of accountability, and then it is only interesting because of the obfuscation and lack of accountability. It's unclear if that's true at this point in time, but it is clear that the only real accountability the NSA has is self-imposed/tied into a system of absolute secrecy and that is both total bullshit and long-term unsustainable.

> I was going to say that your police shooting analogy wasn't that good, but it looks like you're addressing the difference here. That being said, what do you mean about the obfuscation and lack of accountability as being unsustainable?

There is no pressure on politicians or government agencies to represent the interests of the people when the people have no idea what those agencies are doing or have no authority over them, direct or indirect. An organization's self-restraint is almost always at odds with the purpose it is structured to accomplish. The NSA exists to detect threats. Anything less than reading everyone's everything makes them less capable of doing so. You might have heads of the NSA that handicap themself on ideological grounds they personally hold, but those people won't be there forever (and indeed, if it impacts their ability to look impressive to their bosses they may not be there long at all). If you're going to institutionalize respect for privacy in the NSA, you have to expose them to an external pressure to do so. And "that's what the secret courts do!" will never fly, because that arrangement has the same problems.
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RobbyPants
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Post by RobbyPants » Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:40 pm

Okay. I thought that you meant that they wouldn't be able to remain unaccountable forever.
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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Fri Aug 02, 2013 4:45 am

American government agents invade Long Island family's home because of "suspicious" google searches.
https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Fri Aug 02, 2013 4:47 am

Yeah, except not so much: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/0 ... re-cooker/
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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Fri Aug 02, 2013 5:22 am

Yeah... that actually makes the whole thing seem worse. "If you see something, say something," from that wretched hag Janet Napolitano.
But realistically, they don't send the FBI's JTTF just because someone at your former job has a demented grudge. This suggests that there was some other evidence which the Feds considered. Of course, they might just be bumbling fools.
Catalano said the agents told him they do 100 or so invasions like that per week. If that is true, are all of those invasions prompted by employers digging up google searches of former employees?

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Fri Aug 02, 2013 2:29 pm

Did you even read the article I linked? They didn't send the FBI's JTTF. The local police showed up at her door, and asked a few questions.
You're an idiot.
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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Fri Aug 02, 2013 5:33 pm

You dumb sack of festering shit. The Suffolk county police are PART OF the FBI's JTTF.
Go fuck yourself, and your dog.

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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Sigil
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Post by Sigil » Fri Aug 02, 2013 5:38 pm

The article whatever linked to would indicate that in the time leading up to being let go, the employee googled "Pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks" on company computers. Someone in the company noticed this and contacted the police.
Following from here, though it isn't spelled out explicitly in the article, the police (being part of the FBI's JTTF) probably contacted the FBI, seeing it as potential terrorism, to be advised. Thereafter the local police showed up at his door.
If true, this would mean that it is not a good (or even a) example of government spying, there are other better examples out there.
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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Fri Aug 02, 2013 5:55 pm

They're "partnered" with the FBI's JTTF (as is, apparently, nearly every local police department in the country), but the JTTF said they weren't involved:
http://gothamist.com/2013/08/01/li_woma ... igated.php
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