by Ugh
It seems that there is a bit of a to do about the information the NSA collects on Americans. Whether or not this is "legal" – from a statutory or Constitutional perspective – it's a bit troubling.
First, it has been done in complete secrecy outside of government officials (until these reports). Second, it seems it's been done with minimal oversight, other than via the rather docile FISA court, which almost never objects. Third, the current Administration, like the one before it, invokes the state secrets doctrine/privilege whenever a citizen of the United States might object to said information collection, and Article III courts seem to think this is just fine and dismiss the cases left and right (cases are also dismissed under the rather silly standing doctrine), thus avoiding any sunlight and application of the Constitution in an adversarial proceeding (and then the administration talks about the program to the press, natch, including declassifying information, the horror!). Fourth, there seems to be bi-partisan support for this program on Capitol Hill (with exceptions), so even though this might otherwise be a "scandal," not so much – other than that the "real" scandal is the leaker(s) who must be found and prosecuted for revealing this to the American people.
Of course, the national security apparatus assures us that "safeguards" are in place and that proper respect is paid to civil liberties and Americans' privacy. Well, prove it, as reports like this are not instilling confidence.
Without any meaningful, public, neutral oversight, it's hard to tell what might be needed, what's just a bunch of CYA, and what's abusive (or criminal), but it seems that collecting, at a minimum, the pen-register/meta-data of every single Verizon customer for seven years (and I would have to guess the customers of all the other telecomms) might be a tad bit excessive and oppressive. But, "no one is listening to your phonecalls." Right.
I suppose the best we can hope for is not to have thugs working for and running the national security apparatus, but it seems we only have thugs of differing degrees.
Update: And the leaker reveals himself.
White House Petition to Pardon Edward Snowden: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD
I have no idea if these are illegal actions. They are certainly impeachable.
Interview: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things’ – video
A very quick note, Typepad is still randomly marking comments as spam. If you don’t see your comment, it is most likely there, and I’ll try and keep the superuser dashboard open and regularly check and release the comments as quickly as possible, but I haven’t figured out a way to do it on my iphone, so there will be periods where I can’t do it.
Realize also that conversations may seem a bit strange when a previously unpublished comment pops up in the middle of the thread. I’d ask that you not assume that people have read what you wrote just because the comment you wrote (now) appears directly above the comment you are taking exception to, because it might not be the case.
‘I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things’ – video
So he’d rather live in China (which is probably already hacking into it). Kind of ruins his creds IMO.
What’s really weird about the phone metadata capture is the ambivalence. On the one hand, there’s ‘we absolutely must keep this vital program to keep us safe’, but you never hear ‘this program is so awesome we should be using it to solve/prosecute real crimes’. I imagine every detective in prosecutor in the country would kill to get access to a complete phone metadata (even without the location data tossed in). If it is so useful, what’s the principled basis for not using it solve/prosecute crimes?
They are certainly impeachable.
One of the more inexplicable things you’ve ever posted, Duff.
So he’d rather live in China
That’s a cheap shot.
I think he’d rather live some place where the US government won’t be able to extradite or disappear him, and there aren’t a lot of places like that to choose from.
One of the more inexplicable things you’ve ever posted
“An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history”
– Gerald Ford
Figure it out.
If the American public thinks its a big deal, its a big deal. I think its a big deal.
I think he’d rather live some place where the US government won’t be able to extradite or disappear him, and there aren’t a lot of places like that to choose from.
Haha, if you think that China’s a better bet for that, then you don’t know much about China.
And if you think that it’s a “cheap shot” that I don’t think China is the bastion of civil liberties, well, you don’t know much about China.
Good for you, Duff! I think you’re ready for the Supremes!
I don’t think China is the bastion of civil liberties,
because they not only keep track of people’s communications, they censor them, prosecute people for them, etc. What a joke.
That should confuse the NSA, lj. In fact, could you randomly rearrange the order of comments every couple of hours to keep them guessing?
I watched the Snowden interview and all I can say is that this is going to be a wild ride.
The Chairs of the Intelligence Committees have called for criminal investigations on a bi-partisan basis, which looks like it is going to leave either extreme of the political spectrum united against the vast middle.
Snowden enlisted and served in Iraq, saying he believed in helping oppressed peoples achieve freedom, which tells me that he was naive and idealistic enough at THAT time, anyway, to buy a fulsome line of simpleton bullsh*t from the very designers of the national security state we are living with now.
I’m glad he came forward and I fear for his welfare, but precisely WHAT did he think he was setting himself up for by working for the CIA and then security contractors connected to NSA?
I don’t know who the personalities will be who lead the charge against this stuff from the Left, IF it turns out to be as bad as it sounds, but the fact that ignoramus Rand Paul is setting himself to lead the charge from the Right is dispiriting at best.
Does every problem in this country now require that we hire out for clowns?
I’m thinking Duff Clarity is trying to read Dick Cheney’s mind, as in, “This intelligence program is awesome and doesn’t infringe on freedoms nearly enough, but if anger against it can be used to impeach Barack Hussein Obama, then I deserve a bonus.”
Hong Kong is NOT China, and I think the “live in China” meme is about to get out of hand, but Snowden didn’t exactly shoot down the notion in the interview that he might consider living in China, if it comes to that.
If that happens, regardless of Snowden’s reasoning, I expect the American people to rise up and demand their data be surveilled fore and aft.
In fact, the China fearers will begin handing in transcripts of their phone calls, tweets, and inner thoughts to the NSA as a show of patriotism.
That’s O.K. though, because Rand Paul will fit himself inside any clown car he thinks the American people might be buying.
if you think that China’s a better bet for that
Let me state clearly what I think so you that you don’t have to speculate wildly:
I think that while China is an awful place for civil liberties in general, it can be the most freedom-preserving place for some people in special extremely rare circumstances.
I think the fact that Snowden went there was not a general endorsement of China’s status as a protector of civil liberties but more a recognition that it might be the best option for him at this moment given his extremely special circumstances.
I think anyone who just pissed off the national security apparatus of the US government should fear extradition and, failing that, extraordinary rendition, and, failing that, a sniper’s bullet. That means you can’t go to most (all?) european countries since many of them casually and knowingly let the CIA torture random people in black sites for years. I wouldn’t want to be tortured in a european CIA dundgeon for years.
Also, what is your actual argument with Duff now? As far as I can see, Duff thinks Presidents who shred the 4th amendment deserve to be impeached, even if Congress + the courts agree with said shredding. Do you really disagree with that? Or do you think that as long as the congress+the courts sign off on something, it is always OK? Or do you think storing all telephone metadata and cellphone location data for everyone in the US indefinitely is somehow compatible with the 4A?
I’m thinking Duff Clarity is trying to read Dick Cheney’s mind
I’m thinking you don’t have a clue about what I’m thinking.
I see Clarity has clarified, and my guess was little more than a stiff flour pudding boiled in a cloth bag.
Maybe the House will indict Snowden for national security leaks AND impeach Obama.
Thew we can all kill ourselves.
“I’m thinking you don’t a have clue about what I’m thinking.”
True, but I guessed that you were thinking that I don’t have a clue what you’re thinking, so one out of two ain’t bad.
Hong Kong is China. It’s “one country, two systems” for now. How does that feel, Count-me-in?
It’s a gorgeous, very free city, but its foreign relations is governed by Beijing. Wonder how that feels for people seeking asylum, Count-me-in.
Right now, it’s a libertarian paradise (where private currency rules!) because British financiers were the dominant force.
It’s a wonderful place to visit, and to live! For now! Especially if you’re a pawn of the Chinese government!
I think that while China is an awful place for civil liberties in general, it can be the most freedom-preserving place for some people in special extremely rare circumstances.
Hahahahahahahahah!
Absolutely agree! Aren’t the privileged always protected where their friends are! Don’t we all long for a place that can “be the most freedom-preserving place for some people in extremely rare circumstances”! OMG! That’s what Democracy means to Turbulence! As he states “clearly”!
Oh, this is rich!
How does that feel, Count-me-in?
Corrected, I spose.
I see your in fine fettle, as well.
Is this a tag team event or a demolition derby?
Aren’t the privileged always protected where their friends are!
You seem unusually confused, even for you.
Snowden’s special circumstances that I alluded to is that he’s pissed of the national security apparatus of the US government, and is at risk for extradition, extraordinary rendition, or assassination. That is not a privilege.
Do you really not understand that?
Count-me-in, I’m a fan of yours as you know. I’m sure the leaker has all good intentions …. We should all worry about the national security state ….. We should all applaud the fact that he went public and is willing to risk jail (not sure what that’s about though).
Honestly, we should all worry about loss of privacy. But to whom? To the Government? To somebody else’s government who’s also looking in? To Facebook? To Google? To thin walls in new construction? To hackers?
Is the Government any more likely to do you in by reading your emails than your boss?
Really, give me a break. I am suspicious of people who have security clearances who breach their trust. I don’t like it. It’s FABULOUS that we’re all talking about it – so much fun! But really – do you trust the corporations more than the government? I don’t.
Snowden’s special circumstances that I alluded to is that he’s pissed of the national security apparatus of the US government, and is at risk for extradition, extraordinary rendition, or assassination. That is not a privilege.
That’s bullshit. He’s at risk for a felony prosecution and I hope he gets it.
Except for the extradition part, which of course would be part of his prosecution.
That’s bullshit. He’s at risk for a felony prosecution and I hope he gets it.
This is wrong. First of all, there’s this:
Washington-based foreign affairs analyst Steve Clemons said he overheard at the capital’s Dulles airport four men discussing an intelligence conference they had just attended. Speaking about the leaks, one of them said, according to Clemons, that both the reporter and leaker should be “disappeared”.
But even reasoning from first principles, Snowden is at risk for torture or assassination. I mean, we know that the CIA tortured lots of people at black sites throughout Europe. And the vast majority of those people did far less to damage or embarrass the US government than Snowden did, right? I mean, he undermined a vital program needed to secure the US. Those guys got tortured by the CIA, so why shouldn’t Snowden get the same
punishmentenhanced interrogation to find out who he’s working for? Moreover, the CIA has its own private Air Force that can bomb people now; why shouldn’t they destroy this threat to American safety? As long as they kill him in a foreign country, they won’t be breaking US laws…and they don’t care about breaking the laws of foreign governments. And unlike the real US Air Force, CIA officers don’t fall under the UCMJ so they have no legal bar to murdering people. They can kill with impunity, and they often do.
“Do you trust corporations more than the government?”
No.
I noticed Google the other day disallowed Google Glass in one of its corporate huddles, which seems totalitarian two ways.
Scott McNeily, formerly head of Sun Microsystems, famously said, “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it!”
The American people can’t get over it, even as they surrender it on all fronts.
Turbulence, I am not trusting the Guardian on this, or what they reported that Steve Clemens “overheard”.
What total bullshit.
Oh, and by the way Turbulence, the black sites ended with the Obama administration. I know the perpetually “disappointed” don’t believe that, but come up with something besides somebody said that somebody overheard somebody at an airport. Jeezus Kriste, they probably overheard me trying to be a parody.
You are over the top in ridiculous.
They can kill with impunity, and they often do.
Cite? Let’s be recent.
Thanks, Count. I know you’re not conceding the main point, but I appreciate the fact that you do get the picture about the fact that if we’re worried about “privacy”, it’s a bigger issue.
“Lawmakers who are now expressing outrage over the government’s surveillance of phone records and Internet activity should have paid closer attention when they were voting to reauthorize provisions in the Patriot Act, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said Sunday.
Reacting particularly to fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s assertion this week the programs amount to an “assault on the Constitution,” McCain told CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley that members of Congress had not been left in the dark on what powers to government has in monitoring Americans.
“The Republican and Democrat chairs, and … members of the Intelligence Committee have been very well briefed on these programs,” McCain said. “We passed the Patriot Act. We passed specific provisions of the act that allowed for this program to take place, to be enacted in operation. Now, if members of Congress did not know what they were voting on, then I think that that’s their responsibility a lot more than it is the government’s.”
I copied that off Balloon Juice who got it from somewhere else…anyway, points is that even with Cleek’s Rule, it would be hard for Republicans to impeach Obama over this.
Which is not to say I like the spying. In fact I believe that Obama as a former porfesor of Constitutional law ought not not to be allowig this sort of thing. But The Republicans in Congress who supported the Patriot Act as oone of their crowning achievements will have a hard time repudiating it now.
I am not trusting the Guardian on this, or what they reported that Steve Clemens “overheard”.
See, the beauty of the internet is that you don’t have to trust the Guardian. You could, you know, follow the link they gave and read what Clemens wrote himself. Then, you could do some research on Clemens and discover that he’s a journalist who’s been writing credibly on foreign affairs for years.
the black sites ended with the Obama administration.
The CIA has continued bombing people with its private air force though. And no one in the CIA has ever been punished for torturing or murdering anyone.
I note that you don’t dispute my claim that CIA officers, unlike US military officers, can torture and kill with impunity outside of the US. Good to know.
I note that you don’t dispute my claim that CIA officers, unlike US military officers, can torture and kill with impunity outside of the US. Good to know.
I have disputed it many times, and I dispute it now. The CIA has killed people (during the Obama administration) under the authority of the President under a procedure that has been disclosed (and discussed here many times) and with the knowledge, authorization and imprimatur of the three branches of the United States Government, two of which were elected by the American people, and one of which was appointed by Presidents of both parties and consented to by the Congress.
So good for you with your accusations of murder. Take it to the judge.
Who do you trust the least or fear the most?
Which is not to say I like the spying. In fact I believe that Obama as a former porfesor of Constitutional law ought not not to be allowig this sort of thing.
Just a question, Laura. Have you taken Constitutional law? Because if you have, you might realize that Obama would be allowing this. If you dispute the Constitutionality of the program, perhaps you should point to a Supreme Court case? Or something?
sapient, if the program is constitutional, why aren’t we using it to solve all sorts of real crimes? Why doesn’t every detective and every DA have a terminal on their desk that allows them warrent-free access to all telephone metadata and location data in real time? I mean, that would be super useful for putting criminals behind bars, right? And it is totally 100% constitutional, yes? So why not?
Oh, and Turb, forgot to comment on the Twitter link. Substantive! Actually the worst link ever!
And I’m a Steve Clemons reader!
I especially liked his tweet: “am sure they were intel professionals but still need to identify them may take a day or two”
Very impressive journalism!
As to why everyone doesn’t have everything blah blah blah is because everyone having a terminal on his desk looking at zillions of telephone records aren’t going to make heads nor tails of them.
Which is why you really shouldn’t worry your pretty little head since you have to have a particular situation to focus on to discern anything from the really ridiculous records.
For example, when I get my cellphone bill, I don’t look too closely at it. Too much info, if you know what I mean. But the cellphone company guy? He might see a lot!!!!!!!!!
This is the kind of data we’re talking about. I think that it the government proposed having government agents follow and record the locations of every single American who carried a cell phone, and then compile that data into a giant database, there’d be pretty obvious 4A objections. I don’t see why those 4A objections disappear just because the government has found a cheaper way to do that.
More about why people don’t do everything just because it’s Constitutional:
Maybe because it’s a waste of time! It’s constitutional to ride around my back yard on a mowing lawn mower way past when my lawn is mowed!
Maybe because it’s a waste of time!
US police do not have a 100% closure rate. Many crimes go unsolved. This data would make it much easier to find hit and run drivers for example. Every police officer I know would kill for this data; they don’t consider it a waste of time.
Every police officer I know would kill for this data; they don’t consider it a waste of time.
Really? How would they ferret out the hit and run driver, just asking? Please explain, actually – if they had all of the freaking emails in the United States on their computer, tell me how they’d get it solved.
You’re so freaking full of b.s. on this one Turb. Go back to your twitter feed.
I just released a Turb comment into the wild. I can only repeat my caution, that the randomization can really raise temps, so people might want to try to avoid going to 11 on the sarcasm dial. Thanks.
The phone metadata could be use to create six degrees of Bin Laden constructs.
My late friend was Air Force, and did her 2 weeks every year at Wright-Patterson in Ohio in computer systems. This was in the 90s. She told me the “govt” was listening to cell phone communications, and every time someone said “bomb” or something similar the call was flagged. this was long before PRISM and whatever else they do now.
So this is nothing new, and we shouldn’t be surprised. We gave up our privacy years ago.
And like other commenters pointed out, corporations do this all the time. Do you really think the ads above your gmail are random?
Ha ha ha ….social Marxists proclaimed here a short while ago that massive databases for data mining emails, phone activity, web surfing, credit cards, etc. are impossible and not happening. A patriot said otherwise. Of course he was shouted down by silly ninny liberals.
Fools.
Too preoccupied with pleasuring that chocolate penis to see the truth, eh?. Now what? Open wide then bend over and take it some more, no doubt.
Maybe some day you’ll get a clue. Those minorities you love to love are not your friends. They are not going to repay the favors you do for them. The government that you want to mother you is not your mother. Obama is a Kenyan born racist fascist.
Tools. Obama and the black panther racist radical Holder did read the same utopian fantasy books as you – only they’re just using them against you, whereas you actually believe them, LOL.
Would someone mind banning Mighty Whitey? Or are they more interested in barking at those who use the term “you” collectively?
Or maybe we should live in a purely free speech world where hate speech can run amok.
“I note that you don’t dispute my claim that CIA officers, unlike US military officers, can torture and kill with impunity outside of the US. Good to know.”
More childish naiveté from puke spouting liberal dreamers. The CIA does kill all sorts of people with and without torture. However, US troops do the same. They don’t necessarily want to (though a few do), but it happens regardless. Capture an insurgent and hand him over to the ANA and watch them beat the man to death. Interpreter reports whatever BS the poor gomer says on his way out. Happens every day.
Oooooh nooooos. pleeeeeeaaaaze say it ain’t so. The chocolate messiah is a nobel peace price winner. I luvs him because he isn’t an old white guy.
I think that comment was posted just before the Emancipation Proclamation and has been lost in Spam until now.
Thanks, Count. Please be my best friend.
Really? How would they ferret out the hit and run driver, just asking?
Pretty easily. The cell phone metadata includes data on which cellular towers the cell phone was in communications with anytime the phone is turned on, even when it is not handling a voice call or otherwise moving internet data. In an urban area, a cell phone in a moving vehicle is likely to get handed off from one tower to another; knowing which towers each cell phone was in contact with at different times allows you to reconstruct the path each cell phone took.
If you have all the cell phone metadata, you can look for phones that have a reconstructed trajectory that took them along the street where the hit and run occurred at around the time the accident took place. There might be several matching “hits” to that query, so you’d have to send officers to a few different homes to interview the owners, check for physical evidence (blood on the bumper?) and maybe subpoena the car’s onboard data recorder looking for evidence of a recent collision. It is not perfect, but it allows you to narrow down the pool of suspects from “every driver in the city” to “a small handful of drivers”.
Check out the link I gave above to get a sense for just how powerful metadata can be. There are a lot of other crimes this sort of data would be enormously useful for of course.
And like other commenters pointed out, corporations do this all the time. Do you really think the ads above your gmail are random?
I know how to surf the internet without being tracked by corporations. I admit, that’s not something everyone knows how to do (for a small fee, I can teach you!). Can you tell me how to use a cell phone without having my metadata tracked by the NSA?
Hmmm…
We roger chocolate penis and are alerting black ops presently to begin countervailing action.
“Or maybe we should live in a purely free speech world where hate speech can run amok.”
Or maybe we should audit free speech and destroy those who do not tow the party line?
YOU would like that, wouldn’t u?
“Hmmmm…”
Looks like a case for the IRS too.
for a small fee, I can teach you!
So nice of you!
Before auditing, editing.
“toe”, not “”tow”
who toes a party line? It’s tow – as in haul, transport, move……have another martini Count and don’t worry about it. Personally, I think it challenging to make book on which will give up first; our democratic republic or your liver.
also “HMMM …”
It will be great if this is a gigantic ratf*cking operation managed by Ron Paul to nepotize a certain Presidential candidate gearing up the clown show for 2016.
I’m a chianti man, myself, with fava beans and your liver.
Oh yeah…sure… look over there…it’s a white man…Rand Paul!!!! Lets hate him and get back to that mmmmm chocolicious luvin”.
One forkful of my liver and you’d be ten times the American you are afraid to be now.
John Cole weighs in with a Russelltonian “look in the mirror.”
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/06/09/i-am-so-fucking-over-this-already/
And now, back to Mighty Whitey’s offal.
One forkful of my liver and you’d be ten times the American you are afraid to be now.
No thanks. The bile content is pretty high.
Feed your head: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0
Or are they more interested in barking at those who use the term “you” collectively?
I’ve just gotten back from class (you know, my ‘job’) MW’s ip address is no longer with us. (you know, the unpaid ‘hobby’ that has to fit into earning a living) However
Or are they more interested in barking at those who use the term “you” collectively?
Word to the wise, my patience is very thin at the moment. The discussion might be one-sided without you, but it’s something I’m willing to live with.
I’m trying to figure out what’s new about the current round of surveillance.
The idead of the FISA court giving the FBI or the intelligence community a warrant to listen to private communications without disclosing that is not only normal, it’s the whole point of the FISA court.
The FISA court process has been in place since ’78 or ’79.
For the kinds of communications that appear to be under discussion – routing and addressing information, time of communication, etc., as opposed to content – the feds have been able to demand that information without jumping through the FISA hoop by issuing a national security letter.
All of this is old, old news, depending on the details perhaps decades old.
What’s new about the current situation?
All of this is old, old news, depending on the details perhaps decades old.
Agree.
MW’s ip address is no longer with us
Thanks.
Via LG&M:
Ms. Feinstein said that she would consider holding hearings about them. “I’m open to doing a hearing every month, if that’s necessary,” she said.
But, she added: “Here’s the rub: The instances where this has produced good – has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks, is all classified, that’s what’s so hard about this.”
Russell is correct (as he is almost always). However, the response by those who support these programs is verging on hysterically overwrought opprobrium. Well, no, I take that back. As Sapient’s comments demonstrate, they have gone over the edge in this regard. Really over the top.
The fact that there was a leak, is frankly of no consequence. I would opine that if full disclosure would be in effect,the so-called effectiveness of the program would not be impacted by so much as one Slartimeter.
Is massive data-mining a threat? I’d say yes-in a much larger context. I suspect this will be something that can be worked out.
I’d go into more detail, but nearly all of you are not cleared to know this information. Remember, ignorance is bliss, and if it’s not against the law it’s legal.
What’s new to me is just how much spying the government is actually doing. It doesn’t surprise me that much–I sorta take for granted that the government does all sorts of questionable things, some of them quite terrible, and gets away with it. This is what accountability means, I think, or anyway, in the spirit of Inigo Montoya that’s what I think they think it means.
Some commenters above have mentioned impeachment. Should any impeachment inquiry also include the second President Bush and Vice-President Cheney? After all, the surveillance which is currently getting attention began while they were in office.
Paragraph 7 of Article I, § 3 of the Constitution states:
The expiration of the former president’s term does not make impeachment moot; the House can still investigate and vote articles of impeachment, with the Senate to determine disqualification from holding federal office in the future.
This is not a mere academic question. After serving as president, John Quincy Adams served in the House of Representatives and William Howard Taft served as Chief Justice of the United States. After serving as vice-president, Richard Nixon served as president and Hubert Humphrey served as a U. S. Senator. Walter Mondale served as Ambassador to Japan and was nominated to run for the Senate from Minnesota when Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash.
“All of this is old, old news, depending on the details perhaps decades old”
Who cares? Let fury have the hour.
The idead of the FISA court giving the FBI or the intelligence community a warrant to listen to private communications without disclosing that is not only normal, it’s the whole point of the FISA court.
One not normal aspect of this case is that we have the FISA order this time.
All of this is old, old news, depending on the details perhaps decades old. What’s new about the current situation?
I don’t think anyone thought that the feds could use either NSLs or FISA to capture all telephone metadata and location data on every phone and cellphone for years. I mean, that NSLs had to be scoped to some investigation and the idea that any court could order such unlimited data transfer strikes me as a joke: “please deliver all data on everyone for ever to the feds”. Shouldn’t warrants be particularized? I could see such a broad order maybe for a very short time with evidence of an imminent threat or in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack but 7 years doesn’t qualify.
Another new thing is that even if you thought this sort of mass collection would have been approved by FISA in the early 80s, that would have been a different beast entirely. That would have involved agents poring over call sheets delivered on paper by truck describing fixed land line phones shared by many people.
Now we’re talking about a database that lives forever of (nonshared) cell phones that are tied to individual people and allow you to reconstruct complete location histories for many of them. That’s a different kettle of fish, no? Do you really think the 4A, with its particularlized suspicion, is compatible with a giant government database of this kind of data? I’m curious how you see that.
I still don’t know what to make of PRISM. The possibility that the NSA might have unmediated access to user data is disturbing because even very broad mediated access can be contested. If Google gets an overbroad data request or NSL or warrant, they at least have the option of going to court on behalf of their users. (I have heard informally that it is common for LEOs to ask for all sorts of data; not with a warrant or NSL, they just ask for stuff). But if the NSA has constructed a process where they can extract data without Google even knowing about the search, that’s one fewer layer of eyes scrutinizing requests. But the reporting on PRISM has been so confused I don’t really know what to make of it.
However, the response by those who support these programs is verging on hysterically overwrought opprobrium.
What? First, I don’t particularly “support these programs”. I just don’t quite get what the big deal is. As I mentioned, much of the information that is being collected and stored is also available to corporations, hackers, etc. Large numbers of people put this information on the Internet themselves. People carry cell phones around voluntarily; Turbulence’s link is kind of creepy for sure, but there’s one very effective way to prevent people from tracking your movements by cellphone: leave it behind.
Second, I don’t get why everyone thinks of government employees who betray their trust as being heroes, especially so-called civil libertarians who then choose to seek protection from a government who is the most notorious censor, data miner, hacker and information abuser of civil liberties in the world. (And, to be clear, I’m not a China hater: China has a lot of problems, but also a lot of potential. And Hong Kong is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. But really? We’re going to seek refuge with the Chinese while we protest information abuse in the U.S.? It’s just so hilarious. And just imagine what might have happened had he worked for China and blabbed.)
I don’t think anyone thought that the feds could use either NSLs or FISA to capture all telephone metadata and location data on every phone and cellphone for years.
In general I think you’re correct. I also think that this is exactly what the feds have been seeking to do for years if not decades.
From what we know of this program, it appears to be, basically, the electronic communications piece of John Poindexter’s TIA, initially fired up in ’02 and then mothballed (at least partially) in ’03 after its existence was made public.
My understanding is that surveillance under FISA and NSLs is intended to be targeted at specific individuals, and related to a specific ongoing investigation. So, at a minimum, the current program appears to go well beyond that scope.
That said, it’s not at all clear to me that the program is illegal. It may not be what was intended by the law as originally written, but I also doubt this particular application of the law is unprecedented or even unusual.
Obama claims this was just the renewal of a program that has been underway, with FISA and Congress’ knowledge and approval, for years.
IMO that’s likely true.
I think of (some) government employees who betray their trust as heroes because it’s the only way we find out what stupid, incompetent or simply evil things government is up to. Not that difficult to understand when a Republican is in office. Whistleblowers probably make the lives of US war criminals a bit uneasy, for example. Haha, just kidding–they’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s not like they’ve done anything really seriously wrong, like leaking.
As for China, I don’t particularly care what Snowden’s logic is, though it seems to me that China is one place where the US is unlikely to try to extradite or kill him. Snowden might be a hero or he might be a bit wacky or he might be anything, but I’m glad he leaked. For me the most disturbing thing about what he did is what he has done to his family and loved ones, including a girlfriend who must be feeling some indescribable things right now, but he seems to realize that himself
Obama claims this was just the renewal of a program that has been underway, with FISA and Congress’ knowledge and approval, for years.
IMO that’s likely true.
Yes, also true is that Obama, and his supporters, vilified Bush for what is now everyday business.
But, saying one thing and doing the opposite are hardly rare in politics. One can easily imagine the shoe being on the other foot in any number of recent contexts and a much different outcome here and elsewhere.
On the larger picture, aren’t the feds simply gathering data that was there in the first place? I’m not saying, if that is the case, the potential for abuse is mitigated, but just that it isn’t as if, in some out year, private industry couldn’t do pretty much the same thing with data sharing.
I think of (some) government employees who betray their trust as heroes because it’s the only way we find out what stupid, incompetent or simply evil things government is up to
Until, should the day ever come, when the trust violated does real harm to the country and its citizens, not that such a thing could ever happen.
So, maybe it’s subjective–I’m cool with leaking domestic abuses, but less so when the topic is national security, which I happen to think remains a legitimate, worthwhile and necessary component of government.
More to the point though, is just how big of a secret was this if a 29 year old mid level contractor had access to it? Is this sudden news to the Chinese? The Russians? The Islamists?
That said, it’s not at all clear to me that the program is illegal. It may not be what was intended by the law as originally written, but I also doubt this particular application of the law is unprecedented or even unusual.
I don’t think that anyone contends that the program goes beyond the scope of statutory authority. Some people question its Constitutionality.
It’s obvious that this massive collection of electronic data can easily be abused. But, to me, it seems that people are more worried about the government abusing it than corporations. Just a case in point: Eliot Spitzer. Does anyone really think that the banks didn’t look carefully at what he was up to in order to stop him from prosecuting them? Sure, maybe it was all a coincidence, and I’m a conspiracy theorist.
The fact is, we live in a world where information technology is wonderful, but also threatens our privacy in a huge way. At least there’s some attempt to curb government abuse through the FISA court. Who’s monitoring how the banks are using our data? Or any number of other corporations? It seems more justified to me that the government might be able to use data to prevent terrorist threats than that banks should be able to target people who might prosecute their wrongdoing.
Part of the “conversation” should be what we can do to protect ourselves from intrusion by those who have access to our information – because they do.
aren’t the feds simply gathering data that was there in the first place?
That’s true, but I think it’s not quite on point.
Your personal correspondence is “right there” in the first place, if your personal desk drawer is included in the possible meanings of “there”.
The content of personal electronic communications has for a long time been considered to be protected by the 4th Amendment. Routing and addressing information and/or other information that is already available to 3rd parties like ISPs and your postman is less strongly protected, but has still had some protections, at least through most of the 20th C.
So, the feds are gathering information that was “already there”, but which has generally not been considered readily available to them without a warrant or court order.
Prior, that is, to the various acts of Congress, passed over the last 30 or 35 years, making them more readily available to the feds in the name of protecting us from terrorism or drug runners.
I’m not saying, if that is the case, the potential for abuse is mitigated, but just that it isn’t as if, in some out year, private industry couldn’t do pretty much the same thing with data sharing.
Private industry makes use of this information all the time, especially in the online context (email, internet activity). Most of the time you waive your right to privacy as a condition of using whatever service is involved.
As a practical matter, if you use the internet, specifically, you should assume that anything you do is visible to basically anyone.
Selling your eyeballs to marketers is what pays for all the free stuff.
Yes, also true is that Obama, and his supporters, vilified Bush for what is now everyday business.
I thought we vilified Bush for warantless wiretaps but that these have a FISC warrant, no?
On the larger picture, aren’t the feds simply gathering data that was there in the first place? I’m not saying, if that is the case, the potential for abuse is mitigated, but just that it isn’t as if, in some out year, private industry couldn’t do pretty much the same thing with data sharing.
How would that look? The CEOs of AT&T and Verizon and TMobile and other telecom companies get together and say, “hey guys! I’ve got a great idea! let’s pool all of our customer data together into one giant database! That way, we can track the location of any of our customers. Because there’s nothing we competitors like more than sharing our proprietary customer data with each other. And of course, our customers will love this plan! It will NOT be a public relations disaster at all. And think of how much money we can make by doing this!”
As far as I can tell, while private companies may have theoretically been able to do this: (1) it would have cost them money, (2) there’s no profit incentive to do it, and (3) it would have been a company-destroying incident if it ever became public, which is all to say that there’s no rational basis to believe that it would ever happen.
Moreover, the data that telcos keep involves separate data sets of metadata and tower data; they have no reason to join it together into real time location data. But I’m sure that’s the first thing the government did. So while the telcos have one dataset, the government probably has a larger more problematic dataset that they generated based on the telco dataset.
Is this sudden news to the Chinese? The Russians? The Islamists?
Perhaps a bigger issue is that we’ve now given explicit confirmation to every foreign company that they should probably not do business with US-based or US-hosted internet companies. Sure, people have long suspected that Uncle Sam may have been doing who knows what, but suspicion and proof are different things. The government may have just blown up billions of dollars a year in contracts that won’t be signed.
This article seems, to me, helpful.
One of the issues involved is whether the communications being monitored involve parties not in the US. Purely intra-US communications are more strongly protected than those where one or both of the parties are outside the US.
One complication of this is that a lot of electronic communications, regardless of whether one or both ends are outside the US, end up being routed through servers and comms paths that *are* in the US.
So, a very convenient way for the feds to monitor that traffic is to do so at the point where it passes through equipment or organizations in the US.
That’s at least part of what is involved in PRISM.
The additional complication is that you have to inspect at least some of the routing information to figure out if the communcation begins or ends outside the US.
So, the feds want to look at everything, and then filter out the stuff they shouldn’t be looking at.
There is an “honor system” aspect to this, and the bar for claiming that something of interest might be hiding somewhere in the overall traffic appears to be an assertion of 51% confidence on the part of a federal agent that what they’re looking for is in the pile somewhere.
And, due to the volume of stuff they want to see, and the volume of stuff there is to plow through, and the complexity of keeping track of who said what to whom when and via what channel, some version or other of “trust me, I’m a professional” is basically how this stuff works.
Long story short, for decades the feds have claimed the need to overstep the bounds of the protections found in the Bill of Rights for one or another dire and pressing circumstance.
Anarchists, communists, socialists, anti-war activists, bootleggers, drug runners, terrorists. Even, once in a very great while, financial fraudsters.
There’s always a very good reason to do it, and there is always arguably some value in doing it. And, it is virtually always abused to some greater or lesser degree.
If we want the government to keep us safe from every possible boogieman, we will have accept this kind of intrusive surveillance. If we don’t want Uncle snooping in our desk drawer and mailbox, we will have to accept the risk that some Bad Things might happen.
It’s our choice.
But expressions of surprise and outrage about this program seem, to me, almost willfullly naive.
What do we think USA Patriot Act was about?
What do we think the feds have been building out there in Utah?
What do we think the billions and billions and billions of dollars that get spent on surveillance infrastructure have been paying for?
My personal feeling is that, post 9/11, the US collectively wet its pants and gave the feds virtually anything they wanted, as long as they would promise to “keep us safe”.
Well, this is what it looks like when you do that.
Obama is just carrying on the same programs he inherited, and he’s doing it because we want them. We may be surprised to find that, holy crap, they’re watching *MY* google searches too, but we shouldn’t be.
If there’s anything at all new in PRISM, which I doubt, it’s at most an incremental change from what’s been in place since at least the early aughts, and most likely long before.
McKT wrote:
“Yes, also true is that Obama, and his supporters, vilified Bush for what is now everyday business.”
To put a finer point on Turb’s response, I don’t think Barack Obama was consulted when most of the denizens of the Bush Justice Department executive suites threatened to resign in order to thwart Alberto Gonzalez’ and company’s visit to John Ashcroft’s hospital room to get him to sign off on warrantless everything.
http://www.salon.com/2007/05/15/comey_testifies/
Yes, some in what came to be Obama’s fan base criticized as well and maybe Obama did too, especially when warrantless everything became the unspoken practice.
But, here’s the tally of the Senate vote in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. Notice Obama voted in favor of the bill, not with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, but with Republicans and other conservative Democrats.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/110-2008/s168
Course, he snarked, it was probably just a ploy to strengthen his hand as Obama later secretly brought the full weight of the national security state down on those who would deny 50 million Americans health insurance.
My point is, all things considered, that on national security measures, Obama is a rick-solid conservative who frustrates his “followers” many more times than he frustrates his enemies.
Osama bin laden is frustrated and he wasn’t an Obama follower despite rumors to the contrary.
Here’s another link that might shed light on how we came to be where we are:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/46917/nsa-phone-records-a-look-at-the-courts-that-let-the-feds-tap-our-phones
Anyway, MckT, I agree with your overall point, and Russell’s and sapient’s, that it may well be that there is nothing new here and my data is yours and everybody else’s too.
However, I am poised to “let fury rule the day” if need be.
On a personal note, my computer was hacked last Fall, by what turned out to be Russian or Eastern European virus and all of Best Buy’s pimply teenagers couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so I ended up removing the hard drive and scrapping the rest of the thing.
Read about the virus later in this article, which is pretty good primer on what businesses, individuals and governments are up against with worldwide cyber crime, from businesses, individuals, and governments.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_seabrook
But expressions of surprise and outrage about this program seem, to me, almost willfullly naive.
i’m still waiting for someone to tell me why i should be surprised, let alone upset, at this.
the government has access to my phone records, and, given a warrant, can look at them? so what? who would assume otherwise?
“… police used cell phone records to …” is almost boilerplate for news stories about criminal investigations.
Just a note on government employees, having been one twice, we labor fiercely to humor the conservative meme of over-compensated, lazy, union thugs who luxuriate at taxpayer expense over long lunches, but inside each of us is a freedom-loving whistleblower hero who at a moment’s notice can enter a phone booth and strip down to leotards and cape to save the day.
Yes, the demise of phone booths has put a crimp in our style, because it’s looks a little silly to be disrobing in a parking lot while phoning in government secrets on our cell phones.
I’m organizing a two-million federal employee defection to Hong Kong where all of us can live in peace, away from character assassination, though as Snowden himself pointed out from his hotel room, there is a CIA section at the Consulate just down the road.
An interesting take on what Honk Kong might do with Snowden.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/theyll_send_him_home.php?ref=fpblg
Holy crap, sapient. Repeat after me:
I am not going to save democracy with my blog comments.
I am not going to save democracy with my blog comments.
I am not going to save democracy with my blog comments.
Now I’ve got to forward this to Matt Groening so it can go on Bart’s blackboard. But chances are, it already has.
In a nutshell:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4PtmCPfxgJk/UbXhbUUHgnI/AAAAAAAAMpg/gni8RlG6NBI/s1600/TMW2013-06-12colo2.png
at the risk of letting the mask slip to reveal my inner Stalin, I’m in the shrug my shoulders camp. It may be that I’m trying to keep up with the young’ins, but part of it stems from the fact that because all of my communication is communication that appears to be coming from overseas to the US, I’m really SOL if I want to assert any right to privacy. As I understand it, this right is something that Americans assert when communicating with other Americans within the US, so it is a privilege. I don’t mean to be dismissive of people who are upset about this, but it seems like American exceptionalism, so my reaction is similar to John Cole’s without all the cursing. Probably imagining John Cole’s bit read by Eeyore.
the government has access to my phone records, and, given a warrant, can look at them? so what? who would assume otherwise?
That’s not quite right:
(1) The NSA got a FISC warrant to get access to ALL cell phone data. Once they have that data, they can do anything they want with it.
(2) Apparently, the FBI and local law enforcement do NOT have access to that data.
From my perspective, we’re in the worst of all worlds. We don’t have data security, since an unaccountable group at the NSA (and its contractors) have access to the data. But we don’t reap the benefits because police and FBI and Fish and Wildlife can’t touch the data.
As for the “so what”, well, I think it is a problem if the government keeps a secret dossier on the location history of everyone with a cell phone. Don’t you? At least, I don’t see how that can be squared with the fourth amendment. I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how this can be compatible with the 4A, no matter what statutes say.
For everyone who thinks that this is no big deal or already known by everyone or totally 100% legal, I have 2 questions:
(1) why didn’t the government ask for this openly? Instead of going to FISC, just go to a regular district court. After all, everyone knows this is going on anyway, so we’d lose nothing by telling the world. And every district court in the country would happily sign off on it, because hey, it is 100% legal and there are no constitutional issues at all, right?
(2) Why not use the data more broadly for crime solving? Seriously, if it is 100% legal and every court would instantly approve of it, then this is a huge win for justice.
I think the answer to those questions is:
(a) This is not clearly legal and would not stand up to scrutiny in many courts. Many judges would be horrified; many would find obvious constitutional defects with this process, regardless of what the statues say (or how the government interprets them).
(b) We can’t use the data in the criminal justice system because doing so would taint many prosecutions causing judges to throw them out because of (a).
(c) We can’t ask for this level of data collection in public because it is shameful and cowardly. Americans might have speculated about all manner of government abuses but suspecting and knowing are different things entirely.
I’m really SOL if I want to assert any right to privacy.
I could be wrong but I think that if you are a US citizen, you still retain those rights, even if you live abroad. I believe the term of art is “US person” which includes all US citizens, everywhere on Earth and all non-US citizens who are currently in the US.
I think it is a problem if the government keeps a secret dossier on the location history of everyone with a cell phone. Don’t you?
no, i don’t.
i’m not exactly sure why i don’t. but this whole thing does nothing for my paranoia.
I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how this can be compatible with the 4A, no matter what statutes say.
the NSA is not gathering our info directly. the NSA is gathering Verizon’s biz records, under a court order. that is legal. USA PATRIOT says so. SCOTUS says so.
Imagine you realize you have cancer, and you tell people (including the ObWi commentariat) this disturbing fact.
Among the response you get are:
1) You’ve had it for years;
2) You should have known;
3) It’s probably your fault anyway.
Perhaps these statements are true, but are they at all helpful? Do they make you feel that sharing this information and your feelings about it (with ObWi) was a good idea?
no, i don’t.
OK.
Thanks for answering.
the NSA is not gathering our info directly.
I don’t see why that makes a difference constitutionally. Murdering someone doesn’t become legal if I pay a hit man to do it. In general, illegal acts don’t become legal if you use an intermediary. Moreover, if this were true, why should the government bother with wiretapping warrants at all? They can just ask Verizon for some business data, i.e., voice packets, right?
I doubt Verizon logs voice packets.
But it could be induced to, I would guess, with the application of the right kind of leverage.
They can just ask Verizon for some business data, i.e., voice packets, right?
i don’t think so. i don’t think the biz records (aka. “your phone bill”) includes the conversations – and telcos don’t store them, in any case. they do store billing info, texts, etc..
the actual conversations are still covered under the 4th.
IANAL.
Relevant?
But the government could say, “here are some phone numbers we’re interested in” and then Verizon could decide to store all the voice packets for calls to/from those numbers, and then Verizon would have a trove of internal business data that the government could ask for.
Can the government ask Verizon for voicemail? It does store that, and again, that’s just internal business data. Handing it over to the government doesn’t offend Verizon’s right to privacy because the data doesn’t say anything about Verizon, so Verizon has no privacy interest in it and can’t object to handing it over….
Turbulence, I really enjoyed and agreed with your take on this thread of a year and a half ago.
What I’m wondering is why you trust private corporations with significant amounts of data more than the government. (Of course, the government can theoretically “disappear” people, but it doesn’t really need to gain access to your personal data if it has it out for you. If you believe that it’s going to do that sort of thing, it would be a lot easier for them just to do it than to build some sham evidence trail.)
dr ngo:
I’m not sure that’s what is going on here.
I think, lj, for example, is saying (disclaimer: lj is thinking that I have no idea what he is saying), to keep with the cancer metaphor, as an ex-patriot living abroad, he has been routinely subjected to radiation and chemotherapy despite not having cancer and so what makes the rest of us so especial.
I prefer the metaphor of the chicken, or is it a lobster, being slowly boiled to death in white wine.
Not bad so far, in fact, rather relaxing at these low temperatures.
I’ll decide how upset I am as soon as I understand what the heck is really going on.
As an aside, I’d hate to be a big rig truck driver these days with the close surveillance they are under and I sure wouldn’t want some geek monitoring my call center sales calls to see if I’m ruthless enough for the Glengarry Glenross bottom line.
Maybe Verizon could put a message upfront every time we make a phone call, “This call is being monitored by NSA to see if you’re stupid enough to discuss your plans to blow the rest of us up.”
My druthers would be no surveillance any time anywhere but then my druthers are along the lines of “What are YOU looking at?”
I don’t even like periodic job appraisals cause somebody must have been keeping track of something.
As I understand it, the justification for the FISA court was 1)it’d be limited to national security investigations so 2)the info wouldnt be used in criminal prosecutions.
Point 2 was afaict not only a sop to the 4th, but also a guard against general abuse- if the info couldnt be used crminially, then why would anyone go through the trouble to gather it for John Q Citizen? (Another safeguard- having a court granting specific requests means that political misuse eg ‘track Mitt Romney’ would require a document trail).
Both of those safeguards are lost by replacing the FISA court with a keyboard and a paperweight on the “Y” key. There’s no additional overhead to tracking John Q Citizen, since you don’t need a specific request for him. And there’s no paper trail for data that could be misused for political or personal advantage.
Given the way our information is more and more distributed around the networks of our lives, if ‘in the network’ means not protected by the 4th, we’ll be facing more and more choices between living like ordinary people in the way that we’d like or protecting our privacy by avoiding eg cellphone, internet usage, appearance in public (video cameras), driving anywhere (license plate cameras), use of credit cards, checks, ATMs, etc.
I dont think the 4th means much if it only protects the information of someone living like an 18th century gentleman farmer.
I think that concerns about corporate invasion of privacy and/or data sharing are very reasonable and well-founded, but that the existence of these issues does not mitigate my concerns about government gathering of or (mis)-use of this kind of info.
What I’m wondering is why you trust private corporations with significant amounts of data more than the government.
I think different actors pose different risks.
Private companies tend to deal in much smaller quantities of data than the government programs we’re discussing. Google has a lot of data about me, but it doesn’t have a complete dossier of my locations. Apparently the NSA does. The incentives differ too: google has strong internal controls protecting my data because releasing my data can destroy their business. The government has little if any incentive to limit data collection and protect my data. What’s more, I can pull my data out of google if I don’t like their policies. I can’t opt-out of NSA spying.
Finally, in the post you linked to, there was a lot of uninformed fear mongering that I didn’t think was helping anyone improve their privacy.
(Of course, the government can theoretically “disappear” people, but it doesn’t really need to gain access to your personal data if it has it out for you. If you believe that it’s going to do that sort of thing, it would be a lot easier for them just to do it than to build some sham evidence trail.)
I have no idea what you’re talking about here
I guess the “locations” information doesn’t really bother me because if I get in my car and drive somewhere (or use any other method of transportation), people can see me, and my location isn’t private. It would be absolutely creepy that someone might want to follow me around, but if they did, what’s to stop them? Technology certainly makes it easier for them to be unnoticed by me, but I really don’t feel that I have a true
expectation of privacy in my location. And to the extent that I would want to remain undiscovered, it is possible that one could do without one’s cellphone for awhile.
I’m a very “private” person, so it would be alarming if I were to realize that someone were tracking my movements. But unless their activities amounted to stalking (which requires more than just following), I don’t think I could do anything about it.
And just having information isn’t the same as using it for an illegitimate purpose.
The kind of data that the government collects: is it really useful to anyone else?
Maybe I just don’t understand the threat. My point about government having the means to harm people is that, to me, that would be the only difference between government and a corporation: an evil government might have the desire and ability to stifle my speech (if I were a troublemaker, in its eyes) by harming or embarrassing me, whereas Google wouldn’t. However, the government wouldn’t need my personal information in order to do that.
I’m really SOL if I want to assert any right to privacy.
I could be wrong but I think that if you are a US citizen, you still retain those rights, even if you live abroad. I believe the term of art is “US person” which includes all US citizens, everywhere on Earth and all non-US citizens who are currently in the US.
I could assert that right, but I think that the NSA has been given the right to scoop up anything that is foreign communication, despite having citizens communications mixed in. Again, as this is a legal question, I’m not positive if that has been fully and completely ratified by a court, but I think that the NSA’s right to gather foreign communication is the cornerstone of the PRISM program and I thought that the 2003 FISA revision that protected telecoms specifically allowed that sort of search.
This also strangely synchs with Ugh’s discussions of companies avoiding taxes by moving overseas. If you can create something like stateless revenue, you pretty much have to accept that other things that go outside the state are going to not be subject to the same kind of scrutiny that they would get inside the US.
With the Verizon example, if Verizon doesn’t start using that data to make inferences about its customers, Verizon shareholders might get pissed. I’m not sure if Verizon is the brightest bulb on the corporate marquee, but all the credit card companies must be doing stuff like this.
About the cancer metaphor, I feel like it is someone saying ‘I’m American, I shouldn’t get cancer’ That sounds rather harsh, but big data is big data and I’m not sure how you are going to get a company like Google to section off searches made by americans and searches made by others. Turb argues that private companies don’t have databases as large as the government does. But the tools don’t have some sort of limit where they can stop working and we expect the government to use those tools to figure out other things, just as we’ve grown to expect Amazon to use tools to lower the price of books or Google to help us find similar images. Reduced privacy is in some ways the price we pay for the internet.
Carlton points to the 4th amendment, but the person entering the US has no claims on the 4th amendment if they are not an American citizen. I think we have an analogous situation here. This is not to say that you should just relax and get used to it, it is more to suggest that the landscape has changed. The 4th doesn’t have any meaning unless one thinks that information can be sectioned off according to national origin and I think we are reaching a point where it can’t.
I guess the parallel is the outing of pseudonyms on the internet. I don’t like it at all, but how do I stop someone who has decided that is what they want to do? This is actually even more difficult to stop, because rather than using that data to reveal something publicly, the data is used to make connections that create the potential for outings.
I suppose part of this is trying to figure out why this doesn’t have me and a lot of other people outraged. It could be that we just don’t understand it, and if we did, we would be. But it seems that all of the arguments hinge on ‘you can’t do this to Americans (or people residing in the US)’ That seems to be the thing that has me shrug my shoulders. I guess this has the effect of making the claim that people who are outraged are some species of Luddites, but I don’t think that at all. It’s more like a ‘welcome to my world’.
Amended, to pose a better and more relevant question.
lj,
I would think from a constitutional perspective, if the government had the power to scoop up subset A of dataset B (eg communications crossing national boundaries from the set of all communications), then they would have to make a serious effort to only take that data, or delete the rest once it’s been filtered out. Or they’d have to forego all of the data, if they couldn’t find a way to only take the acceptable parts.
The idea that taking the entire dataset would be unconstitutional on its face, but becomes Ok if the government just says it wants a subset but takes the whole thing… Im not sure if Im characterizing your position correctly though.
I guess a big part of the reason that Im more concerned about American citizens is that we’re the ones most vulnerable to invasion/coercion/etc by the American government. Although I agree that data collection against non-citizens should also have boundaries, and if that means the same boundaries as exist for citizens I think Im Ok with that. I think most of the Bill Of Rights ought to apply to noncitizens (and even citizens are subject to non-warrant-based intrusive searches at border crossing anyway).
[Sidenote: it’s always seemed odd to me that ‘Natural Rights’ conservatives, ie those who believe that the Bill Of Rights recognizes rather than grants rights, don’t automatically assume that all of those rights exist in non-citizens. It seems to me like a virtually automatic extension of saying ‘everyone has an inherent right to habeus’ to observe that ‘everyone’ includes noncitizens.]
Amended, to pose a better and more relevant question.
And, IMO, a very apt one.
Besides the constitutional issue, and the general ‘nosy parker’ issue, there is the simple pragmatic issue of WTF you do with a record of (frex) every phone call made on Verizon’s network, or every email sent, or every Google search.
It’s a fabulous display of technical craft to slice and dice this stuff to within an inch of its life, but what does it mean?
Somebody, somewhere with an interest in defending these programs will point to some plot or other that was stopped.
Was that the only, or best, way to make that happen?
At a certain point, I think some kind of weird gear lust takes over. With the budgets these guys have to play with, it’s hard to say “no” to the shiny new thing.
More:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/whos-a-bigger-snoop-the-nsa-or-your-boss-2013-06-10?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
Digby linked to this article about why we should care about privacy issues even if we have nothing to hide–
link
I suppose it’s a lost cause. If we could blame this on Bush, maybe not, but it’s bipartisan and corporations spy on us too, so we should all just learn to love Big Brother.
Donald- just occurred to me that issues which don’t break down well by party lines are effectively neutered in our system. Whereas issues with a minority of support, even a fringe minority, can often do well if they are concentrated in one party’s base.
Wondering if this is a good general rule or not (popped into my head five minutes ago so maybe just a derailed train). Could be because 20% support in one party is at least as valuable as 10-15% in both, or could be that being part of the “other side’s” rhetorical bag makes an issue icky and not useful as a partisan wedge (insofar as it wedges your own supporters away as much as it wedges the “other side’s” party).
“Oh, and by the way Turbulence, the black sites ended with the Obama administration.”
LOL! Please review the meaning of “black sites”. They never started, in fact. So why do you believe it when you’re told they ended?
The Post Office doesn’t read my mail, but Google reads my emails.
If we privatize the Post Office beyond its quasi-government status, will the private companies open my mail, scan it for key words, and then stuff my mailbox with ads matching my “interests”.
It is going to be interesting to see how things line up politically once our leaker is extradited back to the the United States.
Some on the Right are already calling for his execution.
Personally, I’d like to see Obama give the kid sanctuary from prosecution in the White House for the duration of the second term if only to watch how Rand Paul dislocates his strategy bone coming up with a position.
Im not sure if Im characterizing your position correctly though.
Saying I have a position implies I know what is going on a lot more than I actually do. I just don’t find myself so up in arms about it. I work with students and I spend a large portion of my time both asking them to write about themselves (tell me more!) and still keep enough filters on their blog to prevent them from getting in trouble (but don’t put your last name and your birthday!!!(though I could probably figure out the birthdays of at least half of them from their blog postings, right?)) That pull between tell me more and don’t tell me that has me shrug my shoulders. And it seems everyone is getting used to having less privacy so I might as well scream at the tide for coming in.
Also, just dealing with data in my own incompetent way makes me think that ‘oh you just take that data, don’t touch that’, is not a way that people actually deal with data.
I also share your confusion over Natural Rights conservatives until I realise how much hypocrisy is central to the conservative enterprise.
it’s bipartisan and corporations spy on us too, so we should all just learn to love Big Brother.
Not to mention the fact that we spy on each other; hackers are heroes (did we ever get around to discussing Aaron Swartz?); we can’t be alone without our cell phones; it’s hard to find a public event without phones ringing …
It’s all good, but we are a hive. We can retreat, but it requires some decisions on our parts, individually.
Figures the one day I’m away from the computer after putting up a post and there’s now >110 comments! Will try to read them tomorrow.
Please carry on!
Not to mention the fact that we spy on each other;
When we do it is generally regarded as a serious crime. Are you familiar with wiretapping statutes for example?
hackers are heroes
Hackers are generally prosecuted vigorously by the government because they’re usually breaking the law. Haven’t you noticed that?
(did we ever get around to discussing Aaron Swartz?);
I personally think Swartz was a jerk with childlike ethics who deserved prosecution.
My point was, Turbulence, that we live in an age of TMI, and many people are less than mindful about guarding their privacy. Facebook, Twitter, etc., aren’t exactly privacy inducing media. (When I was talking about “spying” on friends, I was talking about this, not wiretapping people. Please try to be a bit less literal.)
As for hackers, I agree with you about Swartz, but you’ll notice that huge numbers of people do/did not.
…the government really hates competition?
My point was, Turbulence, that we live in an age of TMI, and many people are less than mindful about guarding their privacy.
Sometimes people have to explain how consent works to conservatives because they say things indicating that they just don’t get the concept. I feel like this is one of those times.
Yes, many people choose to share some aspects of their lives with other people online. That does not mean that they consent to share ALL aspects of their lives with everyone. Privacy rights do not disappear once you make selective disclosures.
…the government really hates competition?
When the police arrest someone, that’s OK, but when I arrest someone, it turns out that kidnapping is a felony! So unfair!
I’ll note that government hasn’t hacked anything here and that your rabid government hatred is leading you to ever greater non-sequitors.
Turbulence, just so you know, I don’t identify as a “conservative”. I don’t know what you mean by “conservative” but it’s not me. I don’t think that the concept of “right to privacy” has been legally well settled in the age since the Internet became a widely used tool for communication (in the mid-90’s). The Fourth amendment did not anticipate the Internet. It’s easy to talk about stuff that’s in my house, my personal effects, my home, my bedroom, curtains, envelopes, etc., but that doesn’t easily translate to electronic communications. I know this because I’m older than you and lived in the age when electronic communications were not readily available (except the telephone, and my first experience with that was a party line).
Life is different now, and we have to adjust to how it’s different. It doesn’t make me a “conservative” because I don’t draw lines the same places you do.
Especially since, in fact, I do draw lines in many of the same places you do, but you’re too belligerant to acknowledge the places where we agree.
If I can reasonably anticipate that people can hear me, it’s not private. If I send an email to someone, it’s pretty clear that someone (I use google email, for example) can intercept it. I have a reasonable expectation that no one is going to care what I write, and so I write some stuff that I wouldn’t particularly want people to read. But I wouldn’t be completely astonished to find that someone read it. I know full well, for example, that foreign governments hack into U.S. email, Skype, etc., because I communicate with people in foreign countries. In other words, it’s not just the United States government – there ware a whole lot of people listening in.
I’ll note that government hasn’t hacked anything here and that your rabid government hatred is leading you to ever greater non-sequitors.
It’s funny that I totally agree that rabid government hatred is driving a lot of this discussion in favor of the sainted “whistleblower”.
I don’t identify as a “conservative”.
I don’t really care how you identify. You exhibit a similar confusion regarding the nature of consent (not a deep concept I should think, especially for an attorney such as yourself) that seems to befuddle many conservatives.
I don’t think that the concept of “right to privacy” has been legally well settled in the age since the Internet became a widely used tool for communication (in the mid-90’s).
This is meaningless.
The first amendment has been applied to all sorts technologies beyond 18th century printing presses. There’s no reason to limit the fourth amendment to, as Carlton so eloquently put it, only protecting the life of an 18th century gentleman farmer. Is there any end to that line of thinking: is there any technological invasion of privacy that you’d draw the line at? Would you object to tiny robots that entered your home and transmitted your most private conversations to government listeners? I mean, the founders couldn’t conceive of that, so surely the 4A doesn’t apply, right?
I guess I don’t see how email is different from postal mail. The government can’t read my postal mail without a warrant. I don’t see why they should be able to read my email without a warrant either. If it is OK to read one sans warrant, it seems to me that it should be OK to read the other.
Have you no answer to the questions I raised here?
Unfortunately, at least on my browser, the comment links don’t go back to the comment, so you might want to put a timestamp.
Weird.
Thanks for the tip LJ.
I referenced my comment from June 10, 2013 at 11:21 AM.
I’m not going to look up your questions, Turbulence. You have an annoying (to me) habit of badgering people with interrogations. Repeat your questions if they were relevant.
Consent isn’t the major issue with respect to the 4th Amendment. The major issue is “expectation of privacy”. We have a Constitutional expectation of privacy in our persons (that’s our bodies), our homes and personal effects (stuff in our homes and stuff that we own). Our expectation of privacy is bolstered by other laws (against assault (our persons), burglary (our homes and stuff), etc. The right to privacy was extended to contraception, sexual relations, and abortions because it made sense to the court that “persons” implied that we have jurisdiction over our bodies.
As to U.S. mail, there are specific statutes covering U.S. mail: see for example, 18 USC 1702. Again, the statute bolsters our expectation of privacy. As to electronic communications, FISA is specifically mentioned as an exception to what’s protected. See, for example, 18 U.S.C. 2511. So right there, we see that electronic communications and postal mail are not treated the same way.
I’m sure that for you, it’s all about what you think and and what you want, but the law doesn’t work that way.
We have specific statutes making it illegal to read someone else’s email, such as the CFAA.
I don’t think that all possible rulings from the FISC are automatically constitutional. For example, if the FISC were to issue a ruling requiring that Bob Smith be executed for the crime of eating a ham sandwich in public, I don’t think that would be constitutionally permissible, even if the court dotted all its is and crossed all its ts.
For example, if the FISC were to issue a ruling requiring that Bob Smith be executed for the crime of eating a ham sandwich in public, I don’t think that would be constitutionally permissible, even if the court dotted all its is and crossed all its ts.
Nobody contends that the FISC can act beyond its jurisdiction, but what you seem not to understand is that just because you think something should be private, and you don’t “consent” to have it not be private – nobody really cares. What’s important is whether there’s a legally recognized “expectation of privacy”. While there is certainly some degree of “expectation of privacy” in electronic communications, no court has ever held that it is not subject to the exceptions that are in the statute.
It’s not about being “conservative’ or “liberal”. It’s not about what is ideal or what is desirable. It’s what people have come up with so far. You’re perfectly entitled to argue against the current law, but don’t pretend that what the government is doing here is unlawful. No one is required to use the Internet. You can still write letters and have all of the protections associated with the U.S. mail.
“Donald- just occurred to me that issues which don’t break down well by party lines are effectively neutered in our system. Whereas issues with a minority of support, even a fringe minority, can often do well if they are concentrated in one party’s base.”
Yep. It’s something that one really sees in the human rights area, since there has generally been a fair amount of bipartisan support for some of our more disgusting policies. I’m not sure about domestic issues–maybe the war on drugs would be another example where bipartisan agreement means that some issues aren’t really debated, at least not by politicians. But I don’t follow that one as much.
And maybe this privacy issue too, though Wyden and Udall were apparently upset about it.
Digby linked to this John Judis article about the good old days of FBI surveillance back in the 60’s as a reason for why maybe, just maybe, people should be upset about excessive governmental snooping–
link
Funny – I read the article and thought: it’s not really a matter of electronic data collection. It’s a matter of whether the government wants to harass certain citizens. If it does, it will certainly find the means to do so.
This isn’t to say that electronic data collection is without danger, etc., but there’s so much opportunity out there for government to abuse its citizens that it’s just mainly important that people work hard to elect good government.
This supposedly is good government, isn’t it?
Your level of trust doesn’t do much to inspire mine to higher levels.
I do think we currently have good government, which is why I’m not that worried about it. I don’t doubt that our criteria are different, Slartibartfast.
Another article, this one by Steve Walt, on the real problem with this level of surveillance–it means that anyone who is a whistleblower or sticks his or her neck out on some issue is open to people who work in the bureaucracy who might want to embarrass them–
link
(It’s currently the top article at the blog–I’d link to the particular article but Foreign Policy makes you go through some annoying sign-in procedure.)
“it’s just mainly important that people work hard to elect good government.”
Hell, yeah, why even have constitutional protections. Just make sure the rulers are good.
On why “good government” is inadequate justification, see the ever-perceptive Slacktivist: Don’t Worry, Penelope Garcia is a Good Guy.
Hell, yeah, why even have constitutional protections. Just make sure the rulers are good.
I didn’t dismiss the importance of Constitutional protections. But, as should be obvious, the Constitution isn’t self-enforcing and requires good government (in the form of people – elected officials and honest bureaucrats) to uphold it.
Information is a powerful tool, and there’s plenty of potential for abuse. The police power, the taxing power, the war power – they all can be used for good or bad. Sure, there should be checks and balances, but those words are meaningless without the effort of real people doing the right thing – both the people who wield the power and the people who check it.
What’s important is whether there’s a legally recognized “expectation of privacy”.
Just following up on this to make the point that there *was* a legally recognized expectation of privacy for electronic communications such as email etc.
This was codified in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in 1986. In a nutshell, the protections that had long been afforded to phone communications were extended to email and other non-voice electronic comms.
Subsequent to the ECPA, those protections were eroded by other, newer laws, most notably the USA Patriot Act.
I think there’s also a basic, workaday sense in which people object to other folks reading their mail, whether it’s on paper or electronic.
Some of that is due to a more or less common-sense assumption of privacy, and some of it is due to the sense that the feds really ought to have something better to do with their time and our money than reading my note to my wife to remind her that we’re going to dinner with the Johnsons on Friday.
Last but far from least, there’s the incorrigible resistance on the part of the NSA specifically and the intelligence community in general to submit to any kind of meaningful oversight.
The phrase “if you’re not doing anything wrong, what are you worried about?” cuts two ways.
There’s nothing particularly new about PRISM, at least that I can see, and my sense (based on limited information) is that there’s less to be disturbed about in this case than meets the eye.
But it definitely is weird, and merits an explanation.
Whether the ECPA created an expectation of privacy in email, and the extent of that expectation, is debatable since email wasn’t a commonly used method of communication when it was passed. There were subsequent court decisions about what kind of privacy one had in email, etc., so some of those issues were debated and discussed and resolved in some jurisdictions.
I’m pretty sure that everyone (including the government) believes that email and other electronic communications are protected to a certain degree. It’s pretty clear that they aren’t protected to the degree that the government is not allowed to store them. Is the government allowed to randomly read your email to your wife for no other reason than a perverse interest in love chatter? Unlikely. But the extent to which you are allowed to have your email totally off-limits to the government’s program is a different matter.
Honestly, do you really think that your email to your wife is the issue here? The issue is that I might be a dissident, and the government might read my email in order to find information to embarrass me. Or stuff like that. That would be a terrible abuse, just like the government’s power was abused against Martin Luther King, against John Judis, and against a host of other people throughout history. I do not dispute the power, or the potential for abuse. The point is, those abuses happened well before the Internet or ECPA or FISA. We’re not talking about abuse here; we’re talking about maybe, could be. Well, even without the program there is maybe, could be. The Republicans are insisting that it’s happened recently with the IRS.
If you’re a government hater, you don’t trust the government with power at all. If you think government performs a useful service, you’re comfortable with giving government a certain degree of power and figuring out how to minimize abuse. The government argues that all three branches have worked on the FISA system, so the citizens must support it. The laws are quite publicly on the books. To the extent that it’s been challenged, it’s been upheld. So yeah – work to change the law if you want.
I notice that no one took me up on my conspiracy theory about Eliot Spitzer. Frankly, I’m much more afraid of corporations at this time in our history than I am of the government. And people (like me) are happy to google away their privacy every single day.
The FISC Verizon order indicates that the US government has been constructing a dossier on the location of every cell phone in the damn country. I believe that if you went to a random group of Americans and asked them “do you think the government is tracking your location using your cellphone and storing it in a giant database along with the location history of everyone else in the country?”, most of them would say “no.”
That’s your expectation of privacy.
“tracking”
Really? Tracking?
I would say storing. And then I would say that people would shrug.
Frankly, I’m much more afraid of corporations at this time in our history than I am of the government.
Sapient,
I fear corporations as well, both for this and for other reasons having to do with their economic power, which translates into political power, and there is no way to insure we have “good people” at the corporate helm.
After all this back and forth, I can only say your rationale for this program (It’s legal, so stop whining already) leave me somewhat troubled. And really? Good men? Are you ‘effing kidding me? Have you forgotten what happens when good men do nothing? It don’t take much. Good rules are also absolutely required.
The entire structure of our National Security State is an affront to common sense, our prosperity, and yes, our ultimate security. It is an abomination, and it acts to undermine our liberty. I’d tell you more, but you are not cleared to receive that information.
your rationale for this program (It’s legal, so stop whining already) leave me somewhat troubled.
That’s not my position, but go ahead and argue that. I have problems with the program; I just think it’s legal. I find it odd that, although it’s totally apparent from the law what the government can do, it takes the betrayal of trust from some felony-committing government contractor to suddenly appoint himself a hero in order to “start a conversation” (with Glenn Greenwald), while he flees to a country governed by one of the most notorious violators of free expression in the world.
And then we have the left version of the tea party (the “government-haters” to paraphrase Turbulence) saying “OMG, we can’t possibly trust government to not snoop on my grocery conversation with my sister!”
If people don’t know that the privacy of electronic communications are easily compromised (either legally or illegally), they should learn that now. I already knew it, yet I persist in using it in all of its glory. It can be hacked. It can be intercepted by the government. It can be intercepted by foreign governments. It’s not a safe way to be private.
As to what the government should be allowed to do with the data, I think that’s the conversation we should be having.
I’ve been sampling the range of opinion on the interlisteningdevices regarding this issue as I make up my mind what I really think I know and what I think about what I think I know and I thought I’d share this with yous jamokes, if only to admit that I won’t be writing a parody of the “what we’s oughta do is we oughta go in nere and do dis ting heah, capiche, and don’t make me have ta say it again or I’ll come ovah deah an reroute youh plumbin for ya so youh talkin tru youh drain trap,” rant, cause it’s just been done for once and all:
http://www.redstate.com/theplumber/2013/06/11/instead-of-taking-care-of-business-theyre-getting-into-ours/
” but those words are meaningless without the effort of real people doing the right thing – both the people who wield the power and the people who check it.”
Maybe someone should pass a law against torture then, complete with penalties and obligations on the part of the government to do a serious self-investigation and prosecutions if warranted in case anything like that ever happens. I seem to recall that one of the arguments against the US being subject to the ICC is that it would never come up, because the ICC only steps in when a country is unwilling or unable to prosecute its own war criminals and of course we have this fine legal system which would do a great job in the unlikely event that the US ever did anything seriously wrong.
We don’t have accountability for people in power. I’ve said this a few hundred times by now, but if we can’t hold our own war criminals to account and won’t do a serious official investigation into our various torture policies then clearly we don’t have accountability for people in the government. I recently linked to some Guardian story on torture in Iraq that was exposed by wikileaks and of course nothing came of that story. But whistleblowers like Manning and now Snowden–some of you “liberals” just can’t wait to see them jailed. To me this is an utterly appalling mindset. I’m not really arguing with you–there’s not enough common ground to have a meaningful argument. We can agree on some other issues–probably economic ones. Maybe there’s some issue where we can disagree but have some points in common. On this one, no.
I’m not trying to get in the middle of this fight, but in a number of states, they have or want to mandate that your cell phone location be tracked for 911 calls. I can’t remember if this was in MS or LA, but a driver had driven off of the road into a bayou, called 911, but couldn’t be found. Damn these heartless telcoms that don’t care about people in trouble!! You get the picture.
This CNN article discusses the problems of the mobile 911 calls. It had this
In fact, U.S. wireless carriers are not required until 2012 to provide emergency responders with the latitude and longitude — accurate to within 300 meters (984 feet) — of a 911 caller.
This is part of mandated FCC regs
The FCC’s basic 911 rules require wireless service providers to transmit all 911 calls to a PSAP, regardless of whether the caller subscribes to the provider’s service or not.
Phase I Enhanced 911 (E911) rules require wireless service providers to provide the PSAP with the telephone number of the originator of a wireless 911 call and the location of the cell site or base station transmitting the call.
Phase II E911 rules require wireless service providers to provide more precise location information to PSAPs; specifically, the latitude and longitude of the caller. This information must be accurate to within 50 to 300 meters depending upon the type of location technology used.
I’m not sure how you get the mandated to provide more precise information and the assurance that no one will ever use that information for the wrong reason, especially if you ask the government to check if the first one is being followed. Sure, we can put in laws, but they do seem like a kludge. I’d draw a parallel between these kinds of laws and copyright, where increasing attempts to enforce copyright restrictions come off as 60 year olds trying to do hip-hop.
I don’t share sapient’s blissful unconcern about big government, however my ‘argument’ for this is that you can’t stop data from being used in ways you don’t like. You can slow it down, a little, but I’m not sure if it is the best way to manage change.
While the US is not the UK, but there is one CCTV camera for every 32 people. There is currently a push back against CCTV cameras and critics (see here) argue that they are not cost effective or even effective. (reading the Daily Mail on the question of CCTV is like listening to Robin Williams play a schizophrenic).
Still, a lot of people have argued that the US approach to terrorism should imitate the UK one, especially after the subway bombings. Yet the British approach to policing, with ASBOs and a huge amount of latitude for the judges would not cut it in the US. That our Atlantic cousins have taken to CCTV in a big way suggests to me that surveilling in public places is not universally viewed with horror, and that they really no legal right to privacy (though there is one through the European Convention on Human Rights) suggests to me that the universe is arcing to a place where you have to take positive steps to create your privacy rather than have an expectation of it. Demanding that your cell phone respect your privacy is probably not going to cut it.
I hope this doesn’t come off as being flippant, but I guess I’m of the s**t happens school.
I would certainly be open for a guest post (as I always am) on the subject. I’m taking a trip tomorrow and will be back on Tuesday, but should have internet access while I’m there so if you are interested, send it to libjpn at gmail.
I notice that no one took me up on my conspiracy theory about Eliot Spitzer. Frankly, I’m much more afraid of corporations at this time in our history than I am of the government.
I fear them differently. More to the point, I don’t think fearing one ameliorates my concern about the other.
I fear both of them working in concert more than anything (ie the government using state secrets/flag-waving/etc to hide the correlation of massive DBs of data voluntarily forwarded from corps without consent or knowledge of users, for a combined political-economic purpose). Bright lines protecting us against both sides of that equation seem important to me.
I find it odd that, although it’s totally apparent from the law what the government can do…
It is not obvious to me that the law allows for wholesale, ongoing monitoring of every cell phone location and call record in the country. It *appears* to allow access to the records on a case-by-case basis as the government produces evidence that this info is needed for national security.
I suppose one could say that *all* of this info is ‘needed’ for national security. But no, this was not obvious to everyone. I suspect a law saying that the government would receive and hold all cell location and call record data would’ve created much more strenuous objections.
[And, from what Ive read from lawyers trying to deduce the legal rationale, it *may* include some real pretzel logic eg the FBI requesting the data, but having it delivered to the NSA to avoid the laws controlling how the FBI must prune out data from the data set if it’s not relevant to the specific case at hand. But that’s all speculative since we havent seen the government’s justification under the law, and may never do so].
And then we have the left version of the tea party (the “government-haters” to paraphrase Turbulence) saying “OMG, we can’t possibly trust government to not snoop on my grocery conversation with my sister!”
That does not at all seem like a good-faith attempt to understand the counterarguments being presented. Here, at least.
If people don’t know that the privacy of electronic communications are easily compromised (either legally or illegally), they should learn that now.
I know that I am made of meat and can be easily rendered dead by a bullet or baseball bat. That does not give the government the right to shoot me *even if* I dont wear a flak jacket when out around town.
Pointing out that the government could illegally access data has basically zero relevance afaict to whether they’re legally accessing it, or (if they are) whether the laws ought to be changed (or re-interpreted).
Good point on surveillance cameras, lj.
U.S. Government is not quite up to say, Macy’s Department Store levels on surveillance (one way mirrors, watchers in the ceiling, cameras) or Vegas casinos when it come to spying on ya even when you’re innocent of all suspicion, but they probably want to be.
The other night I was out for a walk on a city street, on the public sidewalk minding my own business and one of those motion sensors that triggers three spotlights on a private residence lit up a city block, not just the private property, with me thinking maybe that was my cue to break into song or do a little soft shoe.
I’m innocent, I’m tellin ya.
I’m noticing this week how much surveillance is going on in daily life and the government is the least of it.
Meanwhile, what?:
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/snowden-nsa-leaks-republicans/2013/06/11/id/509148
No, wait, you didn’t know what?:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/graham-nsa-phone-record-tracking-goes-deeper-than-believed.php?ref=fpb
Hold the fort, let me readjust my Daffy Duck bill, now who’s talking:
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/al-franken-defends-nsa-surveillance-this-is-not?ref=fpb
They hacked who? That I understand, but why not Redstate, too!:
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/us-hacks-stops-publication-of-al-qaedas-online?ref=fpblg
Three areas in which the Feds have, or soon will have, data on me:
1. My whereabouts when I make a cell phone call.
2. My earnings, assets, charities I support, etc.
3. Some, perhaps many (we don’t know yet) aspects of my medical/health condition.
Of the three, I am least concerned about No. 1. Of the three, those here most concerned about No. 1 barely bat an eye at Nos. 2 and 3. And yet, it’s all the same damn gov’t–we love it when it promotes the domestic welfare and are willing to make a privacy sacrifice here and there for the greater good, but when it comes to national security, we don’t trust it one single bit and knowing where all 300,000,000 of us are when we hit “call” is *just the tip of the iceberg*.
I do not get any of this.
I think that concerns about corporate invasion of privacy and/or data sharing are very reasonable and well-founded, but that the existence of these issues does not mitigate my concerns about government gathering of or (mis)-use of this kind of info.
Do you worry about the gov’t misusing other types of info it requires citizens to divulge? Your income, employer, deductions, stock trades? How about forced reporting of money transfers in excess of X amount of dollars? You want to send $25,000 overseas or to a family member domestically, that gets reported. You’re ok with this, but not with the feds theoretically knowing where you are standing when you call to make a dinner reservation?
That does not at all seem like a good-faith attempt to understand the counterarguments being presented. Here, at least.
I know that I am made of meat and can be easily rendered dead by a bullet or baseball bat. That does not give the government the right to shoot me *even if* I dont wear a flak jacket when out around town.
I think, Carleton, that you should looe at your good-faith attempt to understand my argument. If you think that the government’s storage of cell phone data is equivalent to being rendered dead by a bullet or a baseball bat, there’s no conversation to be had. Because I don’t consider the “invasion of privacy” to be anywhere near similar.
Let’s discuss for a moment (please, indulge me if you will) what the invasion of privacy might mean.
I have acknowledged that what it might mean is that the government (or a renegade gov’t employee such as Snowden) might use information to harass or embarrass (whatever) a dissident (or in the case of a renegade, a random person). I agree that such a scenario is terrible and should not be allowed.
Other than that, there’s the remote possibility that some government official might get a few jollies from intercepting something. That also is regrettable, but who really cares? Kind of a problem with the post office too – it would be so easy for postal employees to steal letters addressed to Angelina Jolie or whomeve or whatever. It’s against the law, etc., and creepy, whatever, but really? What we really care about is that they steal the New Yorker, or something like that.
Anyway, I’m with lj on this (as I often am – sorry, lj) but we have to be a bit vigilant to figure out how to protect our own privacy. And when we find out, as you did Carleton, that the government has more authority than we thought, we speak up. So good for you! Good luck with that!
Good point.
We’ve hit the trifecta.
I assume, when you say “we don’t know yet” you mean the Obamacare Death Panels, not the Medicare Death Panels.
😉
And thanks, Count. The surveillance cameras creep me out like nothing else. I happen to work in a building with surveillance cameras (for my own safety, of course!) but I don’t know where they are or what they surveille. The building has a lot of glass – are they watching me picking my nose, or smacking my head at the stuff I’m not supposed to be reading on ObWi? I have no idea who can see me, hear me, or [eek] – I just picked a tick off of myself. Hope they didn’t see that.
I do not get any of this.
McKinney,
Well, I don’t get ‘voter fraud’ either.
The main issue to me is not so much the privacy aspect, but the growth government power without effective citizen oversight. Why, I dare say, that very topic is something you broach now and then. To lefties, an out of control National Security state is the big bogey man, and statements such as, “Since you are not cleared, we can’t tell you” send chills up the spine.
I suggest you read James Carroll’s excellent book, “The House of War”, to get a sense of the beginnings of this new and troubling institutional arrangement…..we are now beginning to see where this is taking us: Endless war, loss of privacy, the enhancement of unchecked executive power, loss of effective oversight and control.
Compared to this the evils of Obamacare is a fart in the wind.
Regards,
justanother12handicapper
but the growth government power without effective citizen oversight.
Really? The Executive branch cain’t do nuthin’ in this Congress. frankly maybe the spooks are the only functional government we have.
1. My whereabouts when I make a cell phone call.
That is not correct. The cell phone location data does not just cover times when you’re actually making a call. It covers times when your cell phone is turned on. If your phone is capable of receiving a call, then its location is available to the NSA.
The cell phone location data does not just cover times when you’re actually making a call. It covers times when your cell phone is turned on. If your phone is capable of receiving a call, then its location is available to the NSA.
So, again, what are you worried about? Your right to privacy or the right to privacy of your cell phone. Because you can always require a prosecutor to prove that you and your cell phone were together. It’s really interesting to me where you leave your cell phone, Turbulence, when you’re out and about. I’m intrigued! Also mystified as to why you might lend your cell phone to people who do such interesting stuff!
That is not correct. The cell phone location data does not just cover times when you’re actually making a call. It covers times when your cell phone is turned on. If your phone is capable of receiving a call, then its location is available to the NSA.
Which will be one of three places: my home (they already know where I live), my office (they have that too) and where I play golf (I’m holding that back).
Compared to this the evils of Obamacare is a fart in the wind.
My location vs. personal facts about me that I’d like kept private–we have two entirely different views of what matters and what does not. I am reasonably confident the feds–and others as well–can identify my bank accounts and balances. That used to be private. It isn’t my cell phone location that gives them this information. It’s the feds’ pervasive role in banking and gathering of personal financial data via the income tax system. I’m not saying I don’t consent to a great deal of what I am nonetheless compelled to divulge. What I am saying is that worrying about the feds knowing where I am at the moment(at work, in Houston Texas, and where I work is public record from a myriad of sources)pales in comparison to my finances and health status as far as privacy is concerned. You don’t agree. Fine by me, but you do take it a step further, as do most libs, and make the decision for me. Obamacare, which none of us understand yet, is not the end of federal intervention in this arena. It will have to be *improved* and *tailored* and *made more efficient*. I did not and do not consent–but, my side lost that vote and privacy concerns be damned. So, having surrendered on so many other privacy fronts, the current leftish whining about cell phone locations rings a bit hollow.
I was a 12 handicapper briefly. Glad to know you’ll be giving me strokes.
A government of people, then, and not of laws?
What could go wrong?
I’m not arguing either side at the moment, but I’m wondering if the NSA would be willing to call my cell phone on request after I put it down and it falls behind the couch cushions and I can’t find it, since they know its location.
Maybe the government could have a “Do Not Track” list similar to the “Do Not Call” list for the hucksters.
For awhile there some years ago, I was sure some Florida bucket shops knew I was just sitting down to dinner when they called to interest me in some penny stocks that had cornered some soggy beachfront property.
But how?
We could conduct a controlled experiment on Obsidian Wings over say, a ten year period, and see if at the end of the period anything untoward has happened at the hands of the government to those on this thread who have voiced opposition to the NSA practices (or in McTX’s case, at the hands of the IRS or HHS) and compare those outcomes with those of the individuals on the thread who are in favor of, or who are merely philosophical or undecided about NSA practices.
If sapient is the last one standing, and the rest of meet mysteriously deadly ends, like the Deeley Plaza witnesses who swore there was more than one shooter, then sapient was wrong and everyone else was right, which should be comfort enough.
I kid.
I’m done.
sapient the last standing? Do you really think that sapient stands?
A government of people, then, and not of laws?
Slart your hilarious absurdity knows no bounds. In what way is our government breaking the laws? The guys there are good, in part, because they follow the laws.
In what way does your quirky ridiculous mind disagree?
I knew that, by which I mean the sitting part.
So does the NSA.
Not that there’s anything wrong with quirky, ridiculous. But take a look at your last million comments. What do you actually think? You remind me very much of my pet snail.
So, again, what are you worried about? Your right to privacy or the right to privacy of your cell phone.
Most people, after blowing $50-$100 per month for cell phone service like to keep their cell phone with them at all times. Because, you know, you’re paying for the damn thing. And you never know when you’ll need to take the call that your spouse/children/ailing-parents/whatever are having an emergency and need your help.
So, for most people, their cell phone follows them around all day every day. Not all of course. That means that if I decide to have an affair, the giant NSA database will show that. Look at these two cell phones whose tracks intersect every few days at cheap motels! This is a simple query against the NSA database. Since the NSA apparently has little or no internal controls on data access, anyone with access can run that query, find a list of people and start blackmailing people. Or maybe sell the list to a PI who can verify the entries and blackmail the victims himself. A government salary won’t buy much in northern VA these days.
A complete database of where people go and who they communicate with is incredibly valuable. It allows you to infer the answers to extremely private questions: who people are sleeping with, what groups they’re part of, whether they’re buying drugs, how much they gamble, etc. We’re not talking about uncovering all their secrets, but a good number of them.
I guess I don’t see why the government can’t legally put a tracking device on my car without a warrant but can track my cell phone without one.
Now, I think that people of an older generation who maybe don’t have first hand experience working with data might have some difficulty visualizing the implications. And it is probably my fault for not writing clearly enough. But there’s an old saying in the computer security community: ‘attacks always get stronger, they never get weaker’. Constructing this giant database is an attack against our privacy. It may or may not be a legal one. It may or may not be a necessary one. But it is an attack, and as time goes on, it will only become more powerful and more invasive.
Tracking ambivalence, via Kevin Drum
“Elsewhere, CBS News reports that 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the government collecting the phone records of ordinary Americans. Yesterday, Pew reported that 56 percent of Americans approved. Obviously, question wording is going to be a real headache on this issue.”
Which, for some reason, reminded me of George Carlin’s “chickens are decent people” routine, and then, voila, this appears:
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/06/11/herzog-probably-doesnt-eat-mcnuggets/
Now, I’m done.
I’m not sure how you get the mandated to provide more precise information and the assurance that no one will ever use that information for the wrong reason,
This is not a hard problem.
You mandate that telcos provide the realtime location data for enhanced 911 calls and then you mandate that they delete that data after 24 hours (or whatever). Location data for 911 is extremely time sensitive; it is useless a week later. I expect that most telcos would do this on their own in order to avoid a privacy/litigation nightmare. You don’t need to enforce strict controls on data that you don’t have, and you can’t get in trouble for misusing data that you don’t have. Telcos and ISPs are already in the habit of deleting logs specifically so they can promise customers enhanced privacy.
Still, a lot of people have argued that the US approach to terrorism should imitate the UK one, especially after the subway bombings.
I haven’t seen anyone do that.
Yet the British approach to policing, with ASBOs and a huge amount of latitude for the judges would not cut it in the US. That our Atlantic cousins have taken to CCTV in a big way suggests to me that surveilling in public places is not universally viewed with horror,
I don’t think CCTV is really comparable to what we’re talking about here. CCTV footage is rarely archived: video takes a lot of space and space costs money, so it is rare for CCTV footage to be archived for more than a few days. Beyond that, CCTV is in some ways privacy preserving. If I went into London and asked the police “show me all video footage of Bob Smith”, they could not. CCTV implies lots of raw data that is extremely difficult to connect to individuals. CCTV might be useful for recovering information after a terrorist attack, but even that is extremely expensive: hundreds of specially trained investigators had to pour through footage looking for the Boston bombing suspects over several days.
So, I don’t think public acquiescence to CCTV in the UK tells us anything. Mostly, it seems like CCTV is just a particularly british version of security theater: a hugely expensive waste of resources that doesn’t actually make anyone safer but mollifies people’s anxiety by visibly demonstrating that the government is doing “something”, even if that something is useless.
suggests to me that the universe is arcing to a place where you have to take positive steps to create your privacy rather than have an expectation of it. Demanding that your cell phone respect your privacy is probably not going to cut it.
So, how exactly do I take positive steps to create my privacy from having the government surveil my location using my cell phone? Technically, that seems physically impossible unless I stop using a cell phone.
And where exactly does this end? In 20 years, when the government deploys surveillance drones the size of a fly into everyone’s homes to record and transmit all of our conversations, will you still insist ‘there’s no right to privacy, and you just have to accept that the government is entitled to know whatever it wants, no matter the justification’?
Whether the ECPA created an expectation of privacy in email, and the extent of that expectation, is debatable since email wasn’t a commonly used method of communication when it was passed.
Actually the ECPA covered a much broader range of communications than email, although it more than certainly applied to email as well.
At least until the law was changed.
Perhaps you should read the freaking law and see what it covered, and what expectations it set.
The issue is that I might be a dissident, and the government might read my email in order to find information to embarrass me. Or stuff like that.
The issue here is that private communications between individuals have historically been protected under the BIll of Rights.
It behooves folks who think electronic communications should be exempt to explain why that should be so.
If people don’t know that the privacy of electronic communications are easily compromised (either legally or illegally), they should learn that now.
How is that different than any other damned thing?
I can walk into your house when you’re away, install a listening device, and be privy to everything you say, day and night.
So you should therefore have no expectation of privacy while conversing in your own damned house.
I’m able, legally or illegally, to listen to, take pictures of, make movies of, every damned thing you do every day of your life. I’m able to make an inventory of every damned thing you own, every damned place you go, every person you speak with, and what you speak about.
All I need are the resources and the interest in doing so.
You should learn that now.
In what way is our government breaking the laws?
We don’t know.
sapient, meet point.
The guys there are good, in part, because they follow the laws.
sapient, our very own Candide.
Personally, I’m not particularly freaked out by PRISM. I’m not freaked out because I not only have nothing to hide, I don’t even have anything interesting to show.
That said, we should all damned well be highly interested in, and concerned about, WTF the spooks are doing, because they have billions and billions of dollars to play with, they are virtually unaccountable, and they have a very very very long track record of abusing people.
So yeah, it’s not about me and my wife emailing about our weekend dinner plans. It’s about all the folks who do stuff that somebody on the other end of the wire might or might not like.
If you value the right of people to disagree with the government in thought, word, or deed, this crap should give you pause.
You mandate that telcos provide the realtime location data for enhanced 911 calls and then you mandate that they delete that data after 24 hours (or whatever).
The push is to make sure that 911 calls can be located. Also, police probably want to be able to find the location of the calls later (I’m thinking of things like the Travyon Martin case). It’s not that I disagree, it’s that adding the additional mandates is not really how things like that work, I think.
Still, a lot of people have argued that the US approach to terrorism should imitate the UK one, especially after the subway bombings.
I haven’t seen anyone do that.
Really? I can’t give you the exact articles (not hitting the right search terms), but I think UK policing has been lauded for the paucity of firearms and the utilization of community based activities, and I think comparisons, especially after the London Subway bombings, were pretty rife. This piece cites Boston and community based policing, though not identifying it with a UK approach.
So, I don’t think public acquiescence to CCTV in the UK tells us anything.
About CCTV, I think it tells us about an acquiescence to reduced privacy. It also tells us, given the stories of private CCTV cameras, that the government has to take, or will be pushed to take, some control. Those private CCTV cameras placements are being driven by public opinion, so my point isn’t whether they are efficient or not, it is that that’s where the road is leading.
Technically, that seems physically impossible unless I stop using a cell phone.
Yep, there you have it. It sucks. I hate using credit cards, but I’m pretty much stuck with them, and I don’t think there is a right to have a cell phone.
will you still insist ‘there’s no right to privacy, and you just have to accept that the government is entitled to know whatever it wants, no matter the justification’?
I don’t think I’ve insisted, or even argued for that and if I have given you that impression, sorry for the confusion. I feel like a lot of people (Russell, Donald, cleek) have stated an opinion similar to mine, which is resignation to the inevitable. I’m not happy about losing my privacy, but I see the connectivity of the internet lowering those barriers and there is not much to be done about it. When my iphone 7, with it’s instant internet connectivity alerts me to the store that I am around the corner from has a sale on the lattes I liked on Facebook, there are going to be people who want to figure out better ways to slice, dice and crunch that data and mandating that it disappear after 24 (or whatever) hours is not really going to cut it.
McT notes that the government will have info on
Some, perhaps many (we don’t know yet) aspects of my medical/health condition.
A lot of Japanese companies are working on devices that are used in the home to transmit medical information to doctors and hospitals. What is driving this is the fact that we have a rapidly growing elderly demographic that needs attending to. I see all countries having an increasing number of elderly and given the way innovation works through entrepreneurial innovation (and this is one of its downsides) any kind of mandated deletion of data rubs up against that.
This is not insisting that we have no right to privacy, this is simply pointing out that it is getting chipped away all over the place and without a pretty powerful consensus (that, as far as I can see, does not exist anywhere at all), it’s not going to change. I look at it and say ‘geez, that’s crappy’. It doesn’t mean that I’m insisting on the absence of privacy or I am welcoming the future. Privacy seems to be to be sort of tragedy of the commons problem and when enough people are willing to give it up, it’s gone.
So – true story.
Very very good friends of mine were involved in the 80’s and 90’s with the Catholic Worker movement. At various times, they participated in one form or other of civil disobedience.
One friend arranged with another guy from Catholic Worker – we’ll call him Mr. Smith – to pray on the White House lawn, as an act of protest against our then-foreign-policy in Latin America. They agreed to take the White House tour, then break away from the group at the end, go to the lawn, pray, and be arrested.
The point was to make a statement in court about why they had done what they did.
This was all discussed and arranged fairly informally, it’s not like the press were invited or anything.
During the White House tour, some federal agent or other walked up to them and said “Hello Mr. Smith, we’re glad to see you here today”.
Basically, hello, we know who you are, we know why you’re here. Garden variety mind-f**k.
And I use the term “garden variety” advisedly, because it’s dead normal.
Secrecy and good government do not go hand in hand.
I’d also add that I agree (as I usually do) with Russell and I think that sapient’s argumentation on the issues is bringing more heat than light. But more scrutiny is only going to monitor changes, it’s not going to stop them
Hmmm…
Privacy seems to be to be sort of tragedy of the commons problem and when enough people are willing to give it up, it’s gone.
The tragedy of the commons is the loss of a shared resource due to the misalignment of rational self interest and the common good that result in the depletion of a long term, and valuable, shared resource. The tragedy here is that individuals are rebelling against the loss of this commons, and it is, essentially, being stolen right out from under their noses.
A significant difference if you ask me.
As to health records. Having them on-line and shared (with patient consent) is not remotely the same unless one of those ‘good people’ ask for the data and a supine FISA court says, “Sure, what could go wrong?”
Wolverines!
I don’t think I’ve insisted, or even argued for that and if I have given you that impression, sorry for the confusion.
Your analysis seems kind of empty to me because it excludes any notion of laws or norms. Do you think the 4th amendment limits the government in any way? If you do, why do you think it allows the government to suck up location data on all cell phone users for all time? Do you think it would prevent the government from putting drone insect spies in all our homes? Why would it apply in one case but not the other? If the 4A only protects 18th century gentleman farmers, then drone insect recorders are perfectly legal, right?
When my iphone 7, with it’s instant internet connectivity alerts me to the store that I am around the corner from has a sale on the lattes I liked on Facebook,
I don’t see any privacy issue here at all. Your phone does that because you’ve explicitly given it permission to use your location for real time offers. If you don’t want to do that…revoke your permission. You have complete freedom to do that. In contrast, we can’t revoke our “permission” for the NSA to track us. In your case, your phone, which you control, is doing something. You can easily make it stop. The location data integration is happening locally, on your phone, not in some distant computer.
I see all countries having an increasing number of elderly and given the way innovation works through entrepreneurial innovation (and this is one of its downsides) any kind of mandated deletion of data rubs up against that.
I think consent makes this irrelevant. If people want medical devices that transmit their medical information to their doctors, that’s fine, because they’ve consented. That is totally different from the government spying on them, because they haven’t consented.
I don’t think we can reason effectively about these issues as long as consent remains so confusing a topic.
that it is getting chipped away all over the place and without a pretty powerful consensus (that, as far as I can see, does not exist anywhere at all)
My business is significantly constrained because we voluntarily stick to industry standard privacy guidelines. We’d make more money if we didn’t follow those guidelines, but nobody wants to do that because we know that failure to self-regulate on privacy means our entire industry will be destroyed overnight. I see the same thing when I talk to friends working at google or facebook. We’re all leaving a lot of money on the table because the public perception that we don’t take privacy seriously is fatal to our business.
So, when I see you write about how there’s no public consensus of a right to privacy, I just laugh.
Regarding CCTV, let me suggest that the degree of privacy intrusion is related to (1) how long PII (personally identifiable information) persists, (2) how easily joined that data is, and (3) the cost of turning raw data into PII. CCTV scores poorly on all these metrics. It has no PII unless you spend an enormous amount of money paying human beings to try and identify individuals in frame; and that’s totally infeasible unless you’re looking at a terrorist bombing after the fact. As I explained, video is big so you can’t store it for very long, so whatever data is collected disappears very quickly. And because you can’t easily turn video into PII, you can’t join it with other data — there’s no way to build a dossier of where UK residents go from CCTV. It is impossible.
In contrast, the NSA phone spying scores highly on all these metrics. The PII is already there; you don’t need to spend a dollar to put identifying information on the raw data. It is relatively small and can be stored forever. It is trivially joinable with other data sources. I understand that you can look at both and squint and say “meh, they’re both privacy invasions, so they’re the same”, but they’re really not comparable. And because their privacy impact is not comparable, public reaction to them is not comparable either.
Speaking of absurdity: when did I say the government is breaking the law?
Your statement was, in effect: good government happens when you have good people running government. Which is awfully absurd on its face, in my opinion.
The tragedy of the commons is the loss of a shared resource due to the misalignment of rational self interest and the common good that result in the depletion of a long term, and valuable, shared resource. The tragedy here is that individuals are rebelling against the loss of this commons, and it is, essentially, being stolen right out from under their noses.
I hope this isn’t too telegraphic so that it is taken to be snippy, but:
shared resource= privacy
misalignment of rational self interest = I wanna cell phone! I want to make 911 calls
depletion of a long term, and valuable, shared resource = Is anyone arguing that it is possible to turn back the clock?
The problem is that my data is pretty worthless individually, but in the aggregate, it lets any number of companies make a profit. Unless there is some way to monetize one’s privacy, I don’t see that it is going to stop.
Your analysis seems kind of empty to me because it excludes any notion of laws or norms. Do you think the 4th amendment limits the government in any way? If you do, why do you think it allows the government to suck up location data on all cell phone users for all time? Do you think it would prevent the government from putting drone insect spies in all our homes? Why would it apply in one case but not the other? If the 4A only protects 18th century gentleman farmers, then drone insect recorders are perfectly legal, right?
Three rhetorical questions in a row signifies that I’m not actually insisting that there is no right to privacy, right? I don’t think the insect recorders argument makes much sense, and I think the right to personal space will remain. Of course, it may be that you can only exercise your right to be free from insect recorder intrusions by staying in your house, a la Howard Hughes. In fact, that’s kind of the way it is now.
The two paragraphs about consent, I agree that consent is the bulwark against this sort of stuff, but I’m not convinced that people will value that consent highly enough to make it last. And, when enough people cede consent, you are going to be one giving up your cell phone.
So, when I see you write about how there’s no public consensus of a right to privacy, I just laugh.
ha ha ha Or more seriously, if there were a consensus, it wouldn’t be so sensitive to question wording.
t has no PII unless you spend an enormous amount of money paying human beings to try and identify individuals in frame
Hmmmm
Once you have a face identified with the system, you can click the thumbnail and receive a wealth of search results, including every other clip the identified individual is in. This allows you to pick out someone sketchy in one scene and immediately see where they were before and after, plus it also allows you to upload a suitable photo and then use the system to see if the person is, or isn’t, in the area. That is, so long as they’ve glanced towards a camera.
When laws and norms come up against technology, laws and norms generally lose. This doesn’t mean I am agreeing with the way sapient is arguing for this.
The nice thing about being an engineer is that you can spot bullshit PR that gullible bloggers take seriously. Let me know when Hitachi Kokusai Electric actually sells one of their systems or, god forbid, publishes a peer reviewed paper with measurements for how well it works. Until then it is just marketing drivel.
if there were a consensus, it wouldn’t be so sensitive to question wording.
You realize that polling is always extremely sensitive to question wording, right? Of course, for most people, this is a new issue that they’re not familiar with, and almost none of the news I’ve seen has explained the implications, like the fact that government is building dossiers with every cell phone users’ location history.
Of course, it may be that you can only exercise your right to be free from insect recorder intrusions by staying in your house, a la Howard Hughes.
One of the most significant 4A cases decided by the Supreme Court famously held that “the fourth amendment protects people, not places”, so such a ruling would discard a half century of settled law. But I guess the bill of rights doesn’t apply to technology invented after 1967.
Is anyone arguing that it is possible to turn back the clock?
Do we need to? I mean, right now, telcos could theoretically sell location data to private companies. But they don’t. Do you know why? I mean, they’re public companies beholden to shareholders, so why don’t they? Could it be that their customers would all disappear instantly and sue them because people, you know, care about privacy?
Unless there is some way to monetize one’s privacy, I don’t see that it is going to stop.
A data protection act would do.
To make the point again: the idea of determining one’s location from cell phone data assumes that one is with one’s cell phone at all times. In fact, human beings and their cell phones are not one. As a tool for determining where a person might be, it’s an extraordinarily convenient one. But there are other ways to do that: following people around, etc.
I don’t think that anything in the Fourth Amendment can lead anyone, even an 18th century gentleman farmer, to conclude that being in a public place, on public streets, at other people’s houses, in commercial areas, etc., is a private matter. People’s location is not private. How is it private?
That’s not to say that it isn’t creepy to be followed or that someone has the potential to know where you are. But your location is not private.
By the way, russell, if you’d like for me to read where the ECPA refers to email in its various stages of transmission and storage, perhaps you should provide a link.
I feel like a lot of people (Russell, Donald, cleek) have stated an opinion similar to mine, which is resignation to the inevitable.
Just to clarify – my position is not resignation to the inevitable.
I understand the government’s desire and/or need to have access to private information in order to counter criminal or other dangerous behavior.
But I also recognize the long-standing principle that private conversations between individuals are just that, private.
If the government wants access to private communications, it behooves the government to demonstrate why that’s needed.
What I am looking for that I’m not seeing in the PRISM situation – as with basically all similar cases – is some kind of meaningful oversight and accountability.
“They’re good people” / “we have to trust them” / “they haven’t broken any laws” is, frankly, not to the point.
Or, actually, maybe it is to the point – the niceness of the individuals involved, or their personal trustworthiness, or their ability to finesse the letter of the law, have nothing to do with whether the activity itself – accumulating staggering volumes of private information so that the feds can subsequently sift through and decide what does or does not look fishy to them – is legitimate or desirable.
It’s not about who happens to be President at the moment, and it’s not about whether I communicate with somebody else by sending them a letter or an email.
It’s about making sure that the government’s activities are subject to, and accountable to, the public.
As Turbulence points out, repeatedly and accurately, our use of technology quite often occurs with the understanding that information about that use, including in some cases its content, will be exploited for various commercial purposes.
And, that is based on our consent. Hence the requirement to agree to terms of use virtually every time to browse a new page or purchase a device or service.
Access to that information by programs like PRISM are not by consent. That’s the difference.
Unless there is some way to monetize one’s privacy, I don’t see that it is going to stop.
Just wanted to follow up on this.
If we’ve arrived at the point where it’s necessary that someone be able to make money off of something in order for it to deserve public support and protection, then we are well and truly f***ed.
It could well be that we’re already there. Actually, it could well be that we’re well down the road past there.
But whether that point is in our future, present, or past, once that point is achieved, we are screwed.
if you’d like for me to read where the ECPA refers to email in its various stages of transmission and storage, perhaps you should provide a link.
I don’t care if you read it or not.
If you want to find the text of the law and/or any number of discussions of its application to email or any other technology, Google is your friend.
No intent to be dismissive, life’s just too short. The information is dead easy to find. if you’re interested have at it.
If you want to find the text of the law and/or any number of discussions of its application to email or any other technology, Google is your friend.
No intent to be dismissive, but when you’ve accused me of not reading something because your position is obvious from the law, you should point to where it’s so obvious. The googled discussions about the law indicate that it was not written in such a way as to protect email in the way that you seem to think it does, and that even now there’s a movement to amend the law to provide more protection.
sapient, aren’t you an attorney? Do you really need a drum playing computer programmer to help you find the text of federal law? Don’t they teach that skill to 1Ls?
Wait a minute! I’ve been so blind. I just assumed that you had read the 4A, or since you were an attorney, could find it easily. But you might not have ever even heard of it. So here is a link. I wonder how much of the discussion could have been obviated if I had only included that link in my first comment.
when you’ve accused me of not reading something because your position is obvious from the law, you should point to where it’s so obvious.
A pretty good precis, from here:
So: yes, email was explicitly addressed by the ECPA, and in fact was one of the motivations for the law.
Technology moves on, and it’s now common for emails to be stored on servers “in the cloud” for quite a long time, so some of the issues have shifted since the ECPA.
But the basic point – that there was a legally recognized assumption of privacy for email, codified in law – stands. As far as I can see, not a particularly debatable point.
For the record, it took me about 30 seconds to find that. I do understand the basic principle that if you’re going to cite something in support of your argument it’s polite to include a link, but to be honest it was also dead easy to find.
The USA Patriot Act was what got me interested in politics lo these many years ago, and also was what got me involved in online discussion of public issues. I’ve spent, literally, hundreds of hours looking over the law, including walking back bizarre minute changes through the US Code (which is what most of USAPA is), to look and see what was actually so, and what was not.
I don’t expect you to accept that as some kind of evidence of authority on my part, I’m just mentioning it as a partial explanation for why I’m just not that interested in running around finding cites for everything.
Because I’ve rarely found that it actually changes anybody’s mind, and it is a huge time sink.
If I’d wanted to be an attorney, I would have been one. I didn’t want to be one. I’m happy to do homework for my own purposes, but I’m tired of jumping through hoops to establish my own personal credibility on a blog.
So if you think something I say is wrong on the substance, you’ll have to go find out for yourself. If that means you find what I say less credible, I can find a way to live with that.
Thanks.
Turb, WANL, but if you want to quote Katz v US, you might want to consider Smith v. Maryland. The Pen Register act was supposed to pushback against that, but it specifically allowed for the recording of routing and addressing information. and I believe that US v. Graham gets us up to the point I am suggesting we are at. This is not normative, this is descriptive. Yes, you could mandate that all information be destroyed after a day or a week, or a month. Just like the ECPA thought that 180 days would be enough to protect people’s email.
This talk about the CIA’S CTO may be interesting to some here.
As I said, if anyone wants to write a guest post, feel free. I’m travelling from tomorrow, but will hopefully have internet access. Please play nice, I’d like to find the place not burned down when I get back.
I would tend to use meaningless, but your word works better because it’s meaningless on purpose. It sounds like it’s saying something meaningful, but it’s really not.
Frex:
Index != recognize (or associate, or successfully correlate)
If you do the math on this, you’re going to find out that just storing these images in individual files is going to chew up something like one hundred gigabytes in that one second.
So: not going to happen, in any meaningful sense.
Engineers AND attorneys.
Stuck in the middle of facticity and evidence, I am.
Incidentally, I think the NSA’s sarcasm filter is flashing high alert at the moment — “People, we have a hot spot of suspicious sarcasm back and forth in sector seven …. code OBWI. Let’s requisition time on the satellite for a closer look at those cell phone positions and have the SNARK drones ready for mobilization.”
“Copy that, Utah. These are canny high profile professional targets — how do we get the drones in without detection …”
“That could be a problem … wait, just a second …. yes, we’ve got the humanities major in the bunch ordering pizza on his cell phone, the idiot. Can we configure the tiny fly drones so they deliver a 24″ pepperoni deep dish — or is that a payload beyond you guyses capability?”
“No sweat, they could deliver the payload and then disperse to the ceiling and walls and commence surveillance.”
“Right, but look, why don’t we just continue reading the thread and monitor the conversation from here?”
Pause, crackling over the line.
” …. D’OH!!!”
That’s just my way of saying this a great thread.
This sentence jumped out at me in an article about Congressional members being shocked, I say SHOCKED at the scope of the NSA’s surveillance capabilities:
“Some congressmen admitted they’d been caught unawares by the scope of the programs, having skipped previous briefings by the intelligence committees.”
I guess if the invite didn’t include the words “blow job” or “birth certificate” or “death panels”, interest in national security rates just below reading the text of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
I suppose in the House of Reprehensibles, the critters noticed Michelle Bachmann is on the “Intelligence” Committee, so they begged off with a sudden case of the trots.
No Surveillance without Representation.
I’ll have a cup of the spicy camomile gunpowder tea.
McT,
I agree that financial or medical data could be misused by the government. I don’t share your feeling that location and call data pale in comparison, but I imagine that what seems important to protect varies quite a bit from person to person.
But, the government has a strong rationale for needing this data to do the tasks it has been assigned by the law. Even if you disagree with the law, I think that’s clear.
So my problem is what this says about government versus privacy in general. The cell phone data have afaict no justification beyond “man it’d be neat to have all that data to comb through”. If this is balancing privacy against other concerns, it appears to give basically zero weight to privacy.
But Im totally fine with the NSA getting a warrant for a specific time or place or person to get their call data, or police to track or get info about a suspect. And Im totally for the government anonymizing and otherwise building walls against the misuse of data that they necessarily gather in the course of doing government business.
As it stands, this seems to me like a blanket warrant to search anyone’s home on the grounds that some national security info might be uncovered. That is, troubling.
If (as lj suggests) the day comes when we’ve all got implanted medical devices monitoring/maintaining our health and alerting EMS if we need assistance, I would hope that we’d work hard to build into the system safeguards against misuse and for the protection of privacy. Maybe we wont, maybe it’ll be a Facebook world where everyone knows where everyone else is all of the time. And maybe we’ll grow up as a society to the point where that will be Ok. That would be pretty cool, but not sure that I would bet on it.
I think, Carleton, that you should looe at your good-faith attempt to understand my argument. If you think that the government’s storage of cell phone data is equivalent to being rendered dead by a bullet or a baseball bat, there’s no conversation to be had.
That was an analogy. I don’t think that the ease of doing something changes how I feel about the government doing it without a specific warrant. My house is not particularly locked down, but I think it should have as much legal protection from government search as a paranoid fortress.
I have acknowledged that what it might mean is that the government (or a renegade gov’t employee such as Snowden) might use information to harass or embarrass (whatever) a dissident (or in the case of a renegade, a random person). I agree that such a scenario is terrible and should not be allowed.
I think we agree on that point. Im not sure, but I think we’re disagreeing about whether this is best done with bright-line rules and by carefully selecting our government, or just the latter. I can see the argument that bad government will ignore rules anyway, but I think they perform a function even then in being a bright line that is obvious when it is crossed. And in being a bright line that creates a discussion when the rights of unpopular groups are threatened.
I guess I don’t see a reason for not having bright lines. Unless you think they erode our concern about electing good government maybe.
So, again, what are you worried about? Your right to privacy or the right to privacy of your cell phone. Because you can always require a prosecutor to prove that you and your cell phone were together.
At this point, I dont think we’re talking about prosecutions. Unless things change, this info wouldn’t be admissible.
OTOH, if your cell phone is moving around, you will have a hard time convincing a judge/jury/spouse/employer that it was doing so on its tiny little legs. “I have no idea why my cell phone likes to visit Gay Frank’s Gay Bar while Im across the street at the Free Mission handing out breakfasts and listening to the stories of the downtrodden. No, I don’t think they’d remember me at the Mission, I try to keep a pretty low profile. Just doin the Lords Work ya know.”
Yep, there you have it. It sucks. I hate using credit cards, but I’m pretty much stuck with them, and I don’t think there is a right to have a cell phone.
You don’t *have* to use the mail, but it’s protected. Heck, you don’t have to have possessions at all, yet you are secure in them. You do not need to own a house, but it is safe from causeless and warrantless government searches.
So you don’t have a right to a cell phone, but I think you do have a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy, no warrants without probably cause, etc regarding it.
I think that there ought to be particular attention paid to the protection of things that become modern necessities. Many jobs require a cell phone and/or a car. Many social activities require or are much facilitated by those things. Saying that they aren’t strictly necessary is IMO unnecessarily creating a world where the tradeoffs between privacy and a normal functional life are too high.
I think we agree on that point. Im not sure, but I think we’re disagreeing about whether this is best done with bright-line rules and by carefully selecting our government, or just the latter.
I’m fine with bright line rules. There might actually be some bright line rules here, but we don’t know it.
I think secrecy is scary and worrisome, but I also think we need a certain amount of it. To me, data collection, as long no one is looking at anything but the “outside of the envelope”, is not a big problem as long as there are rules about what people can do with it, and people follow the rules. With a secret program, we really won’t know unless abuse comes to light.
That’s what people are worried about, and I admit that we all should be. What should we do about it though, is the question. There seem to be people in Congress on both sides (including people like Al Franken) who strongly support this program. To a certain extent, I’m willing to trust that the program has worked as they say, to save a lot of lives.
I do know one thing: no number of rules, laws, Constitutions, court rulings, etc., stopped Watergate, secret bombings, spying on Martin Luther King, Iran-Contra, Abu Ghraib, etc. People in government have a lot of power, and if they want to abuse it, they’ll find a way. Electing good people is a big part of the answer.
Having finally read all the comments, I’m not sure I have much to say that hasn’t already been said, and I think all of my original points stand.
The defenses seem to be (i) it’s legal under the PATRIOT act, so what are you complaining about?; and/or (ii) you should have known the government was doing this all along, so what are you complaining about?
At bottom, it seems to me that the, e.g., Verizon cell phone data collected by the NSA should be protected by the 4th Amendment. If it isn’t, then the Supreme Court has, for yet another Amendment, adopted a limited and crabbed interpretation of the 4th Amendment.
Sapient asks upthread how one can have a reasonable expectation of privacy in one’s location since people can look at you and report where you are. Well, one answer is that 99% or more of the people I pass on the street don’t know who I am, so there is privacy in anonymity.
Sure, police can follow me physically and track my movements, but that requires a significant expenditure of resources that would, in an ideal world, require some sort of cost/benefit analysis and a good reason.
In the Verizon case, neither of these things appears to be true. Sure, I might not take my cell phone with me, but I do 99% of the time. And the resource expenditure – at least in terms of human resources – appears marginal.
So, I would argue, that people do have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in that they do not expect the government to know who and where they are 99% of the time.
This report is not encouraging either (lying to Congress seems to be evidence of not being “good”).
Finally, I really don’t think it matters who Snowden is, his motivations, or that he’s currently in Hong Kong* (I guess if he was a well-known mass hoaxster then it might matter). It’s wholly irrelevant to the NSA issues at hand, and is only newsworthy because most leakers go to great lengths not to be caught and he’s jumping up and down saying “I did it!”
*Although it would have been terrific if was in Cuba doing interviews from their side of Guantanamo Bay.
I agree that financial or medical data could be misused by the government. I don’t share your feeling that location and call data pale in comparison, but I imagine that what seems important to protect varies quite a bit from person to person.
But, the government has a strong rationale for needing this data to do the tasks it has been assigned by the law. Even if you disagree with the law, I think that’s clear.
Yes, by the current leftish standard of the day, privacy gives way to governmental need, on which there seemingly is no limit other than cell phone location and what is physically inside one’s home or car. But, other than simply saying “gov’t needs your health and financial data to do its job” (which is the same rationale gov’t offers on the metatdata thing), no one has articulated why cell phone location is more of an imposition than the specific, enumerated data the gov’t already has on most of us. The current leftish view is a far cry from the civil libertarian view I grew up with. It’s transitioned from civil libertarian to lite to ultra-lite–95% less liberty.
McTex, you keep talking about medical data. What specific medical data do you think the federal government requires from individuals?
As for financial data, what specific data does the government currently require that you think it shouldn’t? If it bowed to your wishes, how would that affect its ability to ensure that taxes are paid?
no one has articulated why cell phone location is more of an imposition than the specific, enumerated data the gov’t already has on most of us.
OK, here goes.
The government has no need to know my location at all times. It has no need to know who I’m sleeping with. If it does get that information, it can harass or blackmail me.
On the other hand, if the government discovers that I have an Roth IRA with Vanguard, it actually needs to verify that to ensure that I’m paying my income taxes. If the government does get that knowledge, it…can’t really do anything with it besides verify that I’m not cheating on my taxes. I can’t be blackmailed with my IRA contributions (“Stop asking questions about the NSA or we’ll tell everyone that you…invest in INDEX FUNDS MWAHAHAHAHAHA”).
This is a bit late, but:
Turbulence: Google has a lot of data about me, but it doesn’t have a complete dossier of my locations.
It does if you have a smartphone linked to your Google account.
I got a Nexus 4 recently, and since I happen to rather like most of Google’s applications, I linked my account. About a week later I opened up my notifications and saw that Google had helpfully estimated my commute at about 20 minutes, accounting for traffic being heavier than usual.
Wait, my commute? I never told them where I work.
As it turns out, I didn’t have to. It has access to location data, and some algorithm at Google analyzed my movements throughout the day, noticed that I consistently spent about 9 or 10 hours in a particular location during the day, then drove (because it’s easy to get speed from either GPS or cell tower data) home at a given time.
It’s hardly any kind of analytic stretch, then, for it to guess that this location I spend most of the day in is my work, and what routes I use to commute.
It’s the first time I’ve actually been creeped out by this kind of thing, but I was equal parts impressed with the usefulness of it. I think I’m with David Brin when it comes to the so-called “transparent society”. This technology exists. It will be used. The question we face is not whether or not we will be watched, but who will have access to this technology and what oversight will exist.
The current leftish view is a far cry
McT, one more time. What I have written is not normative, it is descriptive. It’s like saying ‘that earthquake is an indication of leftish viewpoints’. I know some believe that hurricanes and tsunamis are the result of God having a bad day, but that’s not me. So attributing this to a leftish view, given that sapient is the only one who is ‘defending’ this, is that trick knee of yours twitching.
I’m saying you want your internet, you want your googlesearch, you want your amazon even though you are sincerely sad to wave goodbye to the local bookstore, you want a cellphone that can bring up your list of contacts immediately. You got it. This is the price you pay.
Big data doesn’t work well with arbitrary boundaries created by people who think you just say ‘oh, just don’t do it’, no matter how many rhetorical questions they ask. I said this is ‘natural’. I know it is hard to fathom, but ‘natural’ does not automatically mean good. It means that the set of circumstances that have arisen is an outgrowth of the previous set.
Ugh says that the resource expenditure of taking your phone is minimal, so there should be some sort of weighting, so that whatever is easy for you to do, it is actually much harder for the police to do. I’m appreciative for ugh starting an interesting thread, but I really don’t think things work like that.
Yes, by the current leftish standard of the day, privacy gives way to governmental need, on which there seemingly is no limit other than cell phone location and what is physically inside one’s home or car…. The current leftish view is a far cry from the civil libertarian view I grew up with.
Uh McT, you do know that Im not a fan of the idea that the NSA ought to have this data, right? Cos that’s what Ive been saying over and over again in the thread. See eg the 3rd, 4th, and 5th paragraphs of the comment which you were responding to.
My point is that the government needs *some* data to do its job (as set forth by Congress). And that this need to perform needs to be balanced against privacy concerns. And that the cell phone data here dont seem to have anything on the ‘need’ side other than ‘this would be a nice data set to have’. Whereas info on your income is pretty critical to establishing your income tax requirements.
Also, I would like to express my deepest regrets upon hearing of the head injury which rendered you incapable of recalling the *warrantless* phone record searches of the *non-leftist* Bush Administration and subsequent right-wing cheerleading on that subject.
Now, not every conservative applauded. But certainly enough did that the fairy tale of American Conservatism as civil liberties stronghold is pretty laughable. I was talking to DJ above about how cross-party issues tend to languish even when they seem to have significant support, and wondering if this might be because even supporters of eg civil liberties tend to cr@p all over people of the other persuasion who are agreeing with them without even thinking about it.
Case. Point. Set. Match. I am sad.
Ah, I think maybe you misunderstood my 2nd paragraph as referring to the cell phone data. Im referring (“this data”) to your other examples eg financial data.
On the one hand, I might not have phrased that clearly. OTOH, I think it’s pretty clear if you read the whole post…
Also
But, other than simply saying “gov’t needs your health and financial data to do its job” (which is the same rationale gov’t offers on the metatdata thing)
Well, yeah. And (almost) all criminals will maintain their innocence. Yet we can find some guilty and set others free by examining the specific merits of each case and forming judgments on those merits, rather than hoping to create a rule which can determine guilt or innocence without looking at the details.
That is, Im pretty sure that the case for the government knowing your income could be fleshed out a bit more than “gov’t needs your income data to do its job dont ask why just trust us”.
“McTex, you keep talking about medical data. What specific medical data do you think the federal government requires from individuals?
As for financial data, what specific data does the government currently require that you think it shouldn’t? If it bowed to your wishes, how would that affect its ability to ensure that taxes are paid?”
I think the medical data will be more of an issue in the future, as my initial comment makes clear. Under Obamacare, as it grows and *improves*, more and more substantive data will be in the gov’t database. Once I go on Medicare, all of my medical data will be in the gov’t database.
The above is an explanation. Also, either I am not being clear or you, and many others, are not tracking: we already have given up so much in the way of privacy that to complain because the feds could, if they wanted, find one of us by tracking our cell phone, seems pointless, too-little-too-late, etc.
Also, it isn’t just my personal tax reporting that provides data to the gov’t–it’s the reporting banks and other institutions are required to make regarding various transactions.
LJ and CW–way back when, the civil libertarians were on the left, with some encroachment on the middle, not the right. Way back when being the 60’s and 70’s. The pervasive data gathering and storage of today was not on the horizon. Personal, medical and financial privacy resonated a lot more on the left then than they do today.
CW, thanks for your sympathy re my head injury. When’s the eye surgery? I was comparing the left then and now, not the current left/right position-changing.
The pervasive data gathering and storage of today was not on the horizon. Personal, medical and financial privacy resonated a lot more
on the leftthen than they do today.Hope that helps.
I think the medical data will be more of an issue in the future, as my initial comment makes clear. Under Obamacare, as it grows and *improves*, more and more substantive data will be in the gov’t database.
Which specific provision of the PPACA requires that individuals provide PII data to the federal government? My concern here is that a lot times when people talk about the PPACA, they’re not actually familiar with what it requires or they heard a radio shock jock fabricate something about it. I’d like to make sure we’re talking about something real and not imaginary.
Once I go on Medicare, all of my medical data will be in the gov’t database.
I am so confused. Medicare is an insurance provider. That means that it pays healthcare providers. If it doesn’t keep a database, then it can’t pay doctors and hospitals. How could medicare possibly not have a giant database about who consumed what services when? Every insurance company in the world has that database.
we already have given up so much in the way of privacy that to complain because the feds could, if they wanted, find one of us by tracking our cell phone, seems pointless, too-little-too-late, etc.
I don’t really understand. Privacy is not a binary thing. Just because I decide to post my birthday pictures to facebook or use a credit card or carry a cell phone, you can’t just assume that I’ve surrendered all my privacy rights and I’m cool with you putting a camera in my bedroom so you can record my sex life.
Also, it isn’t just my personal tax reporting that provides data to the gov’t–it’s the reporting banks and other institutions are required to make regarding various transactions.
If the federal government doesn’t require banks to report on transactions, how it can ensure that tax laws are being followed? I mean, isn’t that data vitally important for stopping tax fraud? So, without it, how do you stop tax fraud?
You’re a smart guy so I know you’re not advocating a world where the government can’t enforce income tax laws, so what am I missing?
Unless you buy an XBone!
*badumptish*
Yes, by the current leftish standard of the day, privacy gives way to governmental need
WTF is leftish about any of this?
WTF have you, a self-confessed libertarian-ish conservative, ever freaking done about it?
Ever?
Unless I’m completely mistaken, I’ve put more time and effort into putting restraints on federal overreach as regards civil liberties than you or any other soi-disant conservative on this board. Or, with damned few exceptions, any conservative anywhere.
And anybody I know who has made any personal investment in these issues is at least as far to the left as I am.
I’m not seeing a lot of conservative @sses on the line when it comes to civil liberties. Cato will write a white paper now and then, other than that, nothing.
“Leftish”, my keister.
Talk is cheap.
I’m not seeing a lot of conservative @sses on the line when it comes to civil liberties
Then you aren’t looking. If you are right wing, or left wing, you don’t trust the government.
“We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk”.
That’s a conservative talking, by the way.
I’m seeing “moderates” (by which I mean people with delusions) defending the police state and people on the right and left are saying no, we should be free.
Lots of politicians on the right side of the aisle questioning this. Some of them want to take it to the supremes. Godspeed.
Speaking in broad terms I really don’t think the case can be made for equal concern about civil liberties from the left and the right. The right has more of a history of violating civil liberites or, at least, of support a status quo that allowed institutionalized violations, whereas the left has more of a history of defending and wexpanding civil rights. I mean in America, “left” and “right” in the context of our politics.
Examples:
Gay marriage rights.
Equal pay for equal work.
Voting rights.
Discrimination based on race, gender or sexual orientation
The political right does not have a good track record. Dislike of government from the right is an entirely different phenomenon than from the left. Dislike of government from the right is mostly resentment of restrictions on selfishness such as the hostility toward the BLM from ranchers who want overgraze their subsidized access to public land or crazy people who believe that they should be able to own any kind of weapon they want.
Even mainstream conservatives have been slow to support, defend or expand civil liberties. Barry Goldwater’s book was a defense of inaction on civil liberties, for example. Civil liberties which Goldwater enjoyed, of course.
Historically in times of great fear there has been very broad support for violations of civil rights, such as the internment of Japanese Americans. (But that episode is widely seen as a horrible mistake except by Michelle Malkin who wrote a psuedo-historical book justifying the internments).
“Dislike of government from the right is an entirely different phenomenon than from the left”
We divide and conquer.
We ranchers are legion. And we likes our howitzers.
“That’s a conservative talking, by the way.”
Says who? I don’t think “conservative” is what Paul would label himself. He may be right about Snowden’s and Greenwald’s views on the NSA, but let’s flesh out the rest of his platform regarding justice:
http://crooksandliars.com/kenneth-quinnell/ron-pauls-racism-isnt-worst-thing
Here’s the period in U.S. history Paul reveres (from Washington Monthly):
“The U.S. government between Lincoln and FDR engaged in a version of modern East Asian-style mercantilism, protecting American industrial corporations from import competition, while showering subsidies including land grants on railroad companies and using federal troops to crush protesting workers. This government-business mercantilism was anti-worker but it was hardly libertarian.
High tariffs to protect American companies in Tracinski’s alleged Golden Age of American libertarianism were joined by racist immigration restrictions that further boosted the incomes of white workers already boosted by de jure or de facto racial segregation. The 1790 Naturalization Act barred immigrants from becoming citizens unless they were “free white persons” and had to be amended by the 1870 Naturalization Act to bestow citizenship on former slaves of “African nativity” and “African descent.” Although the Supreme Court in 1898 ruled that the children of Asians born in the U.S. were citizens by birth, Tracinski’s libertarian utopia was characterized by increasingly restrictive immigration laws which curtailed first Asian immigration and then, after World War I, most European immigration.
Calvin Coolidge, the subject of a hero-worshiping new biography by the libertarian conservative Amity Shlaes, defended both high tariffs and restrictive immigration.”
For Paul, the NSA goes, but so does the Civil Rights Act.
He divides and conquers himself.
Eh, liberals manage to imagine they have a better track record on civil liberties than the right, in large part by refusing to admit any civil liberty they want to violate, (Freedom of political speech, 2nd amendment rights, economic liberty.) is actually a civil liberty.
Hence Strossen’s “not co-extensive” remarks: If she’d just meant to indicate that civil liberties weren’t limited to the Bill of Rights, she wouldn’t have said “co-extensive”. She used that term because she wanted to deny civil liberty status to right called out in the bill of rights.
“We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk”.
That’s a conservative talking, by the way.
Yes, and as mentioned above, talk is cheap.
When USA Patriot was being debated, there were a number of pundits on the libertarian tip who weighed in with their thoughtful concern about government overreach.
Much appreciated. Well done.
What I did not, ever, see was conservatives or libertarians or whatever showing up at the retail level.
I don’t see a lot of conservatives or libertarians or whatever getting up off of their @sses to make anything change.
Instead of being “thankful” for folks who put something at risk to make things change, your guy should actually go be one of those people.
Then, FWIW, my opinion would be different.
Given Paul’s views expressed in his “newsletters” on race, Jews, and AIDS, to mention three subjects, I suspect the NSA is the ONLY U.S. Government agency Paul would keep intact should he in fact divide and conquer, with Tighty Whitey as his Vice President, if only to protect the two of them from the rest of us.
I do welcome though, cause I like the drama, Paul’s view that the U.S. Government could possibly kill Snowden with a drone.
For the time being that is as likely as me sitting down in his son’s chair for a root canal.
I could be wrong, though.
I often am.
My impression is that some rightwingers and libertarians are sincere about civil liberties, even if they have positions on other subjects I don’t care for very much. They might not do any personal protesting–I don’t know. The late William Safire, who I despised (not too strong a word) was a very staunch proponent of civil liberties.
And quite a few liberals have been staunch defenders of the national security state, at least when Democrats are in charge.
On the current issue, as I think some have pointed out and as a couple of the writers in my links have pointed out, the danger (at least at present) is not to ordinary people–the danger is to investigative journalists and their sources, protestors, people like that. As for having good people in office, programs that are bound to effect all of us ought to be debated in public and there shouldn’t be secret courts deciding such issues. Of course since Obama welcomes open debate, I’m sure he’s entirely in favor of this and will pardon Snowden as someone who merely did what had to be done in the currently Stasi-like environment.
“Historically in times of great fear there has been very broad support for violations of civil rights, such as the internment of Japanese Americans. (But that episode is widely seen as a horrible mistake except by Michelle Malkin ”
That is to say, when it counts you can expect many liberals to be on the wrong side and recognition that we went too far usually comes much later. So FDR and Earl Warren get the blame for the internment camps. I agree though that in the US it is usually some crackpot on the right like Malkin who will still defend some terrible wrong generations after most people have recognized it was wrong.
I don’t really understand.
Yep.
WTF is leftish about any of this?
Getting all worked up over national security-driven privacy incursions and yawning at domestically-driven incursions. And, to round it out, failing to see how the domestic incursions are far more intrusive, pervasive and *permanent* than the national security incursions.
Once you given up most of your privacy for reasons you approve (“yes, have your way with my prostate, so long as your reasoning aligns with mine”), complaining that some further encroachment is just wrong, wrong, wrong and could lead to abuse, abuse, abuse, seems both overwrought and too little, too late. The gov’t already has what it needs to abuse the living sh*t out of some or all of its citizens. It makes no sense, none whatsoever, to worry that the gov’t will use cell phone metatdata oppressively, but will play nice with everything it gathered for domestic welfare or taxation purposes. It’s all the same freaking gov’t, for crying out loud.
WTF have you, a self-confessed libertarian-ish conservative, ever freaking done about it?
Ever?
Depends on what you mean by “it”. I left the Republican Party some years ago because of its corruption and stupid playing to the religious base. I gave more than folding money to a Democratic candidate for governor in a forlorn hope of unseating Rick Perry. I argue, in very conservative milieu’s, for what seems like moderation, at least to me. But, mostly, I show up here from time to time to introduce balance, powerful insight, profound depth and a subtle humor that knows no equal.
yawning at domestically-driven incursions
explain, please.
“I show up here from time to time to introduce balance, powerful insight, profound depth and a subtle humor that knows no equal.”
Oh, so you’re against equality too? %/ (say in Curly Howard’s voice for … something.)
‘(“yes, have your way with my prostate, so long as your reasoning aligns with mine”)’
As long as the government changes it’s rubber glove between your checkup and mine, my views, mt chakras, and my suspension are properly aligned.
I’ve been told to relax during my domestically-driven prostate incursions, (even asked what I wanted for Christmas in the second before said incursion) but yawning seems a little too nonchalant even for me.
Now, if the government says “Say AHHH”, that’s a different story.
Unless they say “Say SHOCK and AHHHH”, and then I’ll become a Paultard.
I think that, when you are talking about braod swaths of people, lots of countradictory things can be true at one time. However, there are also discernable patterns.
It’s the lefties (in America) who advocate for the expansion of human rights first, before such advocacy becomes respectable. They are the ones who go through a period, often decades, of being marginalized and disrespected for beig ahead of the curve on an issue, whether it is voting rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, whatever.
Meanwhile it is he conservatives who are defending the status quo against expansion of human rights.
The arc of our history has been the the gradual expansion of rights. The conservatives usually come around, adjust to one expansion, while resisting the next one.
Barry Goldwater is the classic example. He was all,”I’m not a racist, but my very important political philosophy doesn’t allow the government to protect the rights of its own citizens, except in the case of citizens like me who already have the rights.”
Then, a couple of decades later, he acknowledged that he had been mistaken in the application of his philosophy back when he wrote his book.
That’s the BROAD pattern. Individuals within that pattern vary and exterme circumstances cause big variations in the overall pattern.
That’s the pattern with active, positive rights like the right to vote or the right to eat in a restaurant.
This issue is a more paasive one: privacy, which I guess you could call the right to say ordinary innocent things without being checked up on in case the remarks aren’t ordinary or innocent.
In other words, people can still chat about cats and family on Facebook all they want. No one is stopping them. Bujt some people don’t like th epossiblity that someone somewhere has checked and discovered that they are chatting about cats and family and decided that they aren’t a terrorist and moved on to check on someone else. There is resentment of that checking on activity. Where will it stop? How far will it go?
Screens on the walls in houses such as Winston’s?
It’s a shitty feeling even if one doesn’t wish to plot a crime.
It’s another incremental step.
The spyig can be rationalized as not different than checkig suitcases on an air plane. What does it matter is some guy sees your underwear and the novel you packed for later? Flying somewhere is a choice as is using a phone, sending emails or posting o Facebook.
On the other hand, it’s the federal government checking up on people, the vast majority of whom are just miding their own business and not doing anything.
Point is the spying (which I oppose, BTW) is wrong (in my opinion) but it is a different kind of violation of human rights than blocking certain catagories of people from access to thigs )like voting) to which every American is supposed to have access.
Hence the lack of a clear left/right divide on the issue. Well, that and the fear experience backdrop behid the discussion.
Besides too some extent Cleek’s rule is in play. Sensenburger, one of the consigners, is claiiming that the Obama administration “over stepped” by doing what his law allowed!
‘Besides too some extent Cleek’s rule is in play. Sensenburger, one of the consigners, is claiiming that the Obama administration “over stepped” by doing what his law allowed!’
Sensenburger and some others hope to hit the mother lode here with Snowden in GITMO awaiting execution and Barack Hussein Obama in the docket for impeachment.
explain, please
Ok, one more time:
1. If you are on Medicare or Medicaid, everything about you is part of the federal data bank. Yes, this is an unavoidable consequence of the feds paying for someone’s healthcare, but the data is still in federal hands.
2. If you file an itemized income tax return, have investment or business income, or have a business, the reporting is quite detailed. If you are audited, you have to disclose where and how you spend/donate your money. Yes, this is a necessary adjunct to effectively collecting taxes, but the data–all highly personal and otherwise private–is in federal hands.
3. If you have a relative, as we do, who works for a regulated accounting firm, you have to report to your relative, who in turn reports to the federal gov’t, every stock, bond, mutual fund or other publicly traded security you own.
4. If you withdraw 10K or more in cash from your bank account, the feds are notified.
5. No one, other than Turb, understands Obamacare. As it ‘improves’ over time, with further regulatory guidance, the likelihood that the feds will need more and more hard medical data “to effectively manage costs seems inevitable”. I can’t prove that, but given past history in other contexts, this seems a logical outcome.
The above is not an exhaustive list by any means. The left is perfectly fine, along with many other folks, with this data being in federal hands. My point, which I have now repeated more times than I can count, is why would the left worry about cell phone metadata when it has already consented to far more detailed and very personal data being in federal hands. If the feds are going to misuse something to harm a citizen, they already have all that they need and then some.
Oh, so you’re against equality too?
No, I’m completely in favor it. I wish everyone was my equal.
As long as the government changes it’s rubber glove between your checkup and mine
Given the sequestration and the need to recycle, my faint hope is that I can be first in line.
It’s the lefties (in America) who advocate for the expansion of human rights first, before such advocacy becomes respectable.
All too often, what is a ‘human right’ on the left carries a price tag that results in other, less-individual sensitive policies.
Some Ron Paul out takes from Wikipedia (he’s all over the place):
Ron Paul on telemarketers:
‘Paul was one of only eight members of the entire Congress who voted to block implementation of the National Do Not Call Registry act, which prohibits telemarketers from telephoning those who have opted out of receiving such advertising.[84][85] He argued that “legislation to regulate telemarketing would allow the government to intrude further into our lives,” and that “The fact that the privately run Direct Marketing Association is operating its own ‘do-not-call’ list is evidence that consumers need not rely upon the national government to address the problems associated with telemarketers.’
Instead, elect Countme-In President and I’ll turn the NSA’s sights away from Americans and on to telemarketers.
Ron Paul on Spam:
‘He was the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against an anti-spam email bill in 2000,[100] and one of only 5 members of the entire Congress to vote against a subsequent anti-spam email bill in 2003.[101]’
See Countme -In’s previous campaign platform plank.
Ron Paul on sexual harassment in the workplace:
‘In his 1987 book, Freedom Under Siege, Paul expressed the view that those who experience sexual harassment in the work force should remedy the situation by quitting their jobs. He further argued that governmental oversight is warranted only where victims are physically forced into sexual actions.[citation needed]’
‘Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity. Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser cannot be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem? Seeking protection under civil rights legislation is hardly acceptable.[137]
Now, to Paul’s credit he wants to leave (anti-) sodomy laws to the States and calls them ridiculous, but even he likes to have a little wiggle room, especially in the workplace.
I suspect Paul would be O.K with each State having its own NSA domestic spying agency if they wanted it.
Yes, this is an unavoidable consequence of the feds paying for someone’s healthcare, but the data is still in federal hands.
This has been true for decades, but you’re blaming it on the PPACA. McTex, I think you should have the courage of your convictions: either stand up and say Medicare is wrong and we should abolish it, or stop complaining that Medicare exists as an insurance system. But trying to have it both ways ‘Medicare is fine, but how dare they pay doctors money using a database’ is just disingenuous.
Regarding whether civil rights are better supported on the right or the left, I won’t speak to the general case, but in this case…
I think right/left isn’t the best way to analyse it. I think authoritarian/non-authoritarian is a better frame. The most fevered defender of the NSA spying is sapient, who is nominally on the left. If you look back at sapient and Slarti’s exchange over whether we should just blindly trust the nice government men because of their inherent goodness or whether we’re supposed to be a nation of laws, they’re talking right past each other. Slarti’s question about being a government of laws and not men is a classic challenge to authoritarians and it is one that doesn’t really make sense in their worldview, hence why sapient starts randomly insulting Slarti for no apparent reason even though Slarti was far from the most critical.
I believe that psychological research shows that authoritarian tendencies are much more common on the right than the left though. No doubt there’s also a partisan angle here.
why would the left worry about cell phone metadata when it has already consented to far more detailed and very personal data being in federal hands.
Because private communications are considered to be protected by the 4th Amendment.
Also, regarding Medicare, I’m not sure there’s an issue here. Every Medicare subscriber has the option of enrolling in Medicare Advantage! where a private insurance company takes Medicare’s money and does the actual insurance work. Join that and your personal medical data won’t be in Medicare’s database I think. Unfortunately, since Medicare Advantage is much more expensive than Medicare, keeping it around is kind of stupid, but if you want to waste vast sums of government money, by all means, go ahead.
The left is perfectly fine, along with many other folks, with this data being in federal hands. My point, which I have now repeated more times than I can count, is why would the left worry about cell phone metadata when it has already consented to far more detailed and very personal data being in federal hands. If the feds are going to misuse something to harm a citizen, they already have all that they need and then some.
the idea that this is a right/left issue seems truly absurd, IMO. it’s a trust/distrust of authority/govt split, not a left/right split.
but, i basically agree with the notion that the govt already has more than enough info, or can get it easily enough, to do whatever it wants – in addition to having more than enough coercive force that it can do what it wants regardless – and so adding phone records to the mix doesn’t change anything.
but, i am slowly pulling away from my “don’t care” position, to something more like “ok it’s probably legal, but they really should have asked, first”.
with taxes, financial info, and health records, all the legislation happened in full public view (yes, even Obamacare. it’s your own fault if you didn’t read it; the text was right there for you to read at any time), and we’ve all essentially consented to it, and we can look at it, study it, evaluate it, and lobby for its modification, any time we want. this NSA stuff happened in the dark.
to me, that’s the difference.
adding: by “left/right split” i mean liberal vs conservative, not Dem vs Rep. as Laura and Turb note, there are also partisan issues here; but partisanship is not ideology.
The most fevered defender of the NSA spying is sapient, who is nominally on the left.
I guess you don’t really read what I write. But that’s okay, because I suppose I serve as some sort of foil to the personalities here.
As I’ve stated, I enjoy privacy, am concerned about the potential for abuse of information, etc. I’m just not like many of the left’s-version-of-teaparty types who would love to strip government of any ability to defend the United States. Some people seem to believe that terrorism isn’t enough of a problem to wage a drone war. Okay, fine. Then it’s not enough of a problem to use metadata to ferret out terrorist plots. Okay. We’re left with following people around on foot?
Maybe terrorism isn’t a threat at all. But if it is, we need to decide what we’re willing to do to prevent it. As long as it’s “outside of the envelope” spying, I’m not all that outraged. Does that make me an authoritarian?
As to spying on actual content of communications, I’m against it. That said, if any service provider’s IT guy can spy on my conversations, or if my emails can accidentally (or on purpose) be forwarded to a large mailing list, or if hackers (who pretty routinely get into secured sites) can and do steal my information, and if marketers can use it in ways that I haven’t even imagined, I’m not going to pretend that when I write an email to someone, it’s a highly classified document. Sure, I have a “4th Amendment right”, but do I really have privacy?
Of course, according to Turbulence, trusting government more than I trust Google makes me an authoritarian. Is that because Google has the almighty dollar as its raison d’etre?
When’s the eye surgery? I was comparing the left then and now, not the current left/right position-changing.
On re-reading, I still don’t see praise for the left of yesterday. Maybe it was just too painful to put “the left used to be awesome” into words so I was left (ba-da-bump) to infer it.
Once you given up most of your privacy for reasons you approve (“yes, have your way with my prostate, so long as your reasoning aligns with mine”), complaining that some further encroachment is just wrong, wrong, wrong and could lead to abuse, abuse, abuse, seems both overwrought and too little, too late.
First, as already pointed out, my privacy is mine to do with as I choose. If I choose to give up a privacy that you hold dear that does not mean I’ve given up other rights to privacy. This is starting to get weirdly like a she-was-asking-for-it rape defense- if I don’t wear a McT-approved privacy policy then I don’t deserve protection. Seriously, when did it become “I will defend to the death your right to say *exacty what I say* and nothing else.”
Second, my objection- clearly stated above- is that the cell phone data does not appear to me to balance against any government need. It balances against a government want, and not even a particularly compelling one, about looking for suspicious patterns.
You say If you are on Medicare or Medicaid, everything about you is part of the federal data bank. Yes, this is an unavoidable consequence of the feds paying for someone’s healthcare, but the data is still in federal hands– that is precisely the point. The program can’t exist without that data being in government hands. Objecting to that data being in government hands is really a proxy for objecting to the program itself- one either thinks it is a good program (including the data collection) or not (including the data collection). There is no halfway of liking the existent of federal income tax but not federal collection of income data. There is no way for the feds to collect import duties without tracking what’s being imported by whom.
So if you object- on a case by case basis- with a particular program including its data gathering requirements, fine. If you object to a particular balancing of need versus privacy, fine. This blanket ‘if the government has data X then there’s no point in protecting data Y’ isn’t balancing, it’s an attack on Medicare and the income tax that won’t admit what it is.
[Although I have to admit, this is a weird forum to attack Medicare. If the cell phone data collection is bad seems like you could just say so, rather than taking me agreeing with that as a way of attacking my support for Medicare.]
It makes no sense, none whatsoever, to worry that the gov’t will use cell phone metatdata oppressively, but will play nice with everything it gathered for domestic welfare or taxation purposes.
Oh, I *worry* about it. I want to see structures in place to prevent it’s abuse. I want any abuse (eg the IRS thing) investigated fully, punishments handed down, and fixes put in place to prevent further abuse.
But I can’t pretend that the one can be done without the other. On the whole, I favor the existence of Medicare and the income tax. Unless you are an extreme libertarian, you favor the government having some data and therefore balancing some privacy concerns against government need. It’s just a question of where the balance lies. Claiming that those who disagree about a particular balance don’t care about privacy and don’t deserve privacy and don’t even deserve to ask questions about privacy is bizarre.
No one, other than Turb, understands Obamacare. As it ‘improves’ over time, with further regulatory guidance, the likelihood that the feds will need more and more hard medical data “to effectively manage costs seems inevitable”.
And no one, other than McT, can fortell the future so accurately; Id say let’s limit debate to the past and the present. If we were debating the future of healthcare that’d be one thing, but here we have plenty of examples of balancing etc in the present, there’s no reason to make a prediction and then an argument based on that prediction given those examples.
I would tend to think that it’s because one of them is capital-A Authority, while the other one is just Google.
‘m just not like many of the left’s-version-of-teaparty types who would love to strip government of any ability to defend the United States.
I’m fine with government getting whatever data they want in a criminal or terrorism investigation. I just think that the 4A requires some kind of specificity. So I don’t think they can say “please Mr. Telco, give us all data on everyone right now forever”. I’m OK if they say “here’s an NSL that requires you to give us all data on user XYZ” without a court order.
if any service provider’s IT guy can spy on my conversations, or if my emails can accidentally (or on purpose) be forwarded to a large mailing list, or if hackers (who pretty routinely get into secured sites) can and do steal my information
PII data at google I know is encrypted so ‘IT guys’ don’t have access to it. Moreover, successful “hacker” breaches of google/facebook are not exactly common. I know of only one successful breach that allowed access to PII. Do you know how those “hackers” compromised the system? They exploited a system used by the NSA for gaining access to private data for lawful intercepts. Oops.
There’s a huge risk to requiring companies to build systems that are easy to tap for law enforcement (hi CALEA). It forces them to build systems where authorization must be easily circumventable. Maybe that’s a tradeoff that we must accept, but we should do so knowingly. It is a lot easier to build something secure and robust if you don’t have to comply with CALEA and friends.
trusting government more than I trust Google makes me an authoritarian.
No, you’re an authoritarian because you’re unwilling to hold the government accountable for violating the 4A. And also for defending the Obama administration no matter what they do.
I would tend to think that it’s because one of them is capital-A Authority, while the other one is just Google.
The government’s authority depends on what the citizenry gives it. My vote as to what Google does depends on my number of shares. (Not that I’m a Google hater, mind you.)
Im entirely cool with the FISA court (although I wouldnt mind seeing modifications to the process). I object to a ‘warrant’ that gathers data for the entire population, with warrants serially extending the collection indefinitely in time.
If we had a case where the NSA asked for and received all of the call records for, say, Boston around, say, the marathon bombing, Id think that was fine. Just as Im fine with flat-out tapping/tracking/etc individuals or groups where there are specific suspicions.
So I don’t think this is the debate at all- it isn’t about whether the government should be able to use cell phone records to pursue terrorism. It’s about whether they should be able to have all of the cell phone records so they can look through them for patterns.
There could totally be some national security value to that. But it seems to me to be way too far into the speculative return for a concrete invasion of privacy, and I don’t see the line between that and having the government mine for keywords in voice traffic or emails, or looking through one’s house or car (ie speculative search with possible national security value).
Maybe terrorism isn’t a threat at all. But if it is, we need to decide what we’re willing to do to prevent it. As long as it’s “outside of the envelope” spying, I’m not all that outraged.
I wouldn’t call it ‘outside of the envelope’ if it tells you where I am 24/7 (unless I take precautions, which as Ive said above I dont think ‘rights’ and ‘forced to take unusual precautions’ are compatible). Maybe the envelope analogy is just too far from the facts on the ground to be useful here- we are in novel territory, and Im sympathetic to debate about exactly where we should land even if Ive already got my own positions.
They exploited a system used by the NSA for gaining access to private data for lawful intercepts. Oops.
Okay, this is definitely worth worrying about – the security of NSA data. So, common ground!
And I don’t defend the Obama administration no matter what they do. I happen to agree with Obama’s foreign policy. And I do believe that some secrecy in government is necessary, despite the fact that it presents problems. I think that discussing specific ways in which the government can provide accountability despite the need for some secrecy would be a more productive conversation than complaining about entire programs (ones that are unlikely to go away).
As to “holding the government accountable for violating the 4th Amendment”: I believe in the judicial system. Oh, but that would be government, making me an authoritarian.
I believe that psychological research shows that authoritarian tendencies are much more common on the right than the left though.
Well that settles that. Which explains the ‘small gov’t’ bent of many conservatives. It all fits perfectly.
Because private communications are considered to be protected by the 4th Amendment.
The 4th protects us in our person, papers and home. Certainly, communications are a subset, but so is everything else I’ve listed. Another “but”, as Cleek (and only Cleek) acknowledges, getting bent out of shape over the threat of gov’t oppression because of the metadata issue is pretty pointless since the gov’t already has more than enough on us to do whatever it will anyway.
and we’ve all essentially consented to it, and we can look at it, study it, evaluate it, and lobby for its modification, any time we want.
This may be a bit of an overstatement.
Eh, liberals manage to imagine they have a better track record on civil liberties than the right, in large part by refusing to admit any civil liberty they want to violate, (Freedom of political speech, 2nd amendment rights, economic liberty.) is actually a civil liberty.
Eh, there’s a vast difference between good-faith individuals choosing different points of balance between competing rights and outright attempts to dismiss or violate rights. Or, I imagine that there is. From previous conversations, iirc you imagine that there is only one way to view these matters (ie your way) and other ways are bad faith attempts at corrupting the Constitution.
Ah, sweet economic liberty. For the days of the Lochner Court, before the third tablet of the Bill of Rights was lost and with it the fabled “right to contract”.
On re-reading, I still don’t see praise for the left of yesterday. Maybe it was just too painful to put “the left used to be awesome” into words so I was left (ba-da-bump) to infer it.
In the day, the left was synonymous with civil rights and civil liberties–they got some things right and some things wrong. The left was no more awesome than the right. I very seldom praise either side.
And no one, other than McT, can fortell the future so accurately;
I will concede this point.
Id say let’s limit debate to the past and the present.
Ok, then let’s quit worrying about the gov’t misusing metadata until someone gets hurt.
Eh, there’s a vast difference between good-faith individuals choosing different points of balance between competing rights and outright attempts to dismiss or violate rights.
Yes, there is. The left acts in good faith, the right does not. Or, the right acts in good faith and the left does not. *Good faith* is purely in the eye of the beholder. I rarely see concessions, here or elsewhere, of good faith being imputed by one side to the other.
“The government’s authority depends on what the citizenry gives it”
Which is why we have the Bill of Rights, or so I remember from my junior high school history lessons. Just the other day I read a story about horrible conditions in Mississippi prisons, but I guess it’s fine, since the local citizenry gave Mississippi its authority.
“Which explains the ‘small gov’t’ bent of many conservatives. ”
I don’t want to lump all conservatives into a pile–some years ago there was a website that classified people on a two dimensional political scale. It was left/right, and authoritarian/libertarian. It made a lot of sense to me. I was pretty far on the left/libertarian corner. It’d be interesting to see the distribution of Americans on such a map.
But now for the half-serious, half snarky comment. I grew up down South–we moved there right after the end of Jim Crow and I know why at least some conservatives down there favored local government. Which is not to say that’s the reason all small government conservatives favor it, but there’s a certain historical background here.
Ok, then let’s quit worrying about the gov’t misusing metadata until someone gets hurt.
Um, the Director of National Intelligence just straight up and lied while testifying under oath to Congress. Isn’t that a problem?
As James Risen pointed out, NSA officials apparently have no internal controls that stop them from looking up data on whomever they want whenever they want:
You know, if you’re married to an abusive spouse who works for the NSA, or whose friends work for the NSA, it seems to me that you can’t ever leave them. If you do, they’ll just look up all your metadata and continue harassing you. They always know where you are. No one at google has anything like that power. But I guess it is OK because Medicare records when people get surgery.
I grew up down South–we moved there right after the end of Jim Crow and I know why at least some conservatives down there favored local government.
I did too and I live in Houston TX today. The feds were right, the SCT was right, and while some would use the guise of limited gov’t to turn back the clock, the concept of limited gov’t is, for me and many others, completely divorced from your implication.
Um, the Director of National Intelligence just straight up and lied while testifying under oath to Congress. Isn’t that a problem?
Of course it is, but that is not the same as someone being hurt by the gov’t exploiting its powers–it’s just lying. We’ve seen a lot of that over the years.
As James Risen pointed out, NSA officials apparently have no internal controls that stop them from looking up data on whomever they want whenever they want:
Which is different from the *gov’t* oppressing its citizens. As for ‘controls’–good luck there. Because, as we all know, if something is against the law, or violates internal policy, everyone will fall into line and behave themselves.
But I guess it is OK because Medicare records when people get surgery.
If there is a point here, I’m missing it, but to take Risen’s observation to its next level: improperly accessing someone’s mental health records, as one example, might be problematic, don’t you think?
Turb, you are moving the goal posts. I was addressing ‘data and the gov’t’s ability to exploit/oppress’. Individual bad actors are a different topic.
See, I took the statement that you responded to as sarcasm, Turbulence, but that has since been contradicted by the source, himself.
There’s a lesson here about assuming intent and going with it, not that I’m likely to remember that lesson for long.
IANAL but…
Wouldn’t Clapper have another defense? A felony requires intent. To commit perjury, you would need to intend to convey false information. Clapper knew that Wyden and the Congress knew that the NSA was indeed spying on the US. He could reasonably claim that the parties to whom he was testifying could not conceivably be deceived by what he said.
Personally, I think Wyden was a prick about this. If he wanted the program revealed he could give a speech on the senate floor revealing it. He’d be immune from prosecution. There would be nothing but PR consequences for him. Instead, he wanted Clapper to disclose it, knowing he’d lose his job and possibly go to prison.
I think that Clapper should have been smart enough to outwit Wyden, but obviously telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth wasn’t an option. I don’t have any stake in Clapper’s career, but whatever – it was a cowardly game being played by Wyden.
[…]
The debate involves a plan by the Department of Health and Human Services to amend a federal privacy rule. The amendment would expressly allow state mental-health authorities to transmit records of anyone who has been declared mentally unfit by a court or other authority to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The proposal is aimed at easing reluctance to supply such records among authorities in states that haven’t specifically allowed it, as well as clarifying that the related federal privacy law doesn’t interfere with the production of mental-health information in states that have.
[…]
Medical Groups Push Back at Gun-Law Change
but so is everything else I’ve listed
Some is, but much of what you’ve listed are things that you voluntarily disclose.
Participation in Medicare, for instance, is not mandatory, nor is it achieved without your knowledge and permission.
And, as cleek so aptly notes, none of the things you mention operate in secrecy.
So yeah, I find it a big PITA to negotiate the paperwork and record-keeping associated with taxes etc., but I don’t consider it to be an overreaching invasion of privacy or my civil rights, because it happens in the light of day.
And, I require that the same openness, accountability, and oversight that I call for to be applied to the NSA programs, be applied to the things you mention as well. And, in general, they are, and when they’re not I resist that.
And speaking of deceiving, Turbulence, the quote from the James Risen interview you linked to was referring to the NSA in 2005, prior to the amendments to the law that allowed the NSA to engage in the programs at issue here.
As for ‘controls’–good luck there. Because, as we all know, if something is against the law, or violates internal policy, everyone will fall into line and behave themselves.
I think you don’t understand what professional systems for dealing with PII data look like. In those systems, all data is encrypted and no one can access decrypted data except under special circumstances. Typically, no one has full access; people are only given access to small pieces for limited amounts of time. So, a technician would get access to user XYZ’s data while fielding a service request from user XYZ. And that technician would have to explain to their superiors exactly why they were doing it. User XYZ’s service request would be correlated with the technician’s access request. If the tech requested access to PII data without being able to justify it, he’d get fired. Getting access to larger sets of PII data is doable but requires increasing levels of managerial approval. So, in a critical incident, if you needed it, maybe you could get access to all PII data for a short period of time, but you’d need half a dozen different VPs to personally approve it, and they’d all be sitting in your office watching you work because they’re personally responsible.
That’s what a professional system looks like. It is a system where every single PII data access has to be logged and approved, where data grants are time limited and very narrow and audited constantly, where managers get fired if their subordinates circumvent the rules.
A system where operators just randomly start looking through their girlfriends’ emails is not a professional system. It is a joke. Why are we tolerating this joke? Shouldn’t the NSA have internal controls at least as good as google’s?
Of course we don’t know how the government is misusing this data. We only found out that the government HAS this data last week. And telling us what misuse has occurred is a felony.
If there is a point here, I’m missing it, but to take Risen’s observation to its next level: improperly accessing someone’s mental health records, as one example, might be problematic, don’t you think?
Of course it is. But let’s be clear about this. Medicare records that you visited a psychiatrist on the following occasions and paid him X dollars. That’s the only data they have. It is protected legally by HIPPA which mandates certain standards. The NSA doesn’t have to comply with any damn standards at all. What’s more, there haven’t exactly been a ton of HIPPA violations, but when there, the FBI springs into action.
I tell you what McTex. I’ll be satisfied with the NSA’s internal controls once they become HIPPA compliant, including having an external auditor to verify compliance and huge penalties for violating it.
Individual bad actors are a different topic.
If the system gives individual actors unrestricted access, how can you possibly hope to limit “gov’t’s ability to exploit/oppress”?
the quote from the James Risen interview you linked to was referring to the NSA in 2005, prior to the amendments to the law that allowed the NSA to engage in the programs at issue here.
Why should we believe the NSA has become more professional in the interim?
A system where operators just randomly start looking through their girlfriends’ emails is not a professional system. It is a joke. Why are we tolerating this joke? Shouldn’t the NSA have internal controls at least as good as google’s?
Yes, it should. Emphatically.
I’m not sure that it doesn’t though. We have the report of some people who were talking about the program that existed in 2005.
Why should we believe the NSA has become more professional in the interim?
Because we’ve had amendments in the law (bringing the program within the law, for example) and a different Executive department.
Ok, then let’s quit worrying about the gov’t misusing metadata until someone gets hurt.
The point was that you were making predictions and then arguing based on those predictions. Sometimes this is necessary. I don’t see the point when you’ve got plenty of actual programs that you object to- let’s just debate those, rather than debating about where healthcare legislation must be headed and only after reaching agreement (ie never, with this crowd 🙂 ) then debating the privacy concerns. If we didn’t have any real-world examples maybe we’d need to invent hypotheticals, but why borrow trouble?
Whereas I think we can already demonstrate government misuse of private data, both venial and mortal, both legal and illegal. Or are you saying that we need to wait until they misuse a particular piece of data before objecting to them having that particular piece of data? If so, do you really think that this is exactly like waiting to hear the outlines of a policy proposal before deciding about its privacy implications?
The left acts in good faith, the right does not. Or, the right acts in good faith and the left does not. *Good faith* is purely in the eye of the beholder. I rarely see concessions, here or elsewhere, of good faith being imputed by one side to the other.
Yeah, there’s some of that. But not all of the time. Ive said that I agree you may have more concerns about sharing health or financial data than I do- where I see the location data as much worse, you see the health and financial data as worse (from a privacy protection perspective) afaict. I think Im accepting your belief on that point in good faith rather than asking you to validate your feelings on the matter.
Heck, I even take some of Brett’s positions on the Constitution as his good faith beliefs- but in my experience, Brett believes in one Holy Constitutional Interpretation and that other interpretations are bad faith. I dont get a lot of use out of discussing that, but I do tend to point it out when our mutual discussions touch on matters of interpretation. Maybe just as a deterrent to the otherwise-inevitable accusation (eg how liberals dont *really* support civil liberties because we don’t agree with everything Brett thinks about the Constitution).
But pretty much the same NSA, with exactly the same transparency.
So. Are you thinking that Obama, personally, micro-manages the NSA?
Does sapient know who the current director of the NSA is, and who appointed him?
I wonders.
To encapsulate much of my past and future disagreements with sapient:
I do not share your optimism.
Because we’ve had amendments in the law (bringing the program within the law, for example)
Which of those amendments mandated internal technical controls? Can you please cite them?
Which of those amendments mandated internal technical controls? Can you please cite them?
No, I cannot please cite them. Most of the program is secret. Most issues such as imposing internal technical control are regulatory, and probably secret.
I stated my qualified worry about secrecy. Perhaps you’d like to write your Congressman stating your concern about “internal technical controls”. That would be one very constructive thing you could do to further your own goals without eliminating the program. Good for you for thinking of it! Bad on you for not figuring out that you could be helpful, rather than just a scold.
Your concerns are, perhaps, valid. Make them known. Be a friend. Be a partner. Improve government by suggesting better ways to do things.
slart: so happy to know that wielding empty criticism against my comments has become your life’s work! Everyone needs something to do.
Reading comprehension: sapient does not have it.
Discerning what Slartibartfast means by what he utters: not worth the effort.
I’m so freaking glad that some blogs attempt intellectual curiosity and inquiry into facts.
Greenwald is, perhaps, unreliable. Who’d ‘ve thunk.
So, um, who has been dishonest?
If you look closely, you can see that almost none of the discussion here has been about PRISM. I assume most people realized that PRISM wasn’t covering a large number of people because it was so small ($20million/year). Discovering that Greenwald oversold the PRISM story doesn’t undermine any of our discussion here I should think.
So, um, who has been dishonest?
Did I accuse anyone of dishonestly? No, I didn’t. I think that people here engage in a collective freakout. “They’re reading everyone’s emails!!!!” Not dishonest. Just maybe wrong.
Or maybe not. After all, just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get us.
Let’s farm out the NSA’s snooping activities to TransCanada Corp.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/it-depends-on-what-meaning-of-terrorist.html
But, don’t tell anyone:
“From Newt Gingrich, explaining to Greta Van Susteren why Edward Snowden’s leaks have been so harmful:
‘What Snowden did was very damaging at one level because there are a lot of things a democracy can do to protect itself, as long as they’re genuinely secret. And people will tolerate it as long as it’s genuinely secret.’ ”
via Kevin Drum
I could have sworn I posted something today, but it’s not there.
Anyway, I’ll repeat it. Barton Gellman (the Washington Post reporter) said this–
“One top-secret document obtained by The Post described it as “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
Intelligence community sources said that this description, although inaccurate from a technical perspective, matches the experience of analysts at the NSA. From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may “task” the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff.”
I don’t know if that makes sense or not.
Sapient seems to be quoting someone who said “they’re reading all our emails”, but I don’t recall anyone saying that. Instead, we’ve been talking about how they collect data on who we call on our phones. I haven’t seen any indication that this is incorrect.
Instead, we’ve been talking about how they collect data on who we call on our phones. I haven’t seen any indication that this is incorrect.
No, some of us have been talking about content of emails. Turbulence was talking about people reading girlfriends’ emails. russell was talking about people not bothering to read his emails, but worried that other people’s emails were being read. Etc. It’s been a long thread.
You’re right, sapient, I just went back and looked. And you didn’t seem to have a problem with it if the Obama Administration was reading emails. So if they’re not, does that mean they should be?
russell was talking about people not bothering to read his emails, but worried that other people’s emails were being read.
What russell said about people reading other people’s emails:
Was that in reference to PRISM?
No, it was not.
What was it about?
It was part of a response I made to your unsubstantiated assertion that there was no legally recognized assumption of privacy for electronic communications.
An assertion of yours which, as it turns out, was factually false. But I digress.
Nothing from me about PRISM being used to read the content of private emails. In fact, in several comments I’ve made in this thread, I’ve stated that my understanding was that PRISM was likely NOT about looking at content, and in fact for that reason was likely not only illegal, but may well have not even required the FISA authorization that led to the whole “scandal”.
That’s what russell said.
For the one-hundred-and-seventy-ninth time, I would appreciate your not misquoting things I say in an attempt to bolster your own arguments.
Make your own case and I’ll make mine. If you can’t make your case without misquoting other people, please find another hobby.
It’s f***ing rude.
Forgive me, russell for misunderstanding your position. When you emphasized your point that the ECPA protected email, but the Patriot Act took that away, and that you weren’t surprised about the PRISM program, and that you weren’t particularly worried about people reading your own email since it might not have been particularly interesting to the government, I took that to mean that you thought there was a danger that people would be reading Other people’s email. If that was a gross misinterpretation of your position and “rude”, sorry to have been “rude”.
Donald, I don’t think you’re rude to have misunderstood my position. In fact, I don’t blame you since people have mischaracterized my position repeatedly. This is what I said:
To me, data collection, as long no one is looking at anything but the “outside of the envelope”, is not a big problem as long as there are rules about what people can do with it, and people follow the rules. With a secret program, we really won’t know unless abuse comes to light. I also expressed concerns about secrecy, but a belief that the program might require a certain amount of secrecy to be effective.
I do have a problem with Obama’s administration reading everyone’s emails, but I never understood that to be happening.
Hope that clears things up.
If that was a gross misinterpretation of your position and “rude”, sorry to have been “rude”.
If that was an apology, I “accept it”.
It was part of a response I made to your unsubstantiated assertion that there was no legally recognized assumption of privacy for electronic communications.
And, russell, please don’t mischaracterize my position in such a way. What I said was that the expectation of privacy in emails (meaning emails as they are sent and stored now, not as they were sent and stored in 1984, via telephone lines through bulletin board systems like Compuserve, etc.) is less than other forms of communication – the reason why the ECPA is, even now, being amended to tighten the protections.
I also mentioned that email is not a very private form of communication, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a court might not give email correspondence unfettered 4th amendment protection, since email is so easily intercepted, and since we are constantly admonished not to trust the fact that it won’t be read (accidentally or on purpose) by an unauthorized third party. As it is, lawyers run into ethical problems if they rely on email to discuss matters with clients, and the email is intercepted.
You can make of that what you wish.
What I said was that the expectation of privacy in emails (meaning emails as they are sent and stored now, not as they were sent and stored in 1984, via telephone lines through bulletin board systems like Compuserve, etc.) is less than other forms of communication
And if, by “expectation of privacy” you mean “legal protection under the Constitution” you are wrong.
If you mean your cousin Eddie is going to sneak into your office while you’re asleep and read them, you are not necessarily wrong, depending on your cousin Eddie.
But if you’re point is that email is legally entitled to less protection than other forms of communication, you are wrong.
But if you’re point is that email is legally entitled to less protection than other forms of communication, you are wrong.
In that case, I wonder why Leahy and Lee are wasting so much time.
It appears that they’re wasting it in order to give more protection to email communications.
Tap It: The NSA Slow Jam (YouTube)
In that case, I wonder why Leahy and Lee are wasting so much time.
They’re not wasting their time. They’re trying to update the EPCA to reflect the current state of the technology.
Because – wait for it! – email is entitled to the same legal protections as other forms of communication.
You’re not making the point I think you want to make.
Because – wait for it! – email is entitled to the same legal protections as other forms of communication.
No, because email is not currently entitled to the same legal protections as other forms of communication. As to a snail mail letter, there’s no “180 day rule” about whether the government needs a warrant or not, based on the age of the letter or whether it’s been opened. Etc.
I don’t know why you think they need to amend the law (and by the way, the law hasn’t been passed) if the law already provides for these protections.
Of course, they agree with you (and me) that the law should protect email more thoroughly, which is why they’re attempting to do that through these amendments. But, at the moment, the law does not.
Typepad is still randomly putting comments in the spam bin. Unfortunately, I’m in Vietnam with very spotty wi fi access and a busy schedule, so please keep that in mind.
Another item to ponder.
To date, federal courts in S. Carolina and California have ruled on the matter of email privacy and those rulings conflict. Speculation is that the US Supreme Court hopes to receive another case for consideration before deciding the issue—one that may be a bit cleaner or more suitable for deciding this complex issue.
So sure, russell, it makes sense to a lot of people that email should have the same privacy protection as other forms of communication (or, more precisely, your “person, houses, papers and effects”) but, in fact, that protection is not guaranteed.
No, because email is not currently entitled to the same legal protections as other forms of communication. As to a snail mail letter, there’s no “180 day rule” about whether the government needs a warrant or not, based on the age of the letter or whether it’s been opened. Etc.
This is getting stupid.
Email does not go directly from the sender to the receiver. It is sent from the sender to a server, where it is stored. Subsequently, the receiver contacts the server and downloads it to their mail reader.
At the time the ECPA was written, storage was not so cheap, so the normal pattern of use was that the receiver kept a copy on their machine, and the copy on the server would be deleted in a fairly short period.
In that context, 180 days was the period agreed upon between Congress and the intelligence and law enforcement communities as being a reasonable time to consider the stored email to be private. Beyond that period, it was treated like abandoned business records, with no presumption of privacy.
Nowadays, it’s more common for email to be stored on servers for longer times.
So, there is interest in updating the ECPA to reflect that.
The understanding underlying both forms of the law is that email is communication between people which should be considered to be private.
Absent that understanding, neither the original form of the ECPA, nor the proposed change, makes sense.
No-one is disputing that changes in technology can make it difficult to understand how to implement, in law, the basic principles in play.
But the basic principle – the basic understanding that communications between two individuals is presumed to be private unless it is, literally, conducted in public – applies regardless of the technology in question.
The details of implementation vary with the technology, but the basic understanding does not.
When electronic communications emerged, it was recognized that they deserved protection, and the ECPA was written to provide that.
The technology associated with electronic communications keeps changing, so the law continues to need to be updated to reflect that.
But the understanding that email is a form of communication that merits protection has been consistent almost since it was invented.
The fact that the law evolves to maintain that protection is in fact evidence of that, rather than the opposite.
But the understanding that email is a form of communication that merits protection has been consistent almost since it was invented.
Sure. We agree on that point.
The fact is, however, that email has never received the same degree of protection as other forms of communication. This is, in part (as I said previously), because the kind of Internet email that we use now was not anticipated in 1984, so sure – your point about storage is accurate.
But the basic principle – the basic understanding that communications between two individuals is presumed to be private unless it is, literally, conducted in public – applies regardless of the technology in question.
Your opinion makes sense, and i agree with it, but what’s “literally, conducted in public” and what’s private has been litigated in the courts, and the courts don’t seem to believe that things are as obvious as you see them.
I’m tired of arguing about it, because I agree with your concept of what things should be like, but I do wish that you’d acknowledge that there wouldn’t be split court decisions, and there wouldn’t be a need for amendments in the law if everything were as hunky-dory russell’s way as russell wants them to be.
In fact, the law does not protect email in the way that you wish it would.
I guess we are in minced horsemeat territory. It seems to me that there is a middle point here. Recall the Petreus-Broadwell scandal. It’s not clear to me that FBI agents obtained a warrant. This link discusses some of those points. I hop, rather than seizing on this to ‘prove’ your position, it would be much better to realize that this totally supports my take on this and proves that everyone else is wrong. At least that is how I look at it….
I’m tired of arguing about it
Suits me.
The fact is, however, that email has never received the same degree of protection as other forms of communication.
Whatever you say sapient. You’re the attorney.
I do wish that you’d acknowledge that there wouldn’t be split court decisions, and there wouldn’t be a need for amendments in the law if everything were as hunky-dory russell’s way as russell wants them to be.
I have no idea WTF you’re talking about.
This link discusses some of those points.
Allow me to mince the horsemeat even more finely.
For ALL FORMS OF COMMUNICATION, there is and always has been an ongoing discussion of under what conditions it’s considered private, and under what conditions public.
If you and someone converse inside your house, and the feds want to record what you say, they need a warrant.
If you and the same person stand on the street corner and talk, and the feds listen in, they don’t need a warrant. There is no presumption of privacy.
If you receive a letter, open it, and place it in your dresser drawer, the feds need a warrant to seize it and read it.
If you receive a letter, open it, and leave it on the counter at the Starbucks in an airport terminal, I don’t think they do.
The same distinction exists for every form of communication.
The line between whether communication is private, or not, is whether there is a reasonable presumption of privacy.
Beginning with the ECPA, a presumption of privacy has been established, in the law, for email. Or, rather, the reasonable and common-sense presumption of privacy has been recognized in the law.
The only thing, at all, unique about email is that, due to the mechanics of how it works, a copy of the message is held by a third party. In other words, an artifact of the conversation may persist after the conversation ends.
The legal debate about email thus turns on the question of when and under what conditions that copy held by the third party may be considered to be public.
That is all.
There is no question that I am aware of in the law that, until that bar has been met, the email exchange is a private communication and is protected under the 4th Amendment.
None of this has anything to do with “russell’s way”, as if my druthers or opinion have bugger-all to do with the question. It’s a question of what the law says.
I have actually gone to the effort of citing the law that supports my position. Neither you or sapient have done likewise. If you, or sapient, or anyone else, wishes to make a credible reply to my basic point, I’ll require you to go freaking look it up and bring it back alive for the rest of us to see.
An article about how Leahy and Lee are amending the law to clarify the point at which stored email becomes public is not to the point. Or, rather, it makes my point, which is that UNTIL THAT POINT, HOWEVER DEFINED, HAS BEEN ACHIEVED, the email is private.
If PRISM is looking at routing information, they hardly need the FISA warrant, the feds can just write their own subpoenas.
If they want to look at content, they need a FISA warrant. Or, a warrant from a criminal court, if it’s not a national security issue.
That’s the law.
The law doesn’t matter anymore.
The NSA Director walks into a bar.
Bartender: I’ve got a new joke for you.
NSA Director: Heard it.
If true, this is really distressing. I mean, you should be able to tell a joke to anyone.
I mean, you should be able to tell a joke to anyone.
There are some jokes that should never be told by anyone…
I’m glad that some people in the US seem to be concerned about the NSA overreach – but why do these matters only ever come into view when the rights of US citizens are affected?
The NSA has been wiretapping everybody and their dog globally with hardly any checks and balances for decades – and I’m not talking about doing a little John Le Carre style espionage targeting foreign governments, but indiscriminate monitoring of all communications by ordinary citizens around the globe.
The domestic overreach within the US is only the very tip of the iceberg – the NSA is part of a large effort to maintain US hegemony worldwide at all costs – resistance is futile (it has been tried).
“Foreigners” don’t have any right to privacy, hey, they should be happy if only their phone is tapped and their not snatched by the CIA or blown away by a drone strike.
why do these matters only ever come into view when the rights of US citizens are affected?
Because the protections under the Bill of Rights don’t extend to folks ouside the US.
The law doesn’t matter anymore.
There’s the rub.
Looking back through ancient comments, this exchange seems prescient:
It looks like this is a case of pre-certain-technology concepts of civil liberties not being applied to new tchnologies. (Cell phone, email, Internet, etc).
It also looks like, to some degree, the sudden opposition to data gathering by the right is a Cleek’s law phenomenon: it was Ok when Bush did it, but not OK under a Democratic administration.
Which leads to an important point made upthread: when policy is made, it should be made with changes of administration in mind. It is foolish to create a policy that is only “safe” to apply under the authority of one party, but not the other.
My concern is that the data gathering could be misused to track people who are not engaged in a criminal activity, but are engaged in political activites which a particular administration doesn’t like, such as the politically-motivated spying done by the Nixon administration. ALEC has produced model legislation that is being pushed by Republican politicians at the state level to protect factory farms and puppy mills from scrutiny: the “ag-gag” laws. These laws outlaw investigations into possible law violations by businesses. People who investigate and report abuses, even abuses which are illegal, under such laws could find themselves being prosecuted. the justification is that such people are “eco-terrorists”.
It wouldn’t be difficult to use data gahering to find “eco-terrorsts”. Facebook knows me well enough to post animal-oriented ads on the side bar of my home page. I have memberships, donations, cell phone records, all sorts of info that shows an interest in dog rescue. I reported a possible puppy mill and, as a result of my report, an investigator for Posado’s Safe Haven posed as a buyer and visited the facility. (The facility, while inhumanely run, was legal under our current weak laws). That activity would render the investigator and possibly me liable for prosecution under some variations of the ag-gag law.
My point is that once this sort of thing, the data gathering, becomes policy, it will be abused. Some administration will abuse it for some political purpose.
The irony is that people who are seriously engaged in terrorism will know how to hide their data. the other irony is that, for all the data gathering, the Boston bombers were not stopped before they acted.
So the data gathering isn’t even all that effective at what it is supposed to do for the federal government. It’s just a huge potential for abuse with only limited potential for good.
The law doesn’t matter anymore.
There’s the rub.
That’s hardly been substantiated. Or, are you now changing your view, russell, in line with my gross, rude, mischaracterization of your comments that the government is actually reading people’s emails?
Honestly, it’s hard to know what your position is. I think that we all have agreed that there is some degree of privacy protection in the law with regard to emails. The question is whether there’s an expectation of privacy equal to that of other kinds of communications. Your analysis is simple: if it looks private, it is protected, if it doesn’t, it isn’t. But the courts have held diffrently. (The article gives you some names of decisions if you’d like to use Google. Saying that I don’t support my arguments is untrue).
I have contended, and still do, that the EPCA did not contemplate Internet email. I read your argument to say that it doesn’t matter, that the spirit of that law makes it obvious that there is an equal expectation of privacy in email to any other kind of communication, including letters in an envelope. While I agree that the spirit of the law does suggest a degree of privacy in email, I don’t think that it’s ever been true that privacy in email is the same as other mail. The idea that privacy protection depended on where an email was stored in the ordinary course of its transmission and how long (especially when the sender and recipient are known) seems very unlike privacy in a letter. (Your comment about an open letter at Starbucks is off point since Starbucks isn’t part of the chain of a letter’s delivery.)
So the data gathering isn’t even all that effective at what it is supposed to do for the federal government. It’s just a huge potential for abuse with only limited potential for good.
Just because data collection isn’t able to stop everything (it seems because there wasn’t enough “reasonable suspicion” to keep after the Boston bomber), doesn’t mean that it hasn’t stopped many things, without any apparent abuse.
I reported a possible puppy mill and, as a result of my report, an investigator for Posado’s Safe Haven posed as a buyer and visited the facility.
Thanks for doing that.
That’s hardly been substantiated.
Correct, in the case of PRISM.
Honestly, it’s hard to know what your position is.
In this thread, I’ve made two points overall. For your convenience I will summarize them:
1. PRISM – almost certainly legal. Most likely does not involve indiscriminate reading of email contents. In any case, covered by a FISA warrant, and so almost certainly within the law.
2. Email is a form of communication which has, almost since its invention, received protection under the 4th Amendment.
That’s about it.
I have contended, and still do, that the EPCA did not contemplate Internet email.
On this point you are factually incorrect.
Sapient, you have a point: the acts which are prevented don’t show up in public.
However, for every prevented act, how many innocent people get put through the wringer? Remember the American who was arrested as a suspect in the Madrid bombing even tough he had never been to Spain? Gail Collins has a column about him. Here’s an excerpt:
“For the next two weeks, Mayfield remained in jail, imagining a possible death penalty. His daughter recalls the family’s isolation, coupled with omnipresent radio and television reports about the alleged Madrid bomber. “School was a refuge in some ways from the reality of home, which was hell,” Sharia said.
Spain saved the day. The Spanish investigators were dubious from the beginning that the fingerprints at the bombing site were Mayfield’s; they had been hoping, perhaps, for a person who had set foot in Europe within the last decade. They found and arrested someone whose finger was a real match.
Mayfield was released. The government eventually paid him $2 million in damages and, in a rare act of contrition, issued a formal apology to him and his family. A federal judge in Oregon also found that the Patriot Act’s authorization of secret searches against American citizens was unconstitutional — a ruling that was reversed on a technicality by a higher court.
That was nearly a decade ago. “But you never quite get over these things,” Mayfield said. “It was a harrowing ordeal. It was terrifying.” He and his daughter are working on a book about what happened. Sharia is also going to law school. “I want to do civil liberties,” she said.”
What if Spanish authorities had been as hellbent on convicting the guy as our’s were?
And his daughter’s name had to be “Sharia”, which for a few members of the House of Reprerenditions, is quite enough, thank you.
Because the protections under the Bill of Rights don’t extend to folks ouside the US.
Yes, but the US is operating globally with impunity (if we were talking about Denmark, I wouldn’t care much about this stuff).
Are you saying “foreigners” have no rights and the US can do whatever they want as long as the rights of US citizens are not affected?
Are you saying “foreigners” have no rights and the US can do whatever they want as long as the rights of US citizens are not affected?
No, I’m just saying that the 4th A protections that apply to communications between people don’t apply to folks outside the US.
There are lots of things about the behavior of the US regarding people outside the US that I find regrettable and wrong. My comment is not intended as a defense, just a clarification on a point of fact.
…for every prevented act, how many innocent people get put through the wringer?
there’s a whole museum in Salem Mass. dedicated to just this kind of thing.
databases aren’t necessary for misaccusation.
These are God-given rights, but even God requires completion of the necessary paperwork — constitution, bill of rights, filing fees, various waivers and warranties, etc.
Take a number, have a seat, and He’ll want those in triplicate and notarized.
Yeah, naming your kid “Sharia” isn’t tactful.
One problem is that more datat by itself isn’t helpful. There has to be some kind of filter to determine what data must be looked at and what should remain private. “Probable cause” is one filter. But “profiling” too often becomes the filter. Profiling even becomes probable cause. Suppose upon investigation Mr. Mayfield turned out to be a Protestant member of the Orange County Chamber of Commerce? I think someone would have gone back to take another look at the finger prints.
And the profile is likely to be the Other du jour. Plus we are altready on the slippery slope to profiling people as anti-some corportate interest so that the corporation can use the power of government to harass people who are getting in the corporation’s way. I gave the example of factory farms and puppymillers collaborating with the Republican party to criminalize whistleblowers.
In Canada right now the oil sands businesses and the government are collaborating in the harassment of Idle No More on the claim that Idle No More is an eco-terrorist organization.
Power gets misused. Data gathering will be misused. I know that it is hard, maybe impossible, to draw a clear line between what kind of info is not private and what is. i know that there is a legitimate purpose for gathering data. I know that people have different levels of comfort with how many innocent people get snooped on to find the guilty.
But here’s a question for you all:
The Patriot Act was written in a atmosphere of hysteria. Would it get approved by Congress if proposed right now for the first time?
The Patriot Act was written in a atmosphere of hysteria.
A small quibble – the language in the Patriot Act predates the passage of the law per se by many years.
USAPA is largely a grab-bag of enhancements to pollice and intelligence powers that DOJ and other folks had wanted for a long, long time.
And could never get passed, until 9/11.
Would it get approved by Congress if proposed right now for the first time?
Hard to day. Parts of it probably would, the environment is still different today than it was pre-9/11.
Sorry russell, my tone was a bit testy.
“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” —Rahm Emanuel
Sorry russell, my tone was a bit testy.
no worries whatsoever
The Patriot Act was written in a atmosphere of hysteria. Would it get approved by Congress if proposed right now for the first time?
The Patriot Act, as it was passed in the post-9/11 hysteria, has been amended, so that question has been answered. It was most recently amended in 2011.
There was, for sure, an atmosphere of hysteria after 9/11. However, some of the fear of terrorism is legitimate. I think it’s fair to contemplate, and to continuously reevaluate what we’re willing to do to prevent terrorism.
cleek’s comment regarding victims of the Salem Witch Trials is apt. You don’t need to be collecting data in order to falsely accuse people, abuse power, and engage in various types of witch hunts. A government with a lot of information and power can be very effective. It can also abuse the information and power. I like the idea of effective government that doesn’t abuse its power. That means that it’s important to elect the right people. And sure, oversight. Isn’t that what Congress and the Courts are supposed to be doing? They do have a role, which I think is reassuring.
However, some of the fear of terrorism is legitimate.
No, it isn’t.
IMO, Obama pretty much captured the whole debate with his first response to this leak:
This Guardian piece reflects my thoughts
Let us suppose, for a moment, that it’s the companies that are the prime economisers in this context. If it is indeed the case that the NSA has logon-type access to their servers, what does that mean for anyone who is uncomfortable about this? Simple: one shouldn’t entrust one’s personal communications to any of them. That means: no Microsoft cloud services, no Google or Bing searches, no Google Docs, no Gmail, Yahoo mail or Hotmail; no Skype calls; no YouTube or Vimeo videos; no Flickr or Picasa; no Facebook or Twitter. And, of course, no iPhone or iPad use.
Why? Because all these services and/or devices rely on cloud services hosted in the US, which – we must assume – are routinely hoovered by the NSA for indefinite storage in the colossal server farm the agency has been constructing in Utah.
Over the last week, I have had various conversations with friends, colleagues and acquaintances about Prismgate. Many – though not all – confessed to feeling uneasy about what it might mean for privacy and/or liberal democracy. Some were sceptical that the NSA and its overseas franchises such as GCHQ actually possess the technical capability to “collect the haystack”. All were adamant, however, that they don’t want to live in a National Security state.
But when I raised Tim Wu’s recommendation that users should therefore boycott Google and co, the atmosphere changed. The idea of not using Google for search seems unthinkable to most people. My respondents could live without Google Docs, but most thought that webmail was essential. Older people might be able to live without YouTube, but nobody under the age of 25 could. For many, Skype has become a personal lifeline for keeping in touch with distant friends and family members. iPhone and iPad users were appalled at the idea of having to give up their toys. And one person declared that he would sooner shoot himself than go back to using Microsoft Windows.
The moral of this? Simple: we’re screwed either way. We’re so hooked on the services provided by Google et al that we can’t contemplate boycotting them, whether or not they’re collaborating with the Feds. We walked cheerfully into the trap, folks. All that remains now is to live with the consequences.
Thanks, cleek.
We’ve got some problems here.
This seems kind of pertinent:
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Rather startled, yes.
But these aren’t the droids you’re looking for, so move along.
In other news, the FISA court is not a court anyone would recognize (I suppose this is not technically news).
And on and on…
re: Ugh’s 9:01: parsing can be tricky ?
cleek – thanks and yes it seems perhaps CNET was jumping the gun. But, who can say when everything is secret?
The WaPo has an interesting article today as well.
also on that, Julian Sanchez.
But, who can say when everything is secret?
indeed.
But, who can say when everything is secret?
No one. But, honestly, I think that even if all were revealed, there would be no change in people’s opinions, which at this point are faith based.
Your faith in the steadfastness of people’s opinions is archetypally faith-based, sapient.
Perhaps you’re right, Slart.
“I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.”
Nadler
Well, if the administration says so, it must be true – anyway they certainly feel entitled to listen to my phone calls and I find that rather annoying to put it kindly, as does the rest of the world.
the issue is that Nadler didn’t say what CNet said he did.
Of course all power cann be abused. But that’s a reason for limiting spying, not a rationalization to justify it.
I’m very concerned about the future. I do not like they way things are trending. I am particlularly afraid of the collaboration between powerful business interests and government.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
BTW Rep King is putting the Conservative Disease on full display by sponsoring an amendment to the Farm Bill that would nullify state laws that protect animals from the abuses of puppy mills and factory farms. Seems to me that states rights are only invoked when rightwingers want to cop out on social responsibilities. Otherwise imposing federal power on states or individuals is just fine.
I am particlularly afraid of the collaboration between powerful business interests and government.
That was an interesting piece.
What strikes me is that the feds recognize and anticipate the possibility of large scale environmental problems, and instead of responding by attempting to address them, instead responds by making plans to suppress any acts of unrest that they might cause.
Clicking through from the Guardian piece to this Long Island Press article, I find this alleged change to the US Code:
That’s messed up. I want to read the actual changes to the USC before I get my tin foil hat out of the closet, but that kind of language should disturb anyone.
What strikes me is that the feds recognize and anticipate the possibility of large scale environmental problems, and instead of responding by attempting to address them, instead responds by making plans to suppress any acts of unrest that they might cause.
Actually, “the feds” have attempted to address environmental problems. “U.S. CO2 emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels peaked in 2007 and have declined significantly over the past five years.” I certainly wish that we, as a country, were doing more.
As to plans to “suppress any acts of unrest”, is that really the plan? Or is the plan to try to provide for some kind of civil defense in the wake of an extraordinary catastrophe?
I hate to put on an editor hat to question the gravitas of the Long Island Press, but the U.S. Code contains codified statutes, not regulations, and when you click on the link they provide to the “regulation” supposedly entitled “Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies”, there is no such thing. So much for attention to detail.
The Chapter of the U.S. Code that does appear from the link is the authorization for United States military support for emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina. If you’ll recall, the army was quite helpful during the aftermath.
As to disasters caused by climate change, whether or not we respond more appropriately to the issues causing climate change (which I’m enthusiastically in favor of doing), we’re even now having to respond to the seemingly increasing number of natural disasters that are already occurring. And, yes, in a situation where large numbers of people are suddenly without food, drinking water and shelter, there might be a need for military assistance to coordinate rescue, and to quell large-scale civil disturbances.
Maybe the law is actually a sneaky measure to suppress dissent, but somehow I don’t think so. I’ll try to take a look at the statute when I have more time.
As to the rest of the Guardian piece, I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of their reporting.
I see that Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen, is quoted in the Guardian article.
If I were writing a J.G. Ballard-like, dystopian novel about the U.S. military “engaging temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances”, it would be interesting to nail down whom exactly would be the vanguard of these civil disturbances and whom in turn, besides “society”, would require the military’s, read “the Federal government’s”, protection.
The assumption of the planners, perhaps because these plans were launched during the Administration that, like Helen’s face, launched the thousands of vessels of the security state, seems to be that during disturbances sparked by climate events, militant environmental groups, read “leftist”, would react to disturb the peace if, or if not, global warming could be tied to the events.
But, I wonder if this is how things would align themselves.
We know who is stockpiling lethal weaponry to fight the government. It isn’t politically correct, pansy leftists, it is by and largely those of a frame of mind who deny any credence to global warming theory and perhaps even the idea that extreme weather events are occurring at higher rates.
And yet they ARE planning, as they are encouraged to do by one political party, for some kind of dystopian situation, so I could see that heavily armed rightwingers, who I expect would turn their conspiracy theories on a dime to believe that the gummint was HIDING evidence of global warming and the resulting weather events from them all this time (this would be more probable if, say, the President was a black liberal) might make common cause (more likely this would be a second front for the military to quell)) with politically correct pansy liberals to lead civil disorder.
Ah, but what if politically correct enviro-pansy tree huggers, under cover of right-wing foot dragging to foil rational gun control, have been stockpiling big stinking non-pansy weaponry all this time, and believe that the government, in thrall to corporate interests and global warming denialists on the Right, is worthy of the destruction of civil society.
Well, you might then see the military and right-wing radicals merge their efforts to liquidate the enviros, but not before we are treated to the delicious spectacle of personalities like Limbaugh, the Red State crew, and Repulsiventative King being protected in safehouses by the gummint they detest with its NSA protections, perhaps even under a black, liberal President, as pansy enviro-liberals try to hunt them down and butcher them like hogs for cynically manipulating the weather issue all these decades.
It could go either way.
These scenarios are intended as purely fictional representations and bear no resemblance to current or future events or to persons, living or dead, preferably the latter, and do not endorse global warming theories, pro- or anti-, so if NSA functionaries are reading this tripe, chill out for f*ck’s sake, not that I’m wrong.
when you click on the link they provide to the “regulation” supposedly entitled “Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies”, there is no such thing.
Quite right, the correct title is “Military Support For Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies”.
“U.S. CO2 emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels peaked in 2007 and have declined significantly over the past five years.”
I think quoting that statistic to imply that federal action is responsible for the emissions decline disingenuous. Honestly, if you were an engineer or a statistician or a scientist, I’d consider that evidence of poor professional ethics.
Most of the decline in CO2 emissions has been caused by the economic slump and by the growth of cheap natural gas displacing coal. Note that NG prices have just plummeted over the last 5 years. Very little of the decline can be attributed to federal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Very little of the decline can be attributed to federal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
You may be right, and I agree that Congress has done next to nothing. But Federal regulations, as cited in the article (which are Executive Department initiatives) have helped. Unfortunately, not everything that needs to be done can be accomplished by the Executive branch. So should we be doing much better? Absolutely.
Also, if anyone wants to play the home game of “what the hell is that article talking about”, the section of the US Code that under discussion is here, and the proposed regulation intended to implement those sections is found in the Federal Register, here.
As sapient notes, US code is codified statute, regulations are elsewhere. Now, for your sins, you may peruse both.
The regulation does, in fact, contain an assertion that military commanders have authority to act, in the absence of Presidential command, to “quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances”. The language describing the scope and limits of that authority are vague.
The first comment in the regulation contains a very good discussion of the possible problems with all of that. Rather than read the inflammatory and irresponsible LI Press article, you could just read the comment. It pretty much covers the bases.
Thanks for providing a link to the rule, russell.
The comments preceding the text of the rule are public comments (of which only two were apparently received – which doesn’t indicate a huge public outcry). In the response to the first comment, it’s pointed out that the commentator’s worry about “suspension” of the Posse Comitatus Act was unfounded since the regulation doesn’t call for the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act.
There’s a Q and A with Snowden at Greenwald’s site–
link
Some of the answers are a bit murky to me. But anyway, he promises more detail later.
Good grief, another one of my posts has vanished. Anyway, it was a link to the Q/A session with Snowden at Greenwald’s site.
In the response to the first comment, it’s pointed out that the commentator’s worry about “suspension” of the Posse Comitatus Act was unfounded since the regulation doesn’t call for the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act.
If you do something that is not in compliance with Posse Comitatus, without a formal or explicit suspension of Posse Comitatus, the fact that PC was not suspended is sort of moot.
Long story short, the regulation raises my eyebrow. Not more than that, not less than that, but that.
If you do something that is not in compliance with Posse Comitatus, without a formal or explicit suspension of Posse Comitatus, the fact that PC was not suspended is sort of moot.
The regulation can’t take precedence over the statute, so it has to be interpreted in accordance with the Posse Comitatus Act.
As to worries, the Salinas v. Texas ruling handed down today is higher on my priority list. I realize that it’s off-topic, unless the topic is generally Worries About Government.
i got no love for Snowden, but i gotta admit he was right about this:
The regulation can’t take precedence over the statute, so it has to be interpreted in accordance with the Posse Comitatus Act.
Yeah, in a court.
Not disputing your point, just noting that the court part often happens after the fact.
Yeah, in a court.
Well, also by the lawyers advising the DoD what they need to do. If they have John Yoo, it doesn’t really matter what the laws say. If they have a decent lawyer, the lawyer will take the statute into consideration when interpreting the regulation.
Sorry for the itals.
If they have John Yoo, it doesn’t really matter what the laws say.
I believe we have just stumbled across common ground.
Sorry for the itals.
No worries, just trade them in for some Maytals!
I’m not sure where I stand on any of this. But, folks you do understand we are talking about RADIO transmissions? If they were listening in on my CB or short wave would that be any different? Just happens on the cell phones these are sofisticated walkie talkies. E-mail is not private- if you don’t know that, you shouldn’t send any.
Thanks, russell, for the Maytals! But one of the most wonderful comments you ever made was one where you linked to Caetano Veloso’s Billie Jean covers. That was amazing.
But, folks you do understand we are talking about RADIO transmissions?
I think you’re confused. A cellphone transmits using radio waves, but most cell phone protocols encrypt wireless transmissions so other receivers can’t recover the signal. That makes cell phones substantially different than your CB radio even though both use radio waves. Moreover, whether the data is encrypted or not, unauthorized reception is a crime. You do understand that, right?
E-mail is not private- if you don’t know that, you shouldn’t send any.
See, this is something I don’t quite understand. Is postal mail private?
I mean, when I send email, it is generally encrypted. My computer opens an encrypted connection to my mail provider and they transmit the message using an encrypted connection to the recipients’ mail provider. That means that no one except the two service providers can read the contents of the email.
In contrast, postal mail can be read by any intermediary. Heck, postal mail is stored outside in a publicly accessible box on the street where anyone can remove it, read it, replace it, etc.
But I think most people believe that postal mail is both private and secure. That’s why they entrust to it their innermost thoughts, precious documents, engagement rings, etc. Postal workers can read or steal your mail just like email service providers can read your email, but this is illegal and most people find that security enough.
I think it makes sense to say that email is private. Or not. But I think only an idiot would say that email is not private but postal mail is. The security guarantees that modern email provides are strictly better than postal mail.
Yet we are treated to a collection of internet geniuses who insist on repeating, over and over, seemingly without end, that email is not private. These same geniuses never say anything about postal mail. I wonder at the discrepancy.
These same geniuses never say anything about postal mail. I wonder at the discrepancy.
If postal mail is so easy to intercept without anyone noticing, I wonder why the NSA hasn’t caught on. Or, wait! Maybe they have, and the whistleblower hasn’t spoken up yet! Or even still, maybe the NSA isn’t really interested in the content of correspondence after all.
Whether or not the NSA, as a whole, is interested in the content of my correspondence, it seems analysts can ogle whatever they like without much oversight – on my dime, no less.
And maybe there’s a bit of a difference between sucking up data off a server, from whatever location, and running around all over the country looking in people’s mailboxes. Just because surveillance of e-mail en masse is logistically more feasible than that of snail mail doesn’t make it any more okay conceptually – IMO, at least.
Is Dick Cheney on facebook, I wonder? Let’s all friend him.
If postal mail is so easy to intercept without anyone noticing, I wonder why the NSA hasn’t caught on.
I’m sure that they have caught on, but the fact that doing so would clearly violate federal statute could be a deterrent. I
would guessknow there’s some history of folks having been prosecuted for that very thing.Whereas email tampering, maybe not so much. Yet.
Just to clarify, intercepting email communications is also a violation of federal statute. I don’t think there have been many prosecutions in part because most email transmissions are encrypted so it is effectively impossible to recover the message after sniffing bytes on the wire.
I would have put this another way: most cell phone protocols encode wireless transmissions. Why they do that is relatively arcane, but at heart it’s so that a whole lot of users can use a broad piece of spectrum without having to allocate channels.
Instead of channels being allocated, one of a large assortment of mutually orthogonal spreading functions is assigned.
How that happens, exactly, is a matter for cell-communications mavens to speak on. And of course my understanding may be flawed in some key way; if so, I would be happy to be corrected.
Slarti, I think you’re correct, in that for performance/efficiency reasons, cell phone transmissions are encoded in a way that is difficult for a random radio operator to decode. However, a sufficiently motivated individual can put together GSM or CDMA receiver for a few thousand dollars (say, by using USRP or a dev kit for the hardware and something like OpenBTS or GNURadio for the software).
That would allow you to decode GSM or CDMA signals off the air and that’s a non-trivial feat. In addition to the encoding however, some cell phone protocols implement data encryption between the handset and the base station (I know GSM offer the option but I’m not certain of CDMA). Such encryption makes deciphering intercepted cellular communications infeasible in general, even after you blow a few thousand dollars on the equipment needed to decode them.
NSA intelligence foiled terrorist attacks on Wall Street:
http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-director-says-plot-against-wall-street-foiled-152228178.html
Now, if they could foil terror in the financial markets originating FROM Wall Street.
The SEC should be able to tap into NSA methods to more readily regulate insider trading and ferret out the perpetrators of flash crashes.
I’ve got a link heavy comment stuck in the spam trap. If someone could fetch it, I’d be most grateful.
Justice?
Asked what was next for Snowden, Sean Joyce, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said simply, “Justice.”
Sure.
Also, too:
[NSA Director] Alexander, seated side by side with top officials from the FBI and Justice Department at a rare, open congressional hearing, described how the operations work under questioning from members of the House Intelligence Committee who displayed a supportive demeanor.
Thank goodness we can have a hearing to display a supportive demeanor.
Also, free:
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has taken the unusual step of actively blocking a former committee aide from talking to TPM about congressional oversight of the intelligence community. At issue isn’t classified sources and methods of intelligence gathering but general information about how the committee functions — and how it should function. The committee’s refusal to allow former general counsel Vicki Divoll to disclose unclassified information to a reporter was the first and only time it has sought to block her from making public comments, based on her experience as one of its most senior aides, since she left Capitol Hill in 2003.
So, I give up.
Turb- released!
Supportive demeanor?
Osama bin Laden lives! Long live Osama bin Laden!
Too bad about healthcare for all Americans.
They were mistaking Committee Member Michelle Bachmann’s bovine chewing of the cud for a “supportive demeanor”.
Oversight!