The NSA: Never Not Watching

Trailrunner7 writes "For many observers of the privacy and surveillance landscape, the revelation by The Guardian that the FBI received a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to require Verizon to turn over to the National Security Agency piles of call metadata on all calls on its network probably felt like someone telling them that water is wet. There have been any number of signals in the last few years that this kind of surveillance and data collection was going on, little indications that the United States government was not just spying on its own citizens, but doing so on a scale that would dwarf anything that all but the most paranoid would imagine." And now the Obama administration has defended the practice as a "critical tool."

Re:Constitution

[CanHasDIY]

NSA Warrant Submission:

Place to be searched: Verizon Databases
Things to be seized: Everything

--------------------

Warrant issued.

Your Friend,
Judge Rubberstamp

Obama

[codepunk]

"You've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems," Obama said. "You should reject these voices. Because what these suggest is that somehow our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can't be trusted."

Re:seems all the politicos are in favor

[khasim]

From that article:

This renewal is carried out by the FISA Court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore, it is lawful.

Lawful is not the same as Constitutional. I'm pretty sure that our Founding Fathers would NOT have supported this.

As you know, this is just metadata.

If it is "just" anything then why are you so concerned about collecting it?

The information goes into a database, ...

That's even worse. They're COMPILING information about citizens without even having a "reasonable suspicion" about those citizens.

... the metadata, but cannot be accessed without whatâ(TM)s called, and I quote, "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the records are relevant and related to terrorist activity.

Who cares? If there is "reasonable, articulable suspicion" THEN you go after the records. With a WARRANT. And the warrant IDENTIFIES those SPECIFIC people you have a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of.

As you know, and Iâ(TM)ve pointed out many times, there have been approximately 100 plots and also arrests made since 2009 by the FBI.

Go on ...

I do not know to what extent metadata was used or if it was used, but I do know this: ...

If YOU do not know then who DOES know?

And if YOU do not know then YOU should not be trying to IMPLY that there is any link between collecting this information and cracking any plots.

I do not know to what extent metadata was used or if it was used, but I do know this: That terrorists will come after us if they can and the only thing we have to deter this is good intelligence.

More of our people die when their own family kills them than die from "terrorists" in the US.

If "the only thing" that will protect us from these "terrorists" is collecting information on our own citizens then I am willing to take that risk.

Re:Constitution

[fyngyrz]

"Would you please provide X" is not an "ask" when it is followed by a directly associated "or you'll go to jail."

Faith versus Reason

[Jeremy Erwin]

Some news sources have speculated that this program was related to the Boston Marathon Bombing [npr.org]. However The Washington Post [washingtonpost.com] sys that

... the order appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006. The expert, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency.

This particular order was classified as Top Secret/NoForn/SI. The routine nature of the order was likewise highly classified.

Ordinary people-- those not initiated into the orders of nobility associated with "clearances"-- cannot select their government based on real, verifiable information. They have no means to judge the effectiveness, or lack of effectiveness of their political candidates. Instead, they must have faith that their government is either incompetent, or competent.

Do you believe that your government is doing its best to protect you? Surely its effectiveness would be diminished if carefully guarded secrets like this got out, and were use by enemies of the nation and of the state?

Do you believe that the government is doing its best to cynically exploit the security apparatus for its own political benefit? Surely this is but the tip of the iceberg. Were it not for classification, the entire enterprise would be exposed as a cesspool of corruption and criminality.

But in the absence of good solid, reliable data, both of these viewpoints can be freely adopted by any voter who chooses to have an opinion on the matter. Instead of a mass of peoples carefully using their judgements to select the good leaders over the bad, the entire electorate, kept in ignorance, has been reduced to flipping coins.

Government, it seems, is to important to be left to the governed.

Re:Constitution

[turp182]

And the telecommunications companies have immunity from prosecution for such requests being fulfilled (it was even retroactive at the time to squash active lawsuits).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/supreme-court-telecoms-win-immunity [guardian.co.uk]

Re:Constitution

[CrimsonAvenger]

That infighting crippled German production until half way through the war they realized "oh shit, the USSR is out producing us in just about everything that matters" and put someone competent like Albert Speer in charge, instead of that flamboyant, fat fuck Goering.

A couple of things:

1) Speer didn't get that job "halfway through the war" - more like "seven months after invasion of USSR" or "three months after Pearl Harbor". Note that Germany was still pretty much winning then (Stalingrad was almost a year in the future, North Africa wouldn't be settled for more than a year).

2) Speer didn't replace Goering either. Previous guy was Fritz Todt (what a great name "Hi, I'm Death. MISTER Death to you"....)

3) And it wasn't the USSR that was outproducing Germany then, it was the USA. The USSR wasn't outproducing Germany for a couple more years....

Does anyone remember room 641A in AT&T's basem

[kaptink]

This has been going on at least since 2005 and its more than just phone call records - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

"Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T.[1] The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic[3] and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic. Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been installed throughout the United States.[2]"

Re:Constitution

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Unfortunately, the populace is stupid, and so we will continue to see such erosion of privacy based upon the flimsiest of disingenuous excuses.

The population is not stupid. But there's only so much ordinary people can do when the entire state, civic, and industrial apperatus has been seized by an essentially criminal class.

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