When the NSA Shows Up At Your Internet Company 309
Frosty Piss writes "When people say the feds are monitoring what people are doing online, what does that mean? How does that work? When, and where, does it start? Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, an internet service provider in Utah, knows. He received a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant in 2010 mandating he let the feds monitor one of his customers, through his facility. He also received a broad gag order. Says Mr. Ashdown, 'I would love to tell you all the details, but I did get the gag order... These programs that violate the Bill of Rights can continue because people can't go out and say, This my experience, this is what happened to me, and I don't think it is right.' In this article, Mr. Ashdown tells us about the equipment the NSA installed on his network, and what he thinks it did."
No Surprises Here (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't contest these FISA orders because even acknowledging them is a federal crime.
First rule of FISA: Don't talk about FISA
Ethics versus Legality (Score:5, Insightful)
The NSA's corrupt and unethical activities have shown a bright light on the blackened and burned out husk of our ethics within the justice system. Which is to say, there really aren't any left to speak of.
The law has absolutely nothing to do with right or wrong anymore. It's just a prescription for what is allowed and isn't, not whether you should or shouldn't. It's not unlike owning a gun; By itself, it's harmless. Put it someone's hands, and what they do with it can be catastrophic. Laws are just tools. It's what is done with them we need to look at.
So far, I'm not encouraged by what I am seeing those tools used for. Perhaps its time to take them away, until they can learn to handle them responsibly.
Re:Ethics versus Legality (Score:5, Insightful)
Secret laws enforced by secret courts (Score:5, Insightful)
He is absolutely right that we shouldn't have secret courts issuing secret laws. Temporary gag orders are fine but they should expire rapidly and then what happened be subject to public scrutiny. Faretta v. California talked about how many of our laws for trial procedure and rights in the constitution evolved from a reaction against the Star Chamber. The core idea of the Star Chamber was secrecy to deal with defendants who were too powerful to be tried openly for fear the the realm could not control the impact, and we have decided to replicate this in full.
Re:stand up (Score:5, Insightful)
That could also be read as a widespread conspiracy involving multiple companies to coordinate to commit felonies. The problem is the American people, have until recently been strongly supportive of this nonsense. The companies can't stand up to it until they know for sure a jury will never convict and they can't know that yet.
Where exactly is 'outside US jurisdiction' now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask Eric Snowden, I hear he has some experience with this very thing.
The ONLY reason Snowden is not a resident of GITMO, is the US can't invade Moscow Airport.
If he was in a less powerful country, like Panama, for example, he would already be in custody.
Times have changed somewhat, Butch Cassidy....Mexico, or Canada, are no longer safe havens to escape the US.
Intelligence (Score:3, Insightful)
There is absolutely [a] need for secrecy when you are dealing with a criminal investigation. You don’t want to tip off criminals being monitored. But you can’t say, “You can never talk about this ever, for the rest of your life.”
The criminals may never know exactly how they were caught. Some of the tapped information may come out but the authorities may have enough other evidence derived from this tap not to reveal all their methods. The better criminals know how they are being monitored the better the criminals can avoid the monitoring.
As to being a benign web site, the actual site may have noting to do with the criminal activity. It may just be a transit point for communications between criminals and the authorities are after those communications.
As for the tap being on 9 months; there are criminal investigations that take years to gather enough information on enough people to take down an organization.
As for the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment in particular;
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
By law A FISA warrant is a warrant and therefore the Amendment has not been violated. How exactly is the Fourth Amendment violated?
The FISA court should be a public court, and documents should be sealed for a set period of time, [to] let people audit the actions later.
I disagree. When one make public who and how someone else it being watched it it makes the suspects more difficult yo watch in the future. Maybe this investigation didn't gather enough for a conviction but the next one might. I may agree if the set period was 30 years or so but that is not what you seem to be talking about.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ethics versus Legality (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that law is it is meant for people, it depend on people to be honest, not wanting extra money, not being able to be blackmailed or social engineered, not falling into common human bias like the ones shown in the Stanford prison experiment.
If people were honest, not greedy, and incapable of having any vices, and weren't stupid... there'd be no need for laws! The problem isn't the law, it's the people enforcing it. Think about the legal texts of old -- the Magna Carta. The Constitution. Hell, why not even throw in a few holy texts -- the Bible, Koran, etc. My point is a basic code of conduct took one book or less to draw the boundaries for most situations. Now, I don't want to discuss their relative merits, coz that'll take us to nasty flaming troll of doom land, it's just there to illustrate that the legal process doesn't have to be complex to be fairly complete.
This extra complexity is meant to blunt the minds of its critics and enable people to operate under color of authority to do things that many of us consider unethical or immoral. And that is the problem. The judicial process no longer has any feedback mechanism -- no way of saying "good" or "bad". Laws are written, but rarely repealed. They have no expiration date. So the system grows more and more complex, and people's ethics and morality slowly erode. Slow enough, anyway, that it's not obvious to anyone what's happening... at least until most of it has been lost.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:NSA equipment: rent space? charge for electrici (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No Surprises Here (Score:5, Insightful)
How does one authenticate their authenticity?
When men with guns say it's authentic, it is.
Re:Terminate contract instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you're willing to be the guinea pig who runs it through to the SCOTUS, it's perfectly 'legal' until SCOTUS says otherwise.
Re:Intelligence (Score:4, Insightful)
That's NOT how the Constitution works. It GRANTS powers to government. Everything that is not given as a power in the Constitution is NOT a legitimate function of government. There is no power to make courts secret.
On the other hand the Constitution does NOT contain a list of all the rights of citizens. The 9th Amendment makes this quite clear. There are many rights NOT enumerated. Due process IS listed as a right.
How the hell can you have due process if a court and laws can be secret? The idea is preposterous.
Re:Challenge the Gag Order (Score:5, Insightful)
Most gag order statutes have been voided for being unconstitutional.
Great, so all you have to do is go ahead and violate an order (publishing some single event that on its own is trivial), then watch the powers descend on you, take away all your stuff, and possibly lock you up as well. Then you can begin a 5-10 year court battle to get it all back, facing the risk of a long prison term the entire time. That battle will likely cause you to lose your job and waste away a good portion of your adult life.
But yes, in the end there is a decent (but far from certain) chance that you will win. If so, you won't even get an apology - they'll just let you return to life with little more than the clothes on your back so that you can start saving what little you can for your retirement.
Re:Harder done than said (Score:5, Insightful)
The terrorists won on September 11, 2001, although not in the way they planned.
More like not in the specific way that they had hoped. IIRC they hoped to get the US military out of Saudi Arabia. But the sort of stuff in the news now is also the kind of thing they were hoping for [cnn.com]. A rather nice consolation prize. It is certainly a revenge of sorts. The entire country has been punished. Countless generations of Americans will be forced to live in an Orwellian dystopia. They could not have done it without help from our own politicians, but nevertheless it is undeniably a very real victory for Bin Laden's group. No honest person can continue to call the US free and there is no going back.
Re:No Surprises Here (Score:2, Insightful)
"It wasn’t like a guns and ammo website." (Score:3, Insightful)
The subject of my comment is a direct quote from the website. I'm curious as to why the author believes a "guns and ammo" website would warrant this type of surveillance. It seems everywhere you look these days the left is looking to encroach on our rights as American citizens (the provider is based in Utah). The irony here is that the main point of the article seems to be that this type of surveillance is an invasion of someone's privacy and at least an inconvenience to the provider.
Apply some technology here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Intelligence (Score:4, Insightful)
Flying on an aircrift is a right. Or more to the point preventing people from flying on an aircraft is a right that the government does not possess. Or can you point out the part of the constitution that grants the government that right? You cannot because it doesn't exist and not just because aircraft didn't exist. Because they would have considered the idea of preventing people from traveling within the borders of their own country to be tyranny almost beyond their ability to imagine. To them it would have been like asking the government permission to breathe.