NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily

[Coito ergo sum]

I can only answer with a question: do you have a sense of humor?

If not, that would explain a lot. You see, it's a kind of filter most of us use, otherwise your life us continuous suffering.

It would help if what you wrote was funny.

[Tero]

Well, that's your problem. Nothing beyond the confines of your house is under your control, therefore it can never be funny.

Look at Zilla: Vietnam, personal tragedy etc. Yet here he is in full vitality. Well, 90%.

[Coito ergo sum]

Well, that's your problem. Nothing beyond the confines of your house is under your control, therefore it can never be funny.

Look at Zilla: Vietnam, personal tragedy etc. Yet here he is in full vitality. Well, 90%.

[Warren Dew]

No, I'm just speculating. Since the programs aren't likely to go away, I'll take any steps towards protection of the public I can get.

What we really need is standards for email clients to handle public key encryption, and implementation of those standards on all major email clients.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I can only answer with a question: do you have a sense of humor?

C.E.S.? No.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Well, that's your problem. Nothing beyond the confines of your house is under your control, therefore it can never be funny.

Look at Zilla: Vietnam, personal tragedy etc. Yet here he is in full vitality. Well, 90%.

[Coito ergo sum]

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/arti ... rning-post

More details to come.

So, those of you who think the NSA was engaged in proper behavior here --- what should be done with this guy who has apparently endangered American national security by leaking the program. Should he be "disappeared" like some in the government have suggested (ostensibly jokingly), should a drone be dropped on his head, or should he be arrested, tried for treason and espionage, and executed in Kansas?

[camoguard]

He should be tried to see the merits of the case. I think execution is a tall order but he definitely shouldn't be considered for security related jobs. If he can establish that due to internal circumstances that he did not have a way to use his chain of command to evaluate his decision to leak the documents, then maybe he's innocent.

I think the relevant reasons he will lose is that there were options that involved less of a breach of trust available to him. I think he let his paranoia manifest over a reasonable person standard. And, I think the actual information he shared isn't that striking. Establishing those claims would eliminate a public's need to know and damn Snowden.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

If he can establish that due to internal circumstances that he did not have a way to use his chain of command to evaluate his decision to leak the documents, then maybe he's innocent.

Either way, he's made an Assange of himself.

[camoguard]

Basically. Snowden has no qualifications that suggest he's smart though.

[Seth]

And you have evidence they do this?

You might be right, and they may, at the moment, not do the sort of things CES is suggesting with the information gathered.

But the potential, and the temptation is there...

Given that their may be huge benefits to a nation's security against terrorism from such information, the challenge is to have a very robust oversight process that strictly limits the use to which such information is put...

Always tricky, throwing out the bathwater without the baby...

It is also big problem when people's stuff is searched without demonstrable reason/cause for believing that the stuff searched contains evidence of a crime. Searching all phones is like searching all houses in a city because there are criminals in the city. It's basically an unconstitutional "dragnet" technique. It doesn't require additional "misuse" of the information to be wrong -- it is wrong because the dragnet itself is wrong -- it is its own wrong. It is an invasion of privacy.

Like -- if your neighbor takes pictures of you surreptitiously, while masturbating, by sneaking into your house and planting a hidden camera -- the invasion of privacy is wrong even if he doesn't look at it or show it to anyone else. If he uses a listening device to listen to you and your wife fucking, that alone is a misuse and an abuse. It does not matter that he tapes it only for posterity and never listens to it or distributes it. The recording itself is a wrong. It is not any less of an abuse if a cop does the recording, or a computer commissioned by the cops.

On the other hand, if you're sitting on your front porch or on a lawn chair in your front yard masturbating, taking a picture of you would NOT be an invasion of privacy, it would be documenting a crime.

What you have on your computer INSIDE your home is part of the "personal papers" that the 4th Amendment covers.

What you TRANSMIT over the Internet on the other hand leaves your home and therefore has a lesser expectation of privacy...or so the rationale of the government goes.

The problem is that the better analogy is the US Mail. The Postal Service cannot open, read and copy your mail without an explicit warrant based on probable cause you've committed a crime.

Sadly, the courts have not viewed "data packets" being sent from one person to another through the Internet or telephone system to be the legal equivalent of a sealed envelope, even though in point of fact such data packets ARE the exact electronic equivalent, particularl if they are sent using SSL protocols.

What would put a stop to this would be a) the proper use of strong encryption by consumers for everything they send and receive; and b) for either the courts or the Congress to acknowledge that data packets are "digital envelopes" as indeed they are.

But then again, we know that the USPS scans and photographs the front and back of EVERY piece of mail it processes...automatically...as they can because what's on the OUTSIDE of the envelope has no reasonable expectation of privacy attached.

Thus, gleaning IP addresses and other routing information on Internet packets and analyzing them for patterns that might reveal terrorist activity is, in and of itself, NOT a 4th Amendment violation. Copying or reading the CONTENTS (even just scanning them for "keywords") clearly is under the Post Office analogy.

The way for consumers to frustrate the NSA, or at least make their job much, much harder is for EVERYONE to use strong encryption for EVERYTHING they send.

Of course the problem with that is that encryption systems are "munitions" under federal law and cannot be exported without permission from the State Department, which is why Phil Zimmerman was facing many years in jail when PGP got out of the barn. He escaped jail only because they couldn't prove that HE exported the technology...somebody else did.

But now Zimmerman (and others) have gone commercial, and while strong encryption from commercial US sources keeps private snoops out, it does NOT keep the NSA out because federal laws require that ALL commercially-sold encryption systems must explicitly be "crackable" by the NSA, either by weakening the encryption so their Cray supercomputers can easily crack a message, or more evilly by providing a "back door" password access to everything to the NSA. And because the Feds are involved, they can require this of companies while demanding that they NOT tell consumers of the vulnerabilities.

PGP was, and remains, the best encryption system because it's "open source" and anyone with requisite technical knowledge can look at the actual code to see that its as advertised and that there are no back doors. All commercial encryption expressly FORBIDS "deconstruction" and analysis of the code precisely to conceal the fact that it's vulnerable to NSA snooping.

But most people simply don't care if the NSA is reading their email or analyzing their photos because they aren't doing anything wrong.

And anyone using encryption that the NSA can't crack instantly becomes a terrorism suspect and more resources are focused on those data sources under the legal theory that such activity is suspicious per se and provides reasonable suspicion enough to focus on the source. And with analysis of traffic patterns, such as strongly encrypted messages going to and from from the US to Yemen, that's probably enough to create probable cause that a FISA court would accept for issuing a warrant.

But if EVERYONE was using strong encryption, it would no longer be reasonable suspicion of a crime for simply using encryption the NSA can't crack, and they would have to go to greater lengths with traffic analysis (which is entirely legal and constitutional) to identify and build probable cause for a warrant for a specific subject or subjects.

In other words, our own laziness and lack of concern for our own privacy is largely responsible for the NSA pushing the envelope.

[Tero]

I think the NSA does have authority to open out of the country mail. Customs can open packages anyway, but mail too.

[Cormac]

I don't know if this is the case, but I would like to see specific legislation from Congress stating that ANY information gathered by the government for national security purposes can ONLY be used for specified national security purposes such as tracking and apprehending terrorists...and NOTHING ELSE.

...and NOTHING ELSE.



You, of all people, are this naive?

Indeed. We're going to expect them to stay within the law when they're willing to flat out lie to the lawmakers?



Obviously he the NSA thought the lawmakers would not be happy with how the law was actually being skirted/ignored.

Oliver North is practically a folk hero, and he lied through his teeth.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

This news first came out during the Bush 42 presidency. Wasn't a scandal then, of course, Dubya was president.

[Seth]

I think the NSA does have authority to open out of the country mail. Customs can open packages anyway, but mail too.

Yes of course Customs can open packages crossing the border, but that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about domestic mail.