Latest NSA Leak: Rules On How They Use Data Without A Warrant
from the wow dept
Glenn Greenwald had promised that there were more incredible leaks concerning the NSA to come, and here's the first big one. Greenwald has revealed the NSA's rules that show the procedures for targeting non-US persons, and also how they "minimize" data collected on US persons when dealing with the "bulk" data records collection they do, such as with all of the data around every phone call made. These are two key parts to the NSA's insistence that they're staying within the law and not spying on people in the US. The details here, however, suggest a very different story. The FISA court has signed off on these rules that appear to grant incredibly wide latitude for the NSA to make use of data, rather than really "minimize" its usage. While President Obama and others have insisted that the rules make sure that the NSA really isn't collecting data on Americans, the reality shows that FISC approved rules let the NSA:- Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;
- Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;
- Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;
- Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.
One such warrant seen by the Guardian shows that they do not contain detailed legal rulings or explanation. Instead, the one-paragraph order, signed by a Fisa court judge in 2010, declares that the procedures submitted by the attorney general on behalf of the NSA are consistent with US law and the fourth amendment.But since those procedures have now been leaked, we can see that they're not very carefully targeted at all. If the NSA doesn't know where someone is located, it can assume the person is foreign:
In the absence of specific information regarding whether a target is a United States person, a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person unless such person can be positively identified as a United States person.That part about how the NSA can still keep data on US persons if they believe the data contains "evidence of a crime," "technical data base information" or "information pertaining to a threat of serious harm to life or property" obviously give the NSA incredible powers to -- contrary to what they've stated publicly -- retain all sorts of info on Americans.
Once we and others have had a chance to dig deeper through these, I'm sure we'll have more to say, but for now, it appears that, once again, the NSA and its defenders were less than fully forthcoming about how the NSA uses the data it collects and how it makes sure that Americans aren't targeted.
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Filed Under: fisa, fisa court, fisc, foreign persons, minimization, nsa, nsa surveillance, oversight, targeting, us persons, warrants
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Remember, my fellow Americans: only criminals encrypt things.
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I really can't see this one passing ANYONE's laugh test.
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But first, in regards to your 6 year old daughters expectations, the idea is it's the expectation of privacy a "reasonable adult" would have.
My main problem with this test, aside from deciding what a "reasonable adult" would think, is that it's incredibly flexible in a way that guarantees that what is considered "private" will shrink to nothing over time.
It works like this: you, and everyone else, may reasonably expect that you have privacy in some situation. Say, your privacy-fenced back yard.
Then, the government is caught spying on people with drones over their backyards. Whether or not that activity is punished, no reasonable person would expect privacy in their backyards anymore. So, being in your backyard would no longer pass the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test.
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I think that is the basis of the PRISIM program and why the Feds think it's constitutional. Since people give their info to facebook and google they don't "expect" it to be private, therefore it's fair game for the NSA
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I remember seeing "share with: friends, friends except acquaintances, friend of friends, public, me only" on the privacy settings. Nowhere did I see a greyed out permanently checked box marked NSA.
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"Won't you be my... Won't you be my... Won't you be MY neighbor?"
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Absurd.
Unless they also have a secret interpretation of the constitution along side their secret interpretation of these secretive laws they're using to justify their secret spying on us?
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We've heard it all before, actually.
So...
...but some animals are more equal than others.
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> baffling to me. what the hell does what people "expect"
> or not have to do with Constitutional law to begin with.
It actually doesn't have anything to do with the Constitution, or even reality. What people actually expect is irrelevant. The government (i.e., the courts) decide *for* us what is reasonable for us to expect regarding privacy and anything that falls outside that ever-shrinking circle is fair game, regardless of any *actual* expectations of privacy you or I might have.
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Banking.
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Re: Banking.
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Lacking shopping lists, but knowing where you shopped can also give a good idea of what you are up to.
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You know all that "metadata" that they're collecting? Part of that metadata is the number that you dial.
Ever call someone and punch your credit card number into the phone? Or your PIN?
Yeah. NSA has your Credit Card or PIN now. Without a warrant.
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Not so much. Once you have dialed the phone number you're calling and the call is established, all sounds going over the line are part of the call contents (they they promise with a cherry on top they aren't listening to), including the DTMF tones that pressing the numbers generates.
After call setup is complete, the phone company equipment is no longer listening to the line to process DTMF, those tones are not translated into numbers, etc. Your credit card numbers, PINs, and so on are absolutely not part of the call "metadata".
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since we have gone so long being led down this primrose path and find we have been lied to the whole time, the ONLY REASONABLE response is to NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING the gummint tells us...
you will be correct at least 90% of the time...
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I believe all of this is being spied on as well, but that's a different thing than spying on the metadata.
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Given the government's increasingly frequent use of wordplay, that could essentially be interpreted to be anything that impedes the government's status-quo or interrupt legacy businesses or financial institutions.
When you look at other recent revelations, like Alan Grayson's statement that TPP "hands the sovereignty of our country over to corporate interests." the reassurances of our government leaves me tremendously "comforted".
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Just had to post this from a Guardian article
05:00 GMT: Daybreak: LIVE: all the dawn raids from mission control
07:00 GMT: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Anybody with an E-Mail Account, Basically: Entertainment show where the computer selects random names from the Persons of Interest file and has them subjected them to all the rigours of an MI6 investigation: Whose pied-à-terre Will George ‘Smiley’ Osborne send his SWAT team round to this week – and will it end in tearful surrender or a hail of bullets? Tune in and find out!
08:00 GMT: Wheel of Treason: Game show: tonight’s unlucky contestants are a team of Trotskyite Tweeters from the Twickenham Area!
08:30 GMT: Panorama Pyjamarama! : We turn the tables and take a look at those pesky BBC reporters’ personal files.
09:00 GMT: Who Do You Think You Are, Cuz We Might Know Different?!: William Hague and his team of crack-hackers pursue one line of enquiry – and invariably uncover a mountain of embarrassing facts about some innocent plebs along the way! Tonight: how the search for a Polish mobster, led to the arrest and prosecution of a pole-vaulter from Walsall.
10:00 GMT: Embarrassing Bodies: Choice Jpegs from the secret accounts.
11:00 GMT: Jack Straw’s Medieval Torture Hour! Archive fun from the Abu Ghraib interrogation video-file. (Contains scenes that most decent human beings may find offensive)
12:00-05:00 GMT: Big Brother. Live coverage of EVERYTHING!
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Possible evidence of a crime is basically almost everything you ever say or do, since there are so many laws that we don't even know about, including secret laws that we are not allowed to know.
The only reason to archive this stuff is so that, if you become annoying later, particularly if you start campaigning against, say, unlimited spying by government, they can discredit or destroy you.
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time for an American Spring...
(...or -perhaps more appropriately- an American Fall)
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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Once they get a Quantum computer
Yeah, the inadvertently acquired communications rule pretty much says if you collect and read first before checking whether you're allowed to collect and read, well that's okay, then.
And NSA agents thus have no reason to check that they need to collect or read before they start. So we have total circumvention of 4th amendment protections.
Shoot first. Interrogate survivors.
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Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications
Because the NSA can't know to preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications unless it has read the privileged communications already.
I'm not sure whether to become a hermit, or to go all activist guns-a-blazing over this. (That's a metaphor you knee-jerk reactionary govt. fucks.)
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Why, oh why
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wonder why...
i'm sure none of our masters of the universe would point out this factoid to them when an especially egregious violation was being pushed through...
and next week i get a rainbow-colored unicorn ! ! !
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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Well, that was crystal clear
To think it's all 'legal', too. Gee whiz, doesn't it feel great to be an American?
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Encryption
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Quote:
http://prism-break.org/
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NSA Violations
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> in the country...more so then the CIA, the FBI,
> the Justice Department, Homeland Security, on and on.
Congress is always the ultimate authority because Congress controls the money. You think those data centers are cheap? If Congress turns off the tap, it won't be long before NSA can't pay the bills to keep all their fancy toys running.
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DOD, we need money to buy .
Congress says here is $$$B toward your goal.
DOD does a little fancy accounting and $$B gets pumped through to the NSA and $B gets spent on .
NSA has cash and congress knows nothing about it.
DOD presses the "That was Easy" button and repeats.
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> $800 for a hammer do you?
Yes, I saw INDEPENDENCE DAY, also.
If you don't think Congress could financially cripple the NSA if it collectively wanted to, you're watching too many Hollywood movies.
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What would likely happen is that would get worse if the congress decided to 'take away' the NSA budget. There is no one in congress that will properly oversee the DOD, and you really can't it is just too big to track every penny.
The budget for the DOD for 2014 is proposed to be between $512B and $516B dollars. No one would even question where $10M or $20M of that went, it is less than .5% of the budget. Do you really think the DOD can't make $10 or 12 Million (Or far more) get get funneled to the NSA (or a similar program)?
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Encryption
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Re: Encryption
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No True American
Of course. No American would do things that attact the attention of the NSA.
Refine that: No TRUE American would do ...
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The NSA will interpret them as encrypted messages and retain them thus wasting storage space and giving a hopeless task should they ever decide to try to decrypt them.
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