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Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

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Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#121

Post by corndoge »

kick wrote: post #36
corndoge wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read that quote as Ellis siding with El-Masri (notwithstanding that he still ruled invocation of state secrets as valid) - how do you read it?

He knows the CIA did something illegal, but is protecting them. If a mafia member shoots an innocent man, and a judge says "I feel bad for the guy, but the mafia is good for this city, so no can do; yunz are screwed!" it's fairly obvious what's happening. He's preventing criminals from feeling the consequences of the law because of perceived value.

No, he's upholding the law, whether he agrees with it or not, which is his job. A judge's job is to adjudicate based on the law and he adjudicated that states secrets was lawfully invoked.

Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#122

Post by linkregister »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #46
lettergram wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He broke into computer systems he did not have the right to access, copied information, fled the United States, and illegally released the information he stole about government programs that were in no way illegal or unconstitutional. Ugh he didn’t break in, he had access. Also if you know anything about his case or related cases, you’d also know the proper channels don’t lead anywhere. There’s a great frontline do…

> Ugh he didn’t break in, he had access Snowden convinced colleagues to give him their passwords: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/11/snowden... A Google query for "Snowden stole passwords" returns a lot of results.

Snowden gained the vast majority of the electronic information from scraping web tools he had access to. Recall the "wget hacking tool" controversy, where he used the command line to retrieve internal websites. The removal of that information, and obviously the disclosure of it, was illegal.

The government didn't present a release claiming a substantial portion of the information was retrieved with that password list.

Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#123

Post by close04 »

luizfzs wrote: post #21
post_below wrote: post #5

From the article: "Judge Ellis said: "For Wikimedia to litigate the standing issue further, and for defendants to defend adequately in any further litigation, would require the disclosure of protected state secrets, namely details about the Upstream surveillance program's operations. For the reasons that follow, therefore, the standing issue cannot be tried, or otherwise further litigated, without risking or requirin…

That's one thing that Snowden mentions in his book. You cannot have a fair trial if you are an whistleblower, since that would include revealing/acknowledging the existence of such programs, thing they don't want to do.

That's the ultimate get out of jail free card. Break the law but make sure you attach yourself to something that involves state secrets. As such a court will never touch you.

I wonder if there are "secret" courts - a parallel justice and penal system where such issues are tried and punished, similar to military courts (tribunals/court-martial). I'd say no because when you have this power to get away with breaking the law you have enough power to make sure you're never punished.

The US may have 3 branches of power but they're all attached and under the control of the same "state surveillance industry" trunk.

Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#124

Post by saagarjha »

Iv wrote: post #120
saagarjha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> illegitimate laws Now there’s an oxymoron.

It is a very sad democracy when you confuse legitimacy and legality. Slavery, apartheid, death camps were legal. Let me sing you the song of my people. Once upon a time, a french government surrendered to the German invader and changed form to stop being a republic. A colonel (de Gaulle) decided to stop obeying their orders, claiming he was a servant of the French republic, and claiming it was now alive in a governme…

Legitimacy is the same as legality, by definition. Neither of them have anything to do with what is right.

Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#125

Post by teekert »

luizfzs wrote: post #21
post_below wrote: post #5

From the article: "Judge Ellis said: "For Wikimedia to litigate the standing issue further, and for defendants to defend adequately in any further litigation, would require the disclosure of protected state secrets, namely details about the Upstream surveillance program's operations. For the reasons that follow, therefore, the standing issue cannot be tried, or otherwise further litigated, without risking or requirin…

That's one thing that Snowden mentions in his book. You cannot have a fair trial if you are an whistleblower, since that would include revealing/acknowledging the existence of such programs, thing they don't want to do.

That does sound strange to me, can't there be judges that are not politically strapped but bound to secrecy? I understand that in the US you need a jury of peers, but in the Netherlands we don't, so you could copy that system for such cases? Judges should be independent of the state anyway in a trias politica system [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers

Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#126

Post by tialaramex »

chowell wrote: post #118
tialaramex wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear that secrets are a necessary evil. They are, however, greatly desired by exactly the kind of people who definitely shouldn't be allowed them. So that's a bad sign. Inappropriate reliance upon secrets is a recurrent security design mistake. Remember passwords? Well not so much remember, we still have passwords, and they're still terrible. Compare a FIDO Security Key. No secrets, much better. If I'm wron…

This line of reasoning doesn't hold up at all. The best practice advice 'avoid security through obscurity' has nothing to do with what you're talking about. Also, FIDO absolutely relies on secrets: that's what a security key stores. I'd be interested to hear how you think law enforcement and intelligence could still work without confidentiality.

Although the typical design for a FIDO key uses what is technically a symmetric ("secret") key that's an implementation detail and the purpose of the FIDO device is to maintain asymmetric (private) keys.

If you've been under the impression that FIDO is just a shared secret system like TOTP then I've got great news, it's much cleverer than that. By not relying on secrets the system is robust against total incompetence by a relying party. If say Facebook paste all the U2F credentials they have for your account into a public Pastebin, not only can that not be used to attack your Login.gov account secured with the same FIDO key, it can't even be used to attack the Facebook account the credentials are for.

Military intelligence services actually rely heavily on analysis of public information. The value of the exciting and expensive Hollywood-style secret agent is mostly in their ability to do stuff, mostly illegal and immoral stuff, not a benefit to collecting intelligence.

Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#128

Post by labawi »

saagarjha wrote: post #124
Iv wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very sad democracy when you confuse legitimacy and legality. Slavery, apartheid, death camps were legal. Let me sing you the song of my people. Once upon a time, a french government surrendered to the German invader and changed form to stop being a republic. A colonel (de Gaulle) decided to stop obeying their orders, claiming he was a servant of the French republic, and claiming it was now alive in a governme…

Legitimacy is the same as legality, by definition. Neither of them have anything to do with what is right.

If you compare the definitions in say a dictionary[1][2][3], they have high overlap, but are not the same.

Phrases illegal law and illegitimate law have different meanings. While the first seems an oxymoron and the second may be, both seem to be legitimate descriptions of objects in existence.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legitimate

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legal

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/illegitimate

Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#129

Post by Iv »

labawi wrote: post #128
saagarjha wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimacy is the same as legality, by definition. Neither of them have anything to do with what is right.

If you compare the definitions in say a dictionary[1][2][3], they have high overlap, but are not the same. Phrases illegal law and illegitimate law have different meanings. While the first seems an oxymoron and the second may be, both seem to be legitimate descriptions of objects in existence. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legitimate [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legal [3] https://ww…

Ok, my bad, I was not aware that legitimate could actually be synonymous with legal. In my native language, legitimate globally means that it is the general consensus in society, something that ideally the law tries to capture but it is actually importantly distinct from legal and is never used in replacement of it.

Interesting.

Re: Judge dismisses Wikimedia case against NSA over Upstream surveillance

#130

Post by colejohnson66 »

close04 wrote: post #123
luizfzs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one thing that Snowden mentions in his book. You cannot have a fair trial if you are an whistleblower, since that would include revealing/acknowledging the existence of such programs, thing they don't want to do.

That's the ultimate get out of jail free card. Break the law but make sure you attach yourself to something that involves state secrets. As such a court will never touch you. I wonder if there are "secret" courts - a parallel justice and penal system where such issues are tried and punished, similar to military courts (tribunals/court-martial). I'd say no because when you have this power to get away with breaking the…

Secret courts are a thing. Supposedly, they’re just used for NSLs though.
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