NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says • Hacker News Board

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#101

Post by qingcharles » Sun, Jan 28, 2024, 6:48 AM UTC

legitster wrote: post #8

I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…

The US Supreme Court has already shown its reluctance to allow wide-spread, but otherwise legal, data gathering.

In US v Jones, a GPS tracking case, the minority opinions were basically concerned with the fact that the GPS monitoring continued over a wide period of time, covering a wide area:

In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote with respect to privacy: "short-term monitoring of a person's movements on public streets accords with expectations of privacy" but "the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#102

Post by austin-cheney » Sun, Jan 28, 2024, 7:32 AM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #100

austin-cheney wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger issue that people always miss is that NSA is not law enforcement so they do not need a warrant. The Census Bureau does not need a warrant to gather information on Americans either, but for some weird reason people find the NSA controversial but not the census.

I don't know why you think them not being law enforcement changes anything? Constitutional prohibitions generally apply to all governmental bodies, i.e. a school is limited in its ability to constrain your freedom of speech or religion.

The difference there is that the first amendment applies to actions of the individual but the fourth amendment applies to actions of the government. That difference in scope of application thus determines not just whom is protected but also to whom is limited. These first ten amendments exist explicitly to provide individuals lawful rights and when these rights are not violated these laws thus do not apply. For an example see the exclusionary rule. Thus the 4th amendment’s application does not apply all functions of government equally and no law or prior practice says otherwise.

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#103

Post by berniedurfee » Sun, Jan 28, 2024, 2:08 PM UTC

I’d love to have a chat with their LLM. Must be absolutely astonishing what it knows.

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#104

Post by itishappy » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 3:05 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #95

itishappy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The BBC reported that before departing, he told a friend on Snapchat: "On my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)." > Security services saw the message and flagged it to Spanish authorities, who sent two F-18 jets to follow the airliner until it landed, per the BBC. > He faces a public-disorder charge, which could result in him being ordered to pay over $120,000 if he's found guilty. > About $103,…

No, charging 100k to a teenager over a shitty joke over private encrypted communication channel is absolutely not reasonable. Spanish military can eat the cost of their false positive response. Why would you think an innocent individual paying for trigger happiness of authorities would ever be reasonable?

> No, charging 100k to a teenager over a shitty joke over private encrypted communication channel is absolutely not reasonable.

Where are you putting the stress in this sentence?

If your issue is with the encrypted private channel being spied upon, then I completely agree, and so did the court system.

But outside of that, if he had said this via SMS, this would be the standard response. It may be a shitty joke, but jokes don't make you magically immune to consequences. You can't yell "fire" in a clouded theater, and you can't say "on my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)" while boarding a commercial airliner. Well, you can, you just should expect to be sued.