For those keeping score, this is another of the kind of comment that lead me to believe that most HN commenters take the obvious interpretation of "direct access".
What? I'm not putting forth any interpretation of 'direct access'. I appreciate that it seems you are responding to a lot of comments but I really find this comment lazy and borderline offensive.
The two are not really competing claims; the argument over whether they are is the argument that NSA could in fact have direct access to the servers operating Google Mail.
I'm not interested in the semantic argument. Emily Bazelon called The Guardian out this week on the Slate political podcast, as have many others; this is now a mainstream criticism of how The Guardian reported the story. Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence published thus far. I call this out contin…
> Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence published thus far. Evidence being "Google denies it"?
And that The Guardian ran a story contradicting it, and that Marc Ambinder reported a story suggesting that PRISM was a dropbox system and not direct access, and that Declan McCullagh ran a story with sources saying that NSA does not have access to Google Mail, and the NYT running a story with an attached court order from the FISC showing Yahoo availing itself of the opportunity to try to deny NSA access to its servers, and the idea that NSA having direct access to Google is an extraordinary claim requiring not just some evidence, but extraordinary evidence.
As 'DannyBee, himself a lawyer, pointed out a few days ago: no provision of any Federal law requires anyone to issue false statements. There are times you're prevented from saying things†, but there aren't times when NSA gets to put words in your mouth. † ... we think; the ultimate Constitutionality of this is up in the air.
I'm sure the lying part comes automatically when you want to keep your job and you can't tell your boss that you just broke every rule the company has.
If you're saying some lower-level employee of Google was "turned" by NSA and then lied about it to their manager, we're back into "illicit access" territory.
Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a…
It really is appalling that this isn't more rejected. A couple decades ago impeachment, resignations, firings would happen. Everyone thinks about how this affects us now, how will it affect everyone decades from now? Pretty soon warrants won't be needed at all because Executive Orders override them and are 'legal'. We may as well just remove the 4th amendment since everyone is so scared and complacent.
Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a…
If they were obtained without a warrant, wouldn't they be inadmissible as evidence, especially if they were being used in an inculpatory rather than exculpatory manner?
The government lawyers' opinion is that they can later get a warrant to access the data, long after it was recorded (see the whole discussion on "collect" meaning to take a book off the shelf and read it). They also seem to think it's ok to datamine the recordings as long as it's done anonymously.
Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a…
If they were obtained without a warrant, wouldn't they be inadmissible as evidence, especially if they were being used in an inculpatory rather than exculpatory manner?
There seems to be a lot of legal niggling regarding that, obtaining the data itself is perfectly well within all legal avenues -- including indexing it and organizing it into whatever manner -- however querying the resultant database is quite restricted (with apparently many levels of oversight).
The ethics of data collection in the age of people sharing all sorts of information with Google, Facebook, etc, are not a clear cut thing. Moreover, it's not meaningless whether its illegal or not. Indeed, it makes all the difference in the world. Laws can be changed if we don't like their outcomes--a government that's ignoring the law is something else entirely.
> The ethics of data collection in the age of people sharing all sorts of information with Google, Facebook, etc, are not a clear cut thing. It is a peculiar brand of corporatism that thinks the privileges afforded to corporations should somehow be considered when talking about the privileges given to governments. Quite the opposite of what one normally sees, but still curiously the same.
I'm not talking about privileges, I'm talking about the nature of what is "private information." I don't think the ethics of the government collecting information you share with people on Facebook you might have met once, along with god knows how many employees at Facebook, Google, etc, are clear cut.
Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a…
> the NSA might be sitting on audio recordings of all your phone calls for the past several years
I believe you would be interested in Laura Poitras (Snowden advisor and documentary filmmaker) and William Binney (NSA code breaker who designed some of this software and then got a friendly FBI raid-at-gunpoint and who spoke at the same DEFCON as General Alexander). Specifically, Snowden watched Poitras's documentary about Binney, The Program, before seeking her assistance in learning how to live the surveilled life:
> The ethics of data collection in the age of people sharing all sorts of information with Google, Facebook, etc, are not a clear cut thing. It is a peculiar brand of corporatism that thinks the privileges afforded to corporations should somehow be considered when talking about the privileges given to governments. Quite the opposite of what one normally sees, but still curiously the same.
I'm not talking about privileges, I'm talking about the nature of what is "private information." I don't think the ethics of the government collecting information you share with people on Facebook you might have met once, along with god knows how many employees at Facebook, Google, etc, are clear cut.
And I say that how we should treat Facebook collecting data and how we should treat governments collecting data (even data from Facebook) are entirely disjoint. Anything else is a peculiar brand of corporatism.