So, if I wanted to listen in on some phone calls, would the best course of action be to bribe one of these thousands of analysts, blackmail them, threaten them, or steal their laptop? Asking for a friend in a foreign intelligence service.
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
261–270 of 407 posts
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, as 'DannyBee has been at pains to point out, no federal statute ever obligates anyone to lie about anything.
The law is more than the statues. The rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are classified, so we don't know how the statutes are being interpreted and applied. We do know, however, that the executive has a history of using bizarre legal theories to skirt the spirit of the law. But even if Google isn't obligated to lie, it might still be lying. Maybe Google is lying, not because it's obligated to by…
If Justin Schuh is lying about anything that's happening at Google, I'll videotape myself eating a dirty sock.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really unfortunate that most people read 1984 as teenagers (I did). I went back to it as an adult, somewhat expecting it to be a let down. What I found was quite the opposite, there's a lot more nuance in that book than would really be absorbed by high school students being forced to read it. "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you beg…
Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.
My god, when you are older, you will look back and wish that you pursued the "shallow" things in high school. Some of those experiences are not going to be available at any other time in your life. Being an intellectual is overrated; don't be so quick to judge your peers, many of them are wise in ways that you cannot see.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#264Why is Snowden a traitor but Nadler not? Did Nadler not just go to the press with information that was part of a secret NSA briefing?
Congresspeople have immunity for anything they say on the House floor barring treason. Mike Gravel read Ellsburg's Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record in the '70s.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow. Larry Page and Google's General Counsel jointly signed the denial.
Hypothesis: Page was lying; the General Counsel was in the dark for plausible deniability and genuinely believes to this day that PRISM doesn't exist, at least not in a way that involves Google. I don't see this hypothesis as being anywhere outside the wheelhouse of the NSA. Even outright infiltration (i.e. the hypothesis that not even Page is in the know) is, well, kind of the point of intelligence services, but it'…
This is just innuendo.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 serve…
And that the actual slide "collection directly from the servers" came from supports Google's version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5887627 .
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#267Why are we only hearing about this now? From the House Judiciary Committee meeting on THURSDAY where Nadler questions FBI Director Mueller:
NADLER: You wanted to listen to the phone?
MUELLER: Then you have to get a special — a particularized order from...
NADLER: Particularized...
MUELLER: ... the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual.
NADLER: Now is the answer you just gave me classified...
MUELLER: Is what?
NADLER: The answer you just gave me classified in any way?
MUELLER: I don't think so.
NADLER: OK, then I can ask the — then I can say the following: We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that, and you didn't need a new warrant. In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict...
MUELLER: I'm not certain that it's the same answer to the same question. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to...
NADLER: Well, I asked the question both times, and I think it's the same question. So maybe you'd better go back and check, because someone was incorrect.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 1st sentence seems fine: the companies have no practical way to withhold consent. The phrasing "directly and unilaterally seize " seems exaggerated given the preponderance of current revelations and denials, but if Prism includes other not-yet-revealed acquisition methods, might still be substantially true. After all, the denials you're relying on are from company leaders who also said they've never heard of Pris…
> but if Prism includes other not-yet-revealed acquisition methods, might still be substantially true Yes, but that's close to being a tautology: what outlandish claim might not turn out to be true if in future startling new revelations supported it? In fact, direct access in the NSA-has-root sense is less likely in light of the PRISM slides: why file 702 orders and dicker with webco lawyers if you're able and willin…
There's lots of evidence there's way deeper unrevealed stuff: hints from earlier NSA-careerist whistleblowers and Snowden. ~40 more slides in the PRISM deck that Greenwald has seen. Possibly thousands more documents Snowden has provided to Greenwald and perhaps other journalists. Representative Sanchez (D-CA) describing what's public so far as "the tip of the iceberg". Representative Nadler (D-NY) essentially acknowledging warrantless domestic wiretaps, at analyst discretion, in apparent contradiction to sworn testimony of General Alexander a few days ago, and President Obama's comments a week ago.
So while of course, we can't assume every covert acquisition method darkly imaginable is happening, it would also be foolish to assume that exactly what has been clearly documented so far is the full story.
Why the trouble of extra legal orders and a paper trail if the NSA already had deeper covert access? Well, the government isn't efficient and different levels can't always work together. For example, why did the DoJ use more normal procedures to get AP phone records, when the NSA already had all that data? Also, when you have a treasure trove of info obtained in illegal ways, or in ways you don't want to admit, and you want to act in ways revealing that you have that info, you can try to get it again in a second, redundant way: one that you can explain, and maybe legally rationalize.
And when nobody inside or outside your organization has the whole picture, the fact that there's some legal process for getting some info from, for example, Google, might serve as plausible cover deflecting questions about how exactly so much more info winds up in the system.
In fact, that's one possible mechanism for the PRISM slides' author thinking that the access to Google et al is so much more powerful and 'direct' than the companies' own measured response process can explain. They're each blind men feeling different parts of the elephant.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.
My god, when you are older, you will look back and wish that you pursued the "shallow" things in high school. Some of those experiences are not going to be available at any other time in your life. Being an intellectual is overrated; don't be so quick to judge your peers, many of them are wise in ways that you cannot see.
You seem to extrapolate something from his words and then make a judgement. Can you give an example of one "shallow" thing that shouldn't be replaced by "being intellectual" and makes peers "wise in ways"?
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#270So that's not good. You can see how that could be happening; NSA has trunk-level access to telephony circuits. Telcos are engaged in a long-running game of footsie with the government that makes billion dollar Internet companies look like anarcho-capitalists. But I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access…
> I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail.
Couldn't the NSA sniff packets the major internet hubs like MAE-West and MAE-East? I assume most email is sent as cleartext after it leaves Google's servers. Even if intermediate hops were encrypted, the NSA could easily man-in-the-middle any servers they wanted. I'm sure CAs like VeriSign would be happy to do their patriotic duty issuing forged certificates.