Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#61

Post by brown9-2 »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #57
brown9-2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FISA has provisions for surveilling "facilities", buildings, and locations, and is not limited to orders to surveil just an individual. A more generous reading would suggest that is what "foreign entity" is referring to - cases where the NSA is surveilling a safehouse or a military base and not necessarily a human being.

A foreign company might also qualify as an entity. Even a company that merely has offices abroad might qualify. US Citizens who work for foreign entities might very well be included.

The law makes it clear that US persons (defined as citizens or legal residents) are not to be included whether they are presently in the USA or travelling abroad.

Even foreign persons who are under surveillance are to be excluded when they travel to the US.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#62

Post by warfangle »

brown9-2 wrote: post #61
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A foreign company might also qualify as an entity. Even a company that merely has offices abroad might qualify. US Citizens who work for foreign entities might very well be included.

The law makes it clear that US persons (defined as citizens or legal residents) are not to be included whether they are presently in the USA or travelling abroad. Even foreign persons who are under surveillance are to be excluded when they travel to the US.

Yet the system can only figure with 51% probability whether or not an entity being targeted is, in fact, foreign or US-born.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#63

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

brown9-2 wrote: post #61
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A foreign company might also qualify as an entity. Even a company that merely has offices abroad might qualify. US Citizens who work for foreign entities might very well be included.

The law makes it clear that US persons (defined as citizens or legal residents) are not to be included whether they are presently in the USA or travelling abroad. Even foreign persons who are under surveillance are to be excluded when they travel to the US.

Care to point out where the law makes that clear? It's my understanding that communications to/from "foreign entities" are subject to monitoring; as are any communications which have been routed outside the continental US, without regard to the endpoints.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#64

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

hooande wrote: post #21

The reason that FISA warrant requests have such a high acceptance rate is because a federal prosecutor wouldn't ask for one unless they were certain it would be approved. They don't have to file a request every time a federal agent wants a warrant. They have the option to say "You need to gather more evidence". They say a good trial lawyer won't ask a witness a question without knowing what the answer will be. FBI la…

>a federal prosecutor wouldn't ask for one unless they were certain it would be approved.

Yes they would, over the course of a dozen years and many investigations, federal prosecutors would most certainly push the envelope of what is allowed to expand their power/capability, or if nothing else, to discover what the actual boundaries are.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#65

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

fragsworth wrote: post #8
crispycret wrote: post #6

Best article I have read in a while. It's tragic comedy how they get a way with it. I mean i tried asking a group of friends what they thought, to learn they don't know what the fuck PRISM is! It usually goes. "No one cares about, what the government does, your just weird." I'm anti social so the only time I hangout with them is when I'm stoned. So I can see why I'm weird to the average teenager, but to not know abou…

It's questionable that they are "getting away with it". The implications of what they've done are incredibly vast and damning. Not to mention, persistent - people now know everything they type on their computer is handed over to the government. That doesn't go away, no matter how much the media might want to ignore the subject. I'd actually be surprised if they completely get away with it. At least a few people will…

If nothing changes, nobody goes to jail, and nobody loses their job (as in fired / disgraced, not retired with pension & consulting job @RAND), I'd say they got away with it.

>people now know everything they type on their computer is handed over to the government.

And those who are honest with themselves are less free, they moderate their behavior, even perfectly legal behavior. Those who are not honest with themselves will continue as if nothing changed ("the gov't doesn't care about what I do" "they aren't really recording and storing my calls").

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#66

Post by thaumasiotes »

bjourne wrote: post #31
thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inarticulate, chopped-up sentences are just an artifact of the article's author purposefully being nasty to Obama. Everybody talks like that; it's just not quoted as a matter of course.

Couldn't it just be laziness? Is it customary to clean up someones speeched transcript so that it reads better in written form?

It's not just customary; it is very much against standard practice not to do it. You want to see what people actually say? The Nixon tape transcripts famously didn't clean the speech.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#67

Post by thaumasiotes »

MDCore wrote: post #29
thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inarticulate, chopped-up sentences are just an artifact of the article's author purposefully being nasty to Obama. Everybody talks like that; it's just not quoted as a matter of course.

I think it makes more sense to say the author is writing it like that to show that Obama was stumbling with his words in response to a "yes/no/I don't know" question. That's useful information that I appreciate the author conveying.

The problem here is that that information is being conveyed solely through contentless innuendo. You can expect the same level of disfluency from a softball

"How awesome is your new program?" "So awesome"

Q&A session. People only think this transcript shows Obama stumbling with his words because they aren't aware that printed media cleans up the natural disfluencies that occur in speech. This transcript looks highly unusual, but that isn't because Obama's false starts and stops are unusual (they aren't). It's because it's unusual for them to be printed in a quote. Thus, the conclusion that the author is malicious. An attack on Obama for refusing to answer the question is fine. An attack on him for speaking like a normal person in a spoken interview makes no sense.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#68

Post by JonSkeptic »

weland wrote: post #18

Dear God, it's like I'm a kid again. I didn't grow up in the US; when I was a kid, we didn't have this kind of interviews on TV. For one thing, most of the TV shows they aired was propaganda, and it was so utterly boring most of us didn't bother. The newspapers, on the other hand, carried propaganda along with the news, so you kindda had to read it, too, if you were to know what's happening. The smarter folks could e…

You may be right. However, "foreign entity" does not strictly mean "non-US person" and this is highly intentional. A foreign entity does not have to be a person. It can be a bank, a corporation, a nation, an foreign based activist group.

You view it as discriminatory and it may very well be; I purport that its purpose is to encompass literally everything that is not a U.S. person, thereby allowing them nearly unlimited use of all programs that are allegedly not used against U.S. persons. The discrimination aspect is import, but I think the definition aspect that extends the reach of their scope to nigh-unlimited, is also an important way to view that particular word choice.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#69

Post by CWuestefeld »

bmelton wrote: post #2

The number of requests is not, as Obama asserts, "surprisingly small". It is probably smaller than it ought to be, and in light of the NSA's recent admission that they've tapped warrantlessly, that's probably the explanation. Regardless, here's their record, and they certainly aren't disapproving much. https://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html If there's a reason that Obama can't confirm it (beyond that…

Don't we have evidence why the number of requests is "surprisingly small"?

All this time we assumed that the requests would refer to individuals who were under suspicion. But the Verizon order tells us differently. Here we've got one, giant request for "every call that passes through Verizon".

It's a huge amount of spying being done, all carried on the back of one (or a handful) of blanket requests.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#70

Post by bmelton »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #69
bmelton wrote: post #2

The number of requests is not, as Obama asserts, "surprisingly small". It is probably smaller than it ought to be, and in light of the NSA's recent admission that they've tapped warrantlessly, that's probably the explanation. Regardless, here's their record, and they certainly aren't disapproving much. https://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html If there's a reason that Obama can't confirm it (beyond that…

Don't we have evidence why the number of requests is "surprisingly small"? All this time we assumed that the requests would refer to individuals who were under suspicion. But the Verizon order tells us differently. Here we've got one, giant request for "every call that passes through Verizon". It's a huge amount of spying being done, all carried on the back of one (or a handful) of blanket requests.

As I understand it, that's possible, but the 'metadata' requests aren't routinely surveyed because they don't capture 'enough' data to constitute something that would require a warrant.

To put it in more real world terms, it takes a warrant for me to go into your house and listen to what you're doing, but I am perfectly free to sit outside your house and watch your comings and goings without one. I believe (but do not know) that the current interpretation of the metadata requests is being treated like this, where the NSA simply feels that no warrant is required.

Your argument however, probably holds more weight because, at the least, you would very much hope that Verizon and company wouldn't be handing over data without some kind of warrant, even with a 'strong suggestion' from the feds.

Post reply on HN