FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection • Hacker News Board

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#131

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 3:47 PM UTC

haylem wrote: post #113

tootie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a terribly analogy. The bureacracy isn't there as just a speedbump. It's there to make sure you don't waste time on cases doomed to fail. Secondly, surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime. Assassinations are not.

It's not a great analogy indeed. However, you also don't provide much proof that "surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime". Its efficiency to deter/prevent crime, or even to help catch offenders a posteriori, is also highly debatable (I guess it's more likely to be helpful for the latter, but that still makes the definition of "fighting crime" rather vague as well). For kicks, I like this paper on how str…

There is another way in which the analogy is flawed. The analogy states that after the six months, when the forms have been reviewed or approved, the target dies.

If this is to be analogous to bulk surveillance, the assassination agency would have to discover that the target had actually died in an accident eight months ago, just before the forms were submitted, and they would simply retroactively dismiss any wrongful death or homicide cases that may be ongoing.

The panopticon operators are asking forgiveness rather than permission, and only for those specific instances where the surveillance needs to be laundered from illegally gathered to warrant-authorized.

As such, I have no faith that the spying has ever stopped, or slowed, or even decreased its rate of growth. The steep bureaucratic hurdle does nothing to prevent it. The most it does is limit the amount of information that can be moved from the shadows into the sunshine via that method, and strongly encourages less costly alternatives to actually honoring the law. One such workaround is "parallel construction", where the illegal spying is converted into an anonymous tip to another "innocent" agency of the state, who then gets reasonable suspicion on a pretext charge--like failure to signal a lane change, plus the invocation of the magical ritual phrase "I smell marijuana"--and then the road-patrol cop somehow finds 20 kilograms of cocaine in the trunk.

Fixing or eliminating the FISA court won't stop the behavior. Only actual accountability for the people actually doing the dirty deeds will help.

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#132

Post by Trektillian » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 3:47 PM UTC

you think they need a warrent?

a few things occured to me recently:

aluminum and mercury in vaxx are electrical/radio conductors

coil spring matresses are actually 12x12 arrays of coils, googling coil array its for "parallel mri via rf" - university of colorado... its actually a large array of receiver antennas [google golay coils]

people rub sodium aluminum on their armpits as a cheap anti-perspirent. what do you call electric/radio conductors on both sides of the heart? a pacemaker.

dont believe me? check for yourself, apparently mercury was known toxic since 500BC [dartmouth.edu] and they still wont remove it from vaxx (they claim they use organic compound mercury now and its "different" and "non toxic" ;d

thanks christian scientists!

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#133

Post by john_b » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 3:47 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #110

gjm11 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a system that works as follows. You can have people assassinated. In order to do so, however, you need to fill in a hundred-page form with exhaustive details of your personal finances, your medical history, and the contents of your computers' hard drives; and then you need to play six sets of tennis against a strong player and win at least two; and then you need to play a 7-game chess match against a holder o…

That's a terribly analogy. The bureacracy isn't there as just a speedbump. It's there to make sure you don't waste time on cases doomed to fail. Secondly, surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime. Assassinations are not.

> "Secondly, surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime."

This is a very dubious assertion. I'm not aware of any evidence that mass surveillance deters or prevents crime at all, much less is "an essential tool" for doing so.

But even if one, for the sake of argument, concedes the point that mass surveillance does significantly deter or prevent crime, you still have a system set up where the costs of that surveillance (loss of privacy, loss of accountability for abuses of power, introducing/secretly discovering backdoors, etc) are borne by the least powerful--ordinary citizens--while the benefits of mass surveillance (concentration of power, ability to bribe/extort/intimidate rivals, being seen as "doing something" about terrorism, etc) accrue only to those who are already powerful.

That is the real problem with mass surveillance. It creates a positive feedback loop that only exacerbates existing power imbalances, inevitably leading to corruption and capricious injustices by those who are most able to get away with it. Having a speedbump on the road to that inevitable destination, even a big one, is not much of a consolation if the heading is still the same.

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#134

Post by acveilleux » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #42

dmix wrote: post #9

Just a reminder about FISA's historical performance: > Between 2001 and 2012, the FISA judges approved 20,909 surveillance and property search warrants - an average of 33 a week. During that 12-year period, the judges denied just 10 applications. Prosecutors withdrew another 26 applications. > From 2007 to 2012, FISA judges also approved 532 "business record" warrant applications, the category used in the order that…

I can tell you from first hand experience that getting a warrant TO the FISA court from a sponsoring agency is a massive bureaucratic battle in and of itself. Reason being, the agency powers that be don't want to send something up that will be disapproved because it takes significant time and effort of general counsel and leadership of these agencies to process, implement and track to maintain compliance - even if th…

The problem with an explanation like that is three-fold:

1. It applies to agencies you know and more specifically parts of those agencies you have experience with. Many federal agencies have demonstrated that the left hand and the right hand don't always talk.

2. Other agencies are free to apply different policies (cough NSA cough DEA cough) that aren't in line with say, the FBI's policies.

3. This does not change the fact that the FISA court acts as a rubber stamp, the bulk majority of what it rubber-stamps might have met the requirement of EO 12333, some of ought might also have been legal under the constitution and existing laws or maybe the judges are so blasé that they just assume that most of what they see must be OK, it got there after all.

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#135

Post by mirimir » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 3:58 PM UTC

fru2013 wrote: post #13

I personally think that creating laws to prevent government surveillance is a pointless endeavor. The NSA has ignored and broken laws in the past, why would we expect them to follow new ones that are passed? The only way to prevent surveillance is with a technical solution (encryption), not a legal solution (more laws).

The NSA is a military organization, and arguably does not consider itself to be bound by domestic law. After all, the US is perpetually at war. But the legal environment can limit the NSA's options for using intelligence. When efforts must remain secret, there's more need for parallel construction.

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#136

Post by chris_wot » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 4:02 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #110

gjm11 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a system that works as follows. You can have people assassinated. In order to do so, however, you need to fill in a hundred-page form with exhaustive details of your personal finances, your medical history, and the contents of your computers' hard drives; and then you need to play six sets of tennis against a strong player and win at least two; and then you need to play a 7-game chess match against a holder o…

That's a terribly analogy. The bureacracy isn't there as just a speedbump. It's there to make sure you don't waste time on cases doomed to fail. Secondly, surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime. Assassinations are not.

So let me get this straight, to prevent agents from wasting time on cases that are doomed to fail, they make sure that agents waste large amounts of time going through bureaucracy for legitimate cases that will probably win?

That sounds perverse.

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#137

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 4:04 PM UTC

csandreasen wrote: post #93

shadowmint wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pair of judges every six months with 800 applications to review? Or a pair of judges every month with 150 applications to review? In what time period? Do they spend an hour? A whole day? A whole week? All we have to go on is one vague article. ...and that article suggests that ( if we accept they rotate duty and meet monthly say) they spend, on average, (8 hours / 133 * 60 minutes) ~3.5 minutes carefully evaluating…

> A pair of judges ... Do they spend an hour? A whole day? A whole week? All we have to go on is one vague article. The FISC has its own website which happens to answer your question right on the "About" page[1]: The Court sits in Washington D.C., and is composed of eleven federal district court judges who are designated by the Chief Justice of the United States. Each judge serves for a maximum of seven years and the…

All the real work is being done by clerks and staff attorneys. The judges just show up to read the briefs and sign the orders. I doubt the judges themselves are spending much more than 15 minutes on each warrant. The court staff are likely spending 4-12 man-hours on each warrant, mostly filling in the blanks on forms and boilerplate.

And their jobs are not really to weigh the merits, but to cover the judge's ass, just in case something really egregious comes back that points at their bench.

As they preside over a secret court that determines whether the low standard of reasonable suspicion has been passed, the judges barely need to spend any time at all actually judging anything. The worst that can happen is that the trial judge might exclude the evidence collected on their warrant, and that's about as damaging to their careers as an ingrown hair.

I'm not sure you could find a cushier job if you designed one from scratch.

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#138

Post by Lawtonfogle » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 4:06 PM UTC

bazillion wrote: post #53

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you from first hand experience that getting a warrant TO the FISA court from a sponsoring agency is a massive bureaucratic battle in and of itself. Reason being, the agency powers that be don't want to send something up that will be disapproved because it takes significant time and effort of general counsel and leadership of these agencies to process, implement and track to maintain compliance - even if th…

This is exactly the case. The reason there are almost no denials is that there would have been a great amount of due diligence performed to ensure that FISA collection was warranted. The fact that there are any denials after such analytic rigor takes place, suggests that the FISA court is not a rubber stamp. Every single year people who are read onto FISA must complete a comprehensive course on how to deal with FISA…

>The fact that there are any denials after such analytic rigor takes place, suggests that the FISA court is not a rubber stamp.

The fact that there are any indictments after such extensive training takes place suggests that Internal Investigations is not dismissing warranted claims of illegal police behavior.

I don't buy that logic at all.

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#139

Post by chris_wot » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 4:09 PM UTC

bazillion wrote: post #53

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you from first hand experience that getting a warrant TO the FISA court from a sponsoring agency is a massive bureaucratic battle in and of itself. Reason being, the agency powers that be don't want to send something up that will be disapproved because it takes significant time and effort of general counsel and leadership of these agencies to process, implement and track to maintain compliance - even if th…

This is exactly the case. The reason there are almost no denials is that there would have been a great amount of due diligence performed to ensure that FISA collection was warranted. The fact that there are any denials after such analytic rigor takes place, suggests that the FISA court is not a rubber stamp. Every single year people who are read onto FISA must complete a comprehensive course on how to deal with FISA…

The problem with your argument is that nobody can legally validate it's central premise, because nobody is allowed to review applications to the FISC.

Unless you have some sort of inside track, I must ask you how you know that applications are thorough and well constructed? Because the only way to be sure is to allow for public scrutiny, but the whole point of the FISC is to avoid this.

Re: FISA court rules NSA can resume bulk data collection

#140

Post by Lawtonfogle » Wed, Jul 01, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

ngoede wrote: post #96

billions wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FISA court is unconstitutional.

I don't know that this is true but I think we ought to pass a law or constitutional amendment banning secret/private courts if it is not.

The resistance to the Bill of Rights was based on this very notion, the fear that adding an enumeration of some rights would eventually be seen as an enumeration of all rights and that any rights not explicitly enumerated would be considered as lesser rights not protected by the Constitution.

Of course, a right being clearly stated in the Constitution doesn't do much to protect it either. Consider all the limits on gun ownership that run counter to the second amendment. Even someone who is against guns should be of the view that a Constitutional amendment should be needed to allow for limits like those we currently have. For example, banning a mentally ill person from owning a gun or charging a licensing fee to own a gun. Both of these exists and are not considered to infringe on second amendment rights. Now imagine if the same logic was applied to other rights, such as a fee to vote or not allowing free speech to those deemed to have a mental illness (never mind the difficulty in determining what constitutes a mental illness).