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

U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 146 posts

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#111

Post by snowwrestler »

uxp wrote: post #104
snowwrestler wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghostery reports Omniture(Adobe Analytics) on the ACLU homepage, and additionally Adobe Test and Target on their donate page. On EFF, Ghostery only reports Piwik Analytics on their home and donate pages. For comparison, the NYTimes homepage shows 35 trackers. Personally, I don't have a problem with this. I am concerned about overreach in government policy, not nonprofits trying to learn a bit more about their support…

This is fairly off topic, but in case you cared, Ghostery's business model is to sell your browsing habits and blocked ads and blocked trackers data back to the people their extension blocks. They claim it's anonymized, and I'd venture to say it probably is, but it's still data about you.

I almost bought their enterprise solution last year, and we didn't talk about individuals' data at all. What they pitched me on is basically an aggregated version what the browser plugin does--tell me what trackers are running where on my sites.

This is surprisingly difficult for enterprises to keep track of. Different divisions might have different websites, or different campaigns running, and be placing things like tracking pixels or tags all over the place without telling anyone.

And embedded content can come with trackers of their own. For example if you embed a Storify feed in your site, you get 4 trackers with it. Surprise!

They'll host a page for the enterprise that lists out all the trackers, and gives visitors opt-out links for each one. Again--a total pain for most companies to try to do themselves.

It's all powered by people running the plugin, but the plugin data not what's for sale. At least, they never pitched me on it, and it's not part of their service description on their website.

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#112

Post by LLWM »

a3n wrote: post #23
mikecb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constitutional challenge was dismissed because it was found to be constitutional under existing jurisprudence. See discussion in the lower court's memorandum opinion and order starting on the bottom of page 38[1]. Smith v. Maryland, abridged, said that we have no privacy interest in the metadata sent to a third party in order to complete a call. In the words of 4th amendment jurisprudence, we don't have a reasona…

> In the words of 4th amendment jurisprudence, we don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in items we voluntarily disclose to third parties. I would hope that thinking on this evolves, to the point that we have a reasonable expectation that information we've voluntarily disclosed to a third party stays between us and that third party. Because that is exactly my personal expectation, notwithstanding my other ex…

That is a matter of law, not thinking. We have specific laws in cases where you can expect that information you disclose to others should be kept secret. Attorney-client privilege, HIPAA, etc. That alone should tip you off that types of communication without such restrictions are not protected.

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#113

Post by CWuestefeld »

diafygi wrote: post #13

The actual judgment: http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/NSA_ca2_20150507.pdf From the ruling: > Because we find that the program exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized, we vacate the decision below dismissing the complaint without reaching appellants’ constitutional arguments. It appears that the government is starting to lose the ability to always dismiss constitutional rights abused on "state secrets" ground…

the government is starting to lose the ability to always dismiss constitutional rights abused on "state secrets" grounds

I don't think the decision says that. It looks to me like the decision is fairly limited. All it says is that "you're saying that USAPATRIOT lets you capture bulk metadata, but it doesn't; the government's own reading of the legislation is wrong". That doesn't go as far as saying that the gov't cannot hide behind state secrets in other cases.

Further, it's now imperative that section 215 not be renewed. The foundation of this decision is that the mass surveillance can't be considered to have been approved by Congress, because many of them (not to mention all of us) weren't aware of the program. But now that Congress is aware of it, any renewal would imply that they condone the program, and thus that they believe it should be allowed to continue.

Under those conditions, this decision would no longer be applicable, and we'd have to get a SCOTUS decision on the overall constitutionality, which is going to be much more difficult (although I think that in the big picture, that's the right answer).

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#114

Post by frandroid »

cmurf wrote: post #95
a3n wrote: post #3

Pre-Snowden, I wonder if the ruling would have been different. Back then the judges would only know what was presented to them. The government would have obviously presented in a way that was most favorable to them, and their opposition would not have access to crucial evidence. Now that the cat shit is out of the bag, judges and everyone else have more background to evaluate what's in front of them. The government w…

>Thank you Snowden. Fuck you NSA. While that's amusing, it's an imperfect summary of the problem. DOJ had the Patriot Act in a drawer before 9/11. The Patriot Act wasn't read in full by any member of the Senate before it was voted on. And Section 215 was grossly reinterpreted, by both Bush and Obama administrations, according to that section's author, Jim Sensenbrenner. It's said NSA doesn't have a moral compass, it'…

> It just does what it's told.

Actually, bureaucracies, especially defense and intelligence bureaucracies, have a culture and an agenda of their own. They wield enough power (both in absolute and complexity terms) to be able to push the political executive far beyond what said executive would have wanted. Do you think Barack Obama ever dreamed of authorizing drone strikes (i.e. assassination of civilians) around the world before becoming a politician?

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#116

Post by ta0967 »

rl3 wrote: post #110
scott_karana wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike the arguable Manning, Snowden had a deliberate, slow, controlled release of information. No informants were exposed; et cetera. What is wrong with responsible whistleblowing of unlawful activity? I think it should be encouraged!

Snowden's document leaks, and by extension the journalists with whom he entrusted them to, were not restricted in scope to only disclosing illegal domestic collection activities. In fact, the majority of disclosures were foreign in nature, and of those, quite a few ran counter not only to American foreign policy and security interests, but Western interests in general. The articles exposing intelligence activities in…

oh, i didn't know your uncle Bob's spying on me (a "westerner") was in my interest. thank you so much for the enlightment!

in other news, Indonesia's oppressive regime has been propped up by the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suharto

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#117

Post by cmurf »

frandroid wrote: post #114
cmurf wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thank you Snowden. Fuck you NSA. While that's amusing, it's an imperfect summary of the problem. DOJ had the Patriot Act in a drawer before 9/11. The Patriot Act wasn't read in full by any member of the Senate before it was voted on. And Section 215 was grossly reinterpreted, by both Bush and Obama administrations, according to that section's author, Jim Sensenbrenner. It's said NSA doesn't have a moral compass, it'…

> It just does what it's told. Actually, bureaucracies, especially defense and intelligence bureaucracies, have a culture and an agenda of their own. They wield enough power (both in absolute and complexity terms) to be able to push the political executive far beyond what said executive would have wanted. Do you think Barack Obama ever dreamed of authorizing drone strikes (i.e. assassination of civilians) around the…

I don't understand the question. The history of drones predates Barack Obama becoming a state senator of Illinois though. https://understandingempire.wordpress.com/2-0-a-brief-histor...

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#118

Post by rayiner »

nickbauman wrote: post #103
count wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metadata collection is only bad when it's the Government doing it! FWIW: I've not received anything but EFF-related spam from EFF to the email address I used to donate to them back in the day. Not sure about ACLU.

Governments can use force on those they track. Corporations can't yet (they're working on that).

At the same time, the government has little reason to hassle people who aren't fringe minorities. Private companies have strong incentives to use data collection against the masses.

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#119

Post by CWuestefeld »

rayiner wrote: post #118
nickbauman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments can use force on those they track. Corporations can't yet (they're working on that).

At the same time, the government has little reason to hassle people who aren't fringe minorities. Private companies have strong incentives to use data collection against the masses.

I don't buy either side of that statement. Government does hassle the masses, and I'm not sure what incentives private companies have to use data collection on the masses. My argument for the latter is probably a little weak, but certainly in the former, history is clear.

Re: U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court

#120

Post by pluma »

splat wrote: post #108
mhurron wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in reality that's not the prosecutors call to make. In the US laws are challenged in the court system, or overturned by lawmakers. I would say that the current government in the US is not going to be open to changing these things so that requires charges to be brought and a trial to be convened and then let the process move from there. A presidential pardon solves Snowdens issue, but does not change the law.

It is very much the prosecutor's call to make. Prosecutors aren't (at least in theory) supposed to charge the accused with as many crimes as possible. It is the job of the prosecutor to ensure that justice is served, whatever that might mean given the facts before them. Sometimes that might mean throwing the book at the accused, but in other cases it might mean dropping the case even when it is clear that the accused…

I'd put it a little differently: it's the job of the prosecutor to ensure that public order is upheld. Americans tend to get distracted by the ambiguous notion of "justice" and what is or isn't "just" (even when the two are orthogonal).

Justice is for the courts to decide, not the prosecutor. But whether enforcing a law serves to uphold the public order is up to the prosecutor. And enforcing bullshit laws is just as problematic as being inconsistent in what laws you do enforce.

Post reply on HN