There seems to be some suggestion of confusion on the Representative's part about call content vs Subscriber Information, actual video here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/video-congressman-cl... So this might not be the "gotcha" it first appears.
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
151–160 of 407 posts
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#1521984 is not a how-to manual.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#153See? Now this is a problem. I don't see how you can interpret Court precedent and statutory law regarding telephone wiretapping to mean anything other than that you can't intercept that without a warrant.
I remember the other day saying that the "warrant canary" was far too cute to make it past a judge. This might be an even "cuter" argument... should it ever make it in front of a judge (I suspect NSA doesn't actually care about that, given that they're not generally trying to bring cases to court anyways as they'd have to give up their top secret methods on purpose).
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullcrap. When people saw "direct access", they concluded direct access - as was reasonable, at the time, from what the leak seemed to show; I did the same. Many of the people on this site have since realized that that is not true (although there were sure a lot of crazy theories about the specific wording of the initial denials), but most of those people are no longer saying "direct access", and there are people sti…
> there are people still saying "direct access". Undeniably. What tptacek thinks though is that those people are "most" people on HN. burntsushi thinks this is plainly false, and I agree with him. I think tptacek is seeing whatever it takes to stroke his ego.
Personally I'm not sure we're reading the same HN. Maybe today the facts regarding Prism are finally catching up but it certainly wasn't the case yesterday or the week+ before.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#155[deleted]
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#156Since 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…
Enjoy our brave new world.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. My suspicion is that your first two assumptions are incorrect, and that (1) FISA requests are not personalized under PRISM, and that consequently (2) there is no manual review or check against the abuse of power by providers on an ongoing basis. This is the only reasonable explanation I can think of for why the NSA would be trying to hide its request volume in the larger volume of overall requests from law enfor…
I don't understand the (1) and (2) thing. What does it matter whether the requests are "personalized"? In fact, I think they probably rarely are; you can look at Facebook's numbers to see the aggregates suggesting that most requests are for sizable numbers of accounts, not just one. My point isn't that NSA's FISA directives are surgical; like you, I doubt that they are. My point is that upon receiving them, a lawyer…
> If you read all my comments on this whole annoying story
Your comments have repeatedly attacked the credibility of whistleblowers, derided their claims as factually and technically impossible, and asserted that NSA statements about NSA capabilities are wrong.
> My point is that upon receiving them, a lawyer at Google approves or rejects them, not a SQL query.
I don't think Google has much say in this, but what do I know? Only that your assertion otherwise is in open conflict with claims by Snowden and the NSA officials who have briefed Congress, both of whom tell us that authority over which targets to tap is in practice delegated to security analysts.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You realize that when you call something "a peculiar brand of corporatism", you're saying something equivalent to "a label that thus far exists only in my mind".
Is there a more direct, refutable way you could construct your claim? How would anyone falsify your argument otherwise? You know what else is a (very) peculiar brand of corporatism? "Not corporatism".
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're saying that Google's claims compete with NSA's.
They don't.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the (1) and (2) thing. What does it matter whether the requests are "personalized"? In fact, I think they probably rarely are; you can look at Facebook's numbers to see the aggregates suggesting that most requests are for sizable numbers of accounts, not just one. My point isn't that NSA's FISA directives are surgical; like you, I doubt that they are. My point is that upon receiving them, a lawyer…
> If you read all my comments on this whole annoying story Your comments have repeatedly attacked the credibility of whistleblowers, derided their claims as factually and technically impossible, and asserted that NSA statements about NSA capabilities are wrong. > My point is that upon receiving them, a lawyer at Google approves or rejects them, not a SQL query. I don't think Google has much say in this, but what do I…
For fuck's sake. So you don't just disagree with (1) and (2), but with the whole thing. Why not just say that?
Yes, to whatever extent that slide deck said NSA has direct access to the servers that run Google Mail, I am arguing with the slide deck.