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

NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 104 posts

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#71

Post by rightbyte »

legitster wrote: post #8

I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…

Technology automates the spying so there is no upper limit on the amount compared to in person spying.

Some Google servers can do stuff that Stasi could not even dream about. The upper limit of Stasi was that all DDR citizens were to be Stasi employees or informants. Google can do it no-hands.

E.g. I am all for the Police ticketing speeders, but I don't want some automated spy network tracking me instead. At least the Police should have to work for getting me if I speed ...

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#72

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

mu53 wrote: post #26
legitster wrote: post #8

I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…

I think this gets down to a fundamental problem with tech that society is ignoring like a pink elephant in the room. Society fundamentally changed with the introduction of computers. Things have become possible that were never possible before. This is obvious if you consider the tech of 1900, 1950, and today. The elephant in the room is that the more complete the dataset the more dangerous it is. Its like gunpowder.…

software is naturally authoritarian.

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#73

Post by austin-cheney »

Minor49er wrote: post #53
austin-cheney wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger issue that people always miss is that NSA is not law enforcement so they do not need a warrant. The Census Bureau does not need a warrant to gather information on Americans either, but for some weird reason people find the NSA controversial but not the census.

"Some weird reason" being that the Census Bureau hasn't engaged in cyber attacks such as Stuxnet

I think you are unexpectedly proving my point. The answer is bias.

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#74

Post by sgjohnson »

pjc50 wrote: post #62
jjtheblunt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about police, but the NSA has a charter and in that charter is supposed to (for SIGINT : signals intelligence, i.e., gathering) be doing signals gathering outside the US on at least one end of conversations. Perhaps something changed over the last 20 years. But perhaps the rule still applies (or is supposed to apply) and that's the implied misbehavior.

Regardless of their formal categorization, they're a subset of "cop", which means they're not held accountable for misbehavior.

Furthermore, their misbehaviour couldn’t even be tried in a normal courtroom, even if there was mass public and political support for such an action.

They’d have to be tried in a secret FISA Court.

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#75

Post by pjc50 »

salawat wrote: post #69
pjc50 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes. American discourse has got backed into this corner: - "the government" (broadly defined) is not supposed to be able to spy on people - there is no general privacy law, only narrowly defined bits for e.g. video rental records and libraries - corporations spying on people is completely normalized - reporting the results of your spying to other people is free speech > If there is no law against the proprietor…

Technically, if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should; many acts of regulation that would be impractical to implement directly through the government are farmed out as the responsibility of corporations as a pre-req of doing business), many surveillance capitalism patterns would become fraught by default. The "corporations aren't government entities" defies logic. As without gove…

> if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should;

I'm not sure that even the Chinese legal system does that. It makes a nonsense of "part of".

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#76

Post by smogcutter »

legitster wrote: post #8

I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…

> The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant.

Just to clarify a possible misunderstanding: an officer testifying that they saw you go into a store is direct evidence that you were in that store. Likewise, a cashier testifying to what they saw you buy is also direct evidence. It’s eyewitness testimony.

On the other hand, for example, a receipt found in your wallet is circumstantial evidence. There are many possible explanations, some more plausible than others. Circumstantial doesn’t mean weak—-all forensic evidence is circumstantial.

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#77

Post by error_logic »

roenxi wrote: post #63
mu53 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this gets down to a fundamental problem with tech that society is ignoring like a pink elephant in the room. Society fundamentally changed with the introduction of computers. Things have become possible that were never possible before. This is obvious if you consider the tech of 1900, 1950, and today. The elephant in the room is that the more complete the dataset the more dangerous it is. Its like gunpowder.…

Also, it appears that a lot of the danger is political. Both Trump and Biden were presumably being spied on by the incumbent administration (Trump because of the Russia thing, Biden because of the Ukraine thing). It seems likely that Trump is being spied on again, and there is no reason to believe this pattern is going to stop. The hazing process for electing a president is already cruel enough that nobody sane runs.…

I'd argue there's an even more fundamental reason for the hazing process, as you call it, which is that the voting system itself incentivizes negative campaigning as just as if not more effective than positive. In other words, a dollar spent trashing the "other side" is destructive yet effective. This destroys healthy competition and encourages mutually destructive behavior.

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#78

Post by bonton89 »

austin-cheney wrote: post #50
legitster wrote: post #8

I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…

The bigger issue that people always miss is that NSA is not law enforcement so they do not need a warrant. The Census Bureau does not need a warrant to gather information on Americans either, but for some weird reason people find the NSA controversial but not the census.

I've actually known a few people that had a real problem with the census.

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#79

Post by theoriginaldave »

hulitu wrote: post #46

> NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says I really hate to take NSA part on this, but, if the data is available on the open market, why would they need a warrant. The problem is not that NSA buy it (they have access to it anyway, through other means) the problem is that everyone can buy it.

I second this.

If the data is available on the open market, it's available for purchase by any legal entity.

How it's used can be criminal but purchasing it is a valid scenario for any entity.

If we're concerned about the NSA using it, we should be concerned about anyone using it.

So I think the bigger debate is why is all of this personally identifiable information available on the open market?

Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says

#80

Post by MR4D »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #72
mu53 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this gets down to a fundamental problem with tech that society is ignoring like a pink elephant in the room. Society fundamentally changed with the introduction of computers. Things have become possible that were never possible before. This is obvious if you consider the tech of 1900, 1950, and today. The elephant in the room is that the more complete the dataset the more dangerous it is. Its like gunpowder.…

software is naturally authoritarian.

Is is though?

Maybe that's just a reflection of the organizations that have created said software.

Post reply on HN