pacino wrote:seems like the secrecy of the FISA court is the major issue. we have a right to know what the government is requesting and what FISA is granting

drsmooth wrote:
Bobbitt soooo saw this coming, along with the constitutional precedents and implications for practically everyone, years ago

Trent Steele wrote:

drsmooth wrote:
Bobbitt soooo saw this coming, along with the constitutional precedents and implications for practically everyone, years ago

That was the last time it saw it coming

You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.

Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian, which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”

Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.
...
I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a data base of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the internet. And it’s scary that your cell phones have GPS installed. And it’s scary, too, that the little box that lets you go through the short toll lane on I-95 lets someone, somewhere know that you are on the move. Privacy is in decline around the world, largely because technology and big data have matured to the point where it is easy to create a net that monitors many daily interactions. Sometimes the data is valuable for commerce — witness those facebook ads for Italian shoes that my wife must endure — and sometimes for law enforcement and national security. But be honest, most of us are grudging participants in this dynamic. We want the cell phones. We like the internet. We don’t want to sit in the slow lane at the Harbor Tunnel toll plaza.

The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.

And to that, the Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse. No known illegal wiretaps, no indications of FISA-court approved intercepts of innocent Americans that occurred because weak probable cause was acceptable. Mark you, that stuff may be happening. As is the case with all law enforcement capability, it will certainly happen at some point, if it hasn’t already. Any data asset that can be properly and legally invoked, can also be misused — particularly without careful oversight. But that of course has always been the case with electronic surveillance of any kind.

7. Additionally, the NSA whistleblower who provided the information to the Washington Post was quoted as saying, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.” Without direct access to the servers this would be impossible — that is, unless the NSA was intercepting user data in transit. But that’s not what Greenwald and the Washington Post reported: direct server access. This was the bombshell — that the NSA could grab information at will — and, as of this writing, it’s inaccurate.

8. In spite of these new revelations, epidemic-level outrage continued to spread all around. Michael Moore and others applauded the anonymous whistleblower(s) who provided information to Greenwald.

9. By the end of the day Friday, Business Insider reported that the Washington Post had revised its article. The article no longer reported that the tech companies “knowingly” cooperated with PRISM. But, more importantly, the phrase “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” in the article’s lede was revised to “track foreign targets.” There’s a huge difference between the two phrases. Public outrage was almost entirely based on the idea that the NSA was spying on everyone who uses those services — broad, unrestricted access to private information (as private as social media and email is). But the revision limits scope of the operation to international communications.

As of Saturday, Greenwald, unlike the Washington Post, hadn’t corrected or revised his reporting to reflect the new information, and, in fact, Greenwald continued to defend his reporting on Twitter. (It’s worth noting how speculative Greenwald’s article was. The following line was particularly leading: “It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.” There’s no indication whatsoever that the government was gathering information without warrants.)

10. Heads, sadly, continued to explode all over the place in spite of the total de-fanging of both stories.

11. Meanwhile, TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine reported on Saturday, “[T]he NSA did not have direct access or any special instant access to data or servers at the PRISM targets, but instead had to send requests to the companies for the data.”

This is vastly different from what Greenwald reported.

12. Rampant outrage all day Saturday.

13. And ultimately, other than the PRISM Power Point, the NSA’s surveillance story isn’t anything new. Some headline history via ProPublica:

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts, New York Times, December 2005
NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls, USA Today, May 2006
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say), Wired, March 2012
U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens, The Wall Street Journal, December 2012
But the Greenwald and Washington Post stories are somehow bombshells, taken at face value. Has our collective attention span become so ridiculously short that we’re suddenly shocked by news of the NSA attaining data about Americans as a means of fighting evildoers? Has everyone been asleep for the last 12 years?

To summarize, yes, the NSA routinely requests information from the tech giants. But the NSA doesn’t have “direct access” to servers nor is it randomly collecting information about you personally. Yet rending of garments and general apoplexy has ruled the day, complete with predictable invective about the president being “worse than Bush” and that anyone who reported on the new information debunking the initial report was and is an Obamabot apologist.

Speaking for myself on that front, I’m not apologizing for anyone. I’m merely noting that Greenwald and the Washington Post reported inaccurate information. I’ve spent a considerable chunk of my writing career eviscerating the post-9/11 surveillance state and its accompanying trespasses against privacy and civil liberties. While I’m encouraged by the president’s vow to begin rolling back the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military force, winding down the endless war and its accompanying endless war powers, I’m also concerned about the continued bartering of privacy for the sake of a little more security — a through-line that began under George W. Bush and continues today.

But this prioritization of security over liberty wasn’t invented by this president. It began as the unforgivable exploitation of fear in the days after 9/11 and became entwined in the American worldview. We’ve sadly become just as accustomed to unnecessary searches and privacy intrusions as the federal government has grown accustomed to going beyond its mandate to smoke out the evildoers.

The Dude wrote:you're compromising the integrity of the bean

pacino wrote:black coffee at home, fraps at starbucks. cant go wrong, sir

The Dude wrote:

pacino wrote:black coffee at home, fraps at starbucks. cant go wrong, sir

it's not even coffee though it's like a milkshake. at least a latte is just coffee and milk

TenuredVulture wrote:Again, not only are people willing to trade privacy for security, they're willing to trade privacy for 25 cents off a latte.

Werthless wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Again, not only are people willing to trade privacy for security, they're willing to trade privacy for 25 cents off a latte.

And the law is there for the people that aren't.

Werthless wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Again, not only are people willing to trade privacy for security, they're willing to trade privacy for 25 cents off a latte.

And the law is there for the people that aren't.

TenuredVulture wrote:Unless you're willing to live under a bridge or in a cave, forgo any professional medical treatment, and more or less live a modern life, you're going to turn over massive amounts of personal data to people who are not necessarily benevolent.