At what point do we assert what we have known for years; that aggregted metadata is by its nature unethically privacy-invasive, and detrimental to human rights?
Some countries are also collecting physical location data from telecom companies, for the claimed purpose of contact chaining-tracing-matrix-graph-network analysis:
> Despite the lack of evidence to show the effectiveness of location data to stop the spread of the virus, a number of countries’ governments have used the crisis to introduce completely new surveillance powers or extend old ones to new COVID-related purposes.
> Alabama, South Carolina, and North Dakota are among the first U.S. states to express interest in Apple and Google’s Exposure Notifications API for assisting COVID-19 contact tracing.
Apple and google’s system apparently doesn’t store location information. Actually it’s getting pushback from health people because it doesn’t collect data.
It can’t be because the database does not exist: it is sharded onto each individual phone
The server only has a list of random identifiers from those who have tested positive for COVID. An exposure notification is determined when a phone downloads that list and correlates it with its local list.
After exposure, a time-bounded (?) graph of proximity contact data can join the central list, via the state health app using the local data. This can be cross-referenced with other metadata.
Once a human contact tracer establishes communication with the owner of a phone's random identifier, the identifier can be de-anonymized.
Even without the new APIs, each phone's location can be collected and shared by telcos, at the granularity of cell tower triangulation.
Current theory isn't about missing connections between people. With social networks big and small, everyone can be connected to everyone else. Thanks to twitter I'd bet the US president isn't more than a hop or two from every terrorist suspect on the planet. (Not trying to be political, making a point about connected people.)
So the existence of "links" no longer matter as there are links between everyone. What matters is the quality and content of those links. It starts with bi-directionality. Sure, the president's twitter feed is read by terrorists but do they also speak back to him? Then does he reply? That back-and-forth would represent a higher-order of connection. Are they speaking publicly? How many people are in on these conversations? A private conversation matters more than a public back-and-forth twitter war.
A machine mining a database for raw connections isn't useful. To judge the quality of connections you really do need a human mind capable of making a judgement call. They need to put the connection into context. Or, since it's all encrypted and they cannot do that anymore, everyone is linked to everyone. A warrant can be got for anyone anywhere. Send in the killbots when and where the boss wants.
Everything being discussed in the context of leaks is by definition in the past. Use them to inform your understanding of the NSA mindset, not your understanding of current events. "Phone" is just an obsolete pre-2010s term here for the exact kind of pattern analysis you're describing.
I dislike the premise behind "it's all encrypted and we cannot do that anymore" since we have no idea what capabilities an agency like NSA has now or could have in the future. If their capabilities grow perhaps they can replay all that saved encrypted data from their Utah Data Center and throw it into AI for analysis. Why do you assume a human has to be involved in the judgement process for it to be taking place?
>> Why do you assume a human has to be involved in the judgement process for it to be taking place?
I don't. A human is not necessary to the process. A human is necessary for the process to be done well. And if the NSA has broken its own encryption, to the extent that it can read past traffic, call the IMU because there are some Field's medals that need handing out.
> A human is necessary for the process to be done well.
That will still happen, but it will happen _after_ AI processes ${HUGE_NUMBER} of data streams simultaneously to pick out the interesting ones. Human intelligence and AI are complementary in this regard. We are better at the fine detail. They are better at the raw throughput and parallelism. Both types of brain working together to spy on you should terrify you.
The UK equivalent of the NSA invented both RSA encryption and DH key exchange years before any of Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, Shamir, or Adleman did their work. No Fields medal per se, but two Turing awards...
I think the odds that the largest employer of mathematicians in the world is secretly sitting on ground breaking fundamental math is pretty high.
>> “Cheney ordered that Stellarwind be concealed from the judges of the FISA Court and from members of the intelligence committees in Congress.”
(a) Anyone able to expand on the author’s source for this; (b) what if any US legal guidance at the time enabled this; (c) and if anything between now and then has changed legally.
Essentially the White House can do anything it wants by asking the White House Counsel to make up a legal opinion supporting whatever the President or VP want to do.
Then the onus is on people outside that circle to learn, investigate and prosecute, which could take years, or never.
You're correct in the sense that it's how things are supposed to work. However in practice, things are different. Secret interpretations of the law, which should have no more weight than mere opinions, were used to justify surveillance programs that seems outright illegal at first glance, and people got away with it.
Just to be clear, there was no due process of law or habeas corpus with that particular murder.
The blowback from such atrocities is probably going to kill this country as we know it. It'll take a few years to unravel, as many powerbroker boomers die off, but it does not look good.
Neither the contents of your comment, nor that of the document on Wikipedia appear to substantiate the claims you have made. Please cite any relevant documents, laws, etc - that support your claims as directly as possible; for example, document link, page number, subheading, paragraph, etc.
As is, your comment to me is worth less than having said nothing at all — as it requires time to read your comment, link, and the responses critical of it.
The issue is that the white house council can declare anything they want to be legal, and unless the supreme court has ruled on that issue specifically everyone involved has immunity from prosecution until the supreme court does rule on it. See how the council's torture memos played out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo
That being, “The President did not have the inherent authority to seize private property in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on him by Congress.”
My rewording, “The President [does] not have the inherent authority to [do anything] in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on [them] by Congress.”
I don't disagree that legally the authority of the president is limited. But in practice the president can order and see executed the torture of innocent people for years without any possibilty of justice for those victimized. This is because legally the president and anyone acting under his command are immune from prosecution if they acted according to legal guidance from the white house council and the supreme court hasn't specifically ruled that exact behavior illegal.
I guess my question for you if there is a difference between something being legal and something being illegal but those doing it are immune from prosecution.
>> “legally the president and anyone acting under his command are immune from prosecution if they acted according to legal guidance from the white house council“
Source? As far as I am able to tell, this is false; as in it is not that they are immune from prosecution, but that prosecution has never occurred.
Clearly, if war crimes were ever brought, regardless of the laws, commands, etc - it would have not resulted in being immune from prosecution.
> Under recent Supreme Court law, however, we are compelled to conclude that, regardless of the legality of Padilla's detention and the wisdom of Yoo's judgments, at the time he acted the law was not "sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he [wa]s doing violate[d]" the plaintiffs' rights. Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, ___ U.S. ___, 131 S.Ct. 2074, 2083, 179 L.Ed.2d 1149 (2011) (internal quotation marks omitted). We therefore hold that Yoo must be granted qualified immunity, and accordingly reverse the decision of the district court.
As it relates to torture, war crimes apply regardless of if a party believed they were acting legally.
As for the case you cited, it was a civil suit, therefore ruling only covers civil law, not criminal. That said, does not protect "the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law". [1]
All Presidents are fully aware by law their powers are limited, no reasonable official would claim otherwise. No reasonable person or official would claim their actions were legal, hence why they knowingly hid them from FISA & Congress.
The president has the power to fire any federal prosecutor, there should be no expectation that any action he approves of will ever result in criminal prosecution. Civil liability is the only mechanism for holding those in the executive accountable besides impeachment.
The president has the power to fire any federal prosecutor, there should be no expectation that any action he approves of will ever result in criminal prosecution. Civil liability is the only mechanism for holding those in the executive accountable besides impeachment. Many violations of rights are not criminally prosecutable anyways.
> The president has the power to fire any federal prosecutor, there should be no expectation that any action he approves of will ever result in criminal prosecution.
The President does not have the power to fire federal prosecutors serving in subsequent administrations. It's true that you've provided the explanation for why (even without the DoJ opinion which currently prohibits filing charges against a sitting President) it is dubious that a President could effectively be held criminally accountable while in office.
After he leaves office, his only protection is relying on political concerns, or an anticipatory pardon.
>Clearly, if war crimes were ever brought, regardless of the laws, commands, etc - it would have not resulted in being immune from prosecution
Actually one of the areas they have the most immunity. Bush passed the "American Service-Members' Protection Act," authorizing unlimited use of force/resources to free any US personnel being detained by the ICC.
All that act does is say the US will not cooperate. My statement still holds true, ICC has not given the any immunity for ignorance of the law for war crimes.
The ICC can't hold a trial in absentia unless the defendant is present or in ICC custody for the beginning of the trial. The ICC is thus unable to prosecute unless given consent by the US.
They don't need immunity from ignorance, they have a blanket immunity.
> legally the president and anyone acting under his command are immune from prosecution if they acted according to legal guidance from the white house council
“Counsel”, and, no, they aren't (there'd be a stronger, but not ironclad because of the reasonableness proviso, case if they were acting under guidance from the Justice Department, and given the Constitutional structure of the government, from the President himself, compared to White House Counsel, due to the general principal that the only case where ignorance of the law is an excuse under criminal law is when the mistake of law results from reasonable reliance on guidance from officials responsible for enforcing the law.)
>> “due to the general principal that the only case where ignorance of the law is an excuse under criminal law is when the mistake of law results from reasonable reliance on guidance from officials responsible for enforcing the law”
The foundational case on the relevant principal (which reversedas a matter of Constitutional law the common-law principal that mistake of law was never a defense) is Raley v. Ohio, 360 U.S. 423 (1959).
Can you explain how someone is to hold the President accountable for an illegal act if it is committed in such a way where no citizen has standing to bring suit?
The way I understand it is that technically the fellow upthread is technically right in the eyes of the law; until a judge rules that something is illegal, it isn't. That's a staple of common law jurisprudence. Judges discover law. It is still possible even after the finding of illegality to continue to perpetuate the activity as well given that the legislature ends up too locked up to successfully convict the President for malfeasance, and there is still no means through which the sitting President's pardon power or executive discretion can be overcome.
And again, the lack of standing issue is also alarming in that... Well, maybe you can see something is clearly wrong, but if the wronged can't file a suit in their own defense, and no one else has standing...
I don't know, I feel like I fell off a wagon after reading that post. There's a vague sense of possible loophole there.
> Can you explain how someone is to hold the President accountable for an illegal act if it is committed in such a way where no citizen has standing to bring suit.
Impeachment. Criminal prosecution by a subsequent administration. Civil prosecution by public authority if the particular illegal act is one for which their is a public cause of action. Failing all that, retaliation by a subsequent, similarly difficult-to-punish President. (The last of which, obviously, is obviously fraught, but it's there...)
That being, “The President did not have the inherent authority to seize private property in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on him by Congress.”
My rewording, “The President [does] not have the inherent authority to [do anything] in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on [them] by Congress.”
—
Question then is did Constitution or Congress authorize this, directly or indirectly prior to or retroactively after the fact?
Here is just some history to note that little has changed in legality, lack of documentation, and destruction of evidence.
I would like to source the MKULTRA program. “It was approved by the director of central intelligence, the general council, director of the office of technical services, and leadership at the agency.” (1. P12)
“Present practice is to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs.” (1. p14)
Congress nor the White House were notified and if they were, there are no records of it. (1. P19)
1. Joint hearing before the select committee on intelligence..95th congress
[Pages are of the pdf not the actual document.]
Around that time (2013) I knew a European defense contractor was trying to build a triple store that could inject a trillion or so triples a day without purging any; they went to an RDF specialist and a columnar database pro and they said "are you kidding me?"
I told them that they were not.
See also Mark Lombardi an artist who died under mysterious circumstances after hanging meticulously designed linkages between folks like G Gordon Liddy, GHW Bush, Oliver North, A Kasshogi, BCCI inked by French curve in MOMA and many other art galleries.
Any specific reason for the triple store vs a generic sql or graph database? What queries would you be looking for that would be better served with a triple store vs another type of database?
> See also Mark Lombardi an artist who died under mysterious circumstances after hanging meticulously designed linkages between folks like G Gordon Liddy, GHW Bush, Oliver North, A Kasshogi, BCCI inked by French curve in MOMA and many other art galleries.
I have no idea what you just said. What do you mean by "meticulously designed linkages between folks"?
53 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadRelevant: "Using Metadata to find Paul Revere" (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23276083
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/05/global-contact-tracing...
> Despite the lack of evidence to show the effectiveness of location data to stop the spread of the virus, a number of countries’ governments have used the crisis to introduce completely new surveillance powers or extend old ones to new COVID-related purposes.
Some US states will use smartphones for opt-in contact tracing using iOS 13.5+ and Android 6.0+, https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/21/covid-19-exposure-notificatio...
> Alabama, South Carolina, and North Dakota are among the first U.S. states to express interest in Apple and Google’s Exposure Notifications API for assisting COVID-19 contact tracing.
It is not yet understood if/how state health contact databases will be combined with other county, state or federal databases, but Palantir manages multiple databases and is involved in both US and UK Covid-related data fusion projects, https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/20/palantir-covid-19-va-contr... & https://tech.newstatesman.com/coronavirus/palantir-covid19-d...
The server only has a list of random identifiers from those who have tested positive for COVID. An exposure notification is determined when a phone downloads that list and correlates it with its local list.
After exposure, a time-bounded (?) graph of proximity contact data can join the central list, via the state health app using the local data. This can be cross-referenced with other metadata.
Once a human contact tracer establishes communication with the owner of a phone's random identifier, the identifier can be de-anonymized.
Even without the new APIs, each phone's location can be collected and shared by telcos, at the granularity of cell tower triangulation.
Current theory isn't about missing connections between people. With social networks big and small, everyone can be connected to everyone else. Thanks to twitter I'd bet the US president isn't more than a hop or two from every terrorist suspect on the planet. (Not trying to be political, making a point about connected people.)
So the existence of "links" no longer matter as there are links between everyone. What matters is the quality and content of those links. It starts with bi-directionality. Sure, the president's twitter feed is read by terrorists but do they also speak back to him? Then does he reply? That back-and-forth would represent a higher-order of connection. Are they speaking publicly? How many people are in on these conversations? A private conversation matters more than a public back-and-forth twitter war.
A machine mining a database for raw connections isn't useful. To judge the quality of connections you really do need a human mind capable of making a judgement call. They need to put the connection into context. Or, since it's all encrypted and they cannot do that anymore, everyone is linked to everyone. A warrant can be got for anyone anywhere. Send in the killbots when and where the boss wants.
I dislike the premise behind "it's all encrypted and we cannot do that anymore" since we have no idea what capabilities an agency like NSA has now or could have in the future. If their capabilities grow perhaps they can replay all that saved encrypted data from their Utah Data Center and throw it into AI for analysis. Why do you assume a human has to be involved in the judgement process for it to be taking place?
I don't. A human is not necessary to the process. A human is necessary for the process to be done well. And if the NSA has broken its own encryption, to the extent that it can read past traffic, call the IMU because there are some Field's medals that need handing out.
That will still happen, but it will happen _after_ AI processes ${HUGE_NUMBER} of data streams simultaneously to pick out the interesting ones. Human intelligence and AI are complementary in this regard. We are better at the fine detail. They are better at the raw throughput and parallelism. Both types of brain working together to spy on you should terrify you.
The UK equivalent of the NSA invented both RSA encryption and DH key exchange years before any of Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, Shamir, or Adleman did their work. No Fields medal per se, but two Turing awards...
I think the odds that the largest employer of mathematicians in the world is secretly sitting on ground breaking fundamental math is pretty high.
(a) Anyone able to expand on the author’s source for this; (b) what if any US legal guidance at the time enabled this; (c) and if anything between now and then has changed legally.
Then the onus is on people outside that circle to learn, investigate and prosecute, which could take years, or never.
Sounds bizarre, but it's a real thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Counsel
The White House Counsel is nothing more than an advisory role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
The blowback from such atrocities is probably going to kill this country as we know it. It'll take a few years to unravel, as many powerbroker boomers die off, but it does not look good.
I do not want to be right about this.
As is, your comment to me is worth less than having said nothing at all — as it requires time to read your comment, link, and the responses critical of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co...
That being, “The President did not have the inherent authority to seize private property in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on him by Congress.”
My rewording, “The President [does] not have the inherent authority to [do anything] in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on [them] by Congress.”
I guess my question for you if there is a difference between something being legal and something being illegal but those doing it are immune from prosecution.
Source? As far as I am able to tell, this is false; as in it is not that they are immune from prosecution, but that prosecution has never occurred.
Clearly, if war crimes were ever brought, regardless of the laws, commands, etc - it would have not resulted in being immune from prosecution.
https://www.leagle.com/decision/infco20120502152.xml
As for the case you cited, it was a civil suit, therefore ruling only covers civil law, not criminal. That said, does not protect "the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law". [1]
All Presidents are fully aware by law their powers are limited, no reasonable official would claim otherwise. No reasonable person or official would claim their actions were legal, hence why they knowingly hid them from FISA & Congress.
[1] Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341 (1986).
The President does not have the power to fire federal prosecutors serving in subsequent administrations. It's true that you've provided the explanation for why (even without the DoJ opinion which currently prohibits filing charges against a sitting President) it is dubious that a President could effectively be held criminally accountable while in office.
After he leaves office, his only protection is relying on political concerns, or an anticipatory pardon.
Actually one of the areas they have the most immunity. Bush passed the "American Service-Members' Protection Act," authorizing unlimited use of force/resources to free any US personnel being detained by the ICC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
They don't need immunity from ignorance, they have a blanket immunity.
“Counsel”, and, no, they aren't (there'd be a stronger, but not ironclad because of the reasonableness proviso, case if they were acting under guidance from the Justice Department, and given the Constitutional structure of the government, from the President himself, compared to White House Counsel, due to the general principal that the only case where ignorance of the law is an excuse under criminal law is when the mistake of law results from reasonable reliance on guidance from officials responsible for enforcing the law.)
Request for relevant citation(s).
The way I understand it is that technically the fellow upthread is technically right in the eyes of the law; until a judge rules that something is illegal, it isn't. That's a staple of common law jurisprudence. Judges discover law. It is still possible even after the finding of illegality to continue to perpetuate the activity as well given that the legislature ends up too locked up to successfully convict the President for malfeasance, and there is still no means through which the sitting President's pardon power or executive discretion can be overcome.
And again, the lack of standing issue is also alarming in that... Well, maybe you can see something is clearly wrong, but if the wronged can't file a suit in their own defense, and no one else has standing...
I don't know, I feel like I fell off a wagon after reading that post. There's a vague sense of possible loophole there.
Impeachment. Criminal prosecution by a subsequent administration. Civil prosecution by public authority if the particular illegal act is one for which their is a public cause of action. Failing all that, retaliation by a subsequent, similarly difficult-to-punish President. (The last of which, obviously, is obviously fraught, but it's there...)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co...
That being, “The President did not have the inherent authority to seize private property in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on him by Congress.”
My rewording, “The President [does] not have the inherent authority to [do anything] in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on [them] by Congress.”
—
Question then is did Constitution or Congress authorize this, directly or indirectly prior to or retroactively after the fact?
I would like to source the MKULTRA program. “It was approved by the director of central intelligence, the general council, director of the office of technical services, and leadership at the agency.” (1. P12)
“Present practice is to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs.” (1. p14)
Congress nor the White House were notified and if they were, there are no records of it. (1. P19)
1. Joint hearing before the select committee on intelligence..95th congress [Pages are of the pdf not the actual document.]
https://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_Proje... From the Wikipedia reference
I told them that they were not.
See also Mark Lombardi an artist who died under mysterious circumstances after hanging meticulously designed linkages between folks like G Gordon Liddy, GHW Bush, Oliver North, A Kasshogi, BCCI inked by French curve in MOMA and many other art galleries.
I have no idea what you just said. What do you mean by "meticulously designed linkages between folks"?
Nevermind. Makes sense now; that was the weirdest sentence that turned out to make sense that I'd ever read.
No, because Stasi did not operate on a planetary level like NSA does.