It is not that such a ruling would have any effect aside that legislator retrospectively allow such privacy transgression and see no problem with that.
Edward Snowden exposed the world’s largest surveillance state. It seems most of us are comfortable with it. The Chinese are following in our footsteps and they are about two generations away from the mass global surveillance that the NSA (and partners) conduct.
Remember it was our global surveillance dragnet that made us have Nelson Mandela (and other blacks) arrested.
The NSA also conducted surveillance (illegally but they were not white) on homegrown black leaders (considered communists/terrorists/traitors by the white US government) like Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King:
If you want to go down the rabbit hole on the history and pervasiveness of the surveillance state, its media propaganda arms and the torture and drugging of US citizens:
The US imprisons its ethnic minorities in inhumane camps (where torture in the form of extended stays in the SHU is not only legal but routine, as well as the same forced sterilizations) at a rate 17x higher (per capita) than China does, FWIW.
Trials are mostly for show, as the actual source of the evidence in these kinds of cases is completely illegal under the US constitution, and the evidence admitted and used in the sham trials is actually inadmissible under the rules of evidence ("fruit of the poison tree").
From the Reuters article above:
> The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial.
Complete FUD. Nice article full of nothing to distract though. There are millions of Uighurs in concentration camps right now, sterilized, raped, beaten.
I agree, but we can do a lot more about it in the places we have political authority, so long as we don't dismiss the very real threat to millions of US minorities of torture, forced sterilization, and a lifetime of stigmatization as "complete FUD".
People who don't compare US prisons (where overcrowding, rape, physical and psychological abuse, poor medical care, lack of hygiene supplies, and torture are completely routine) to concentration camps are ignorant of the realities of the situation.
There's also the fact it seems to be routine for prosecutors to offer deals to people where they just plead guilty straight up in return for lighter sentencing. I can only wonder how many innocent people take this deal.
Orders of magnitude. While both strain credulity, it is more plausible to take a government at its word for 300 people than for 3 million.
Plausibly it could be the case that there are 100 wrongly imprisoned people in Camp X-Ray without legal recourse... But equally plausibly there are at the very least 1,000,000 wrongly imprisoned people in the Uyghurstan concentration camps, with thousands added every day...
> Edward Snowden exposed the world’s largest surveillance state. It seems most of us are comfortable with it. The Chinese are following in our footsteps and they are about two generations away from the mass global surveillance that the NSA (and partners) conduct.
It's unclear whether most of us are comfortable with it. I know that I personally feel fairly powerless and helpless and unsure as to what to do in the face of it,
Regarding your statement about the Chinese following in the footsteps of the Five Eyes, wouldn't you say that is pure speculation?
> Remember it was our global surveillance dragnet that made us have Nelson Mandela (and other blacks) arrested.
I think it's important to maintain a distinction between the normal so-called spy-craft that led to Mandela's arrest in 1962 to which that NPR article refers and the global surveillance dragnet which Snowden brought to light. There's no suggestion in that NPR article that it was wire-tapping which provided information as to Mandela's whereabouts.
> he NSA also conducted surveillance (illegally but they were not white) on homegrown black leaders (considered communists/terrorists/traitors by the white US government) like Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King:
The BBC article you link to says this: “The agency eavesdropped on civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young as well as boxing champion Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker and Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald.” Tom Wicker and Art Buchwald are white by the looks of it – so I'm not sure why you're trying to crowbar the US's race issue into a topic which is not about race (it's about class struggle and power).
That doesn't quite follow. There are lots of issues where lots of people, even a supermajority, disagree with the status quo for a very long time. Motion seems to depend on it becoming a partisan or culture-war issue. If neither 'side' sees an immediate prospect of wielding an issue against the other, the problem stays a "yeah it sucks but what can you do?" kind of thing.
(Yes that's compatible with many people actually being comfy with it. I'm objecting to the "most of us" part.)
I find it strange that they ruled it was fine to give illegally collected information to America. Maybe I'm missing some of the finer details, but it seems like they're kowtowing to the US with that.
This ruling is extending that attachment to all of Europe though. I figured they'd at least put up a show of denying it, but the ruling seems to publicly say all of Europe can do whatever the US intelligence agencies want.
> The court said it had identified three “fundamental deficiencies” in the regime. They were that
> bulk interception had been authorised by the secretary of state, and not by a body independent of the executive;
> that categories of search terms defining the kinds of communications that would become liable for examination had not been included in the application for a warrant;
> and that search terms linked to an individual (that is to say specific identifiers such as an email address) had not been subject to prior internal authorisation.
Out of _everything_ that Snowden revealed -- the fact that _effectively everything_ transmitted electronically from one human being to another on this planet ended up in the hands of five-eyes; including how the US and UK used each others' rules to snoop on each others' citizens without oversight -- how is it the case that the court only finds that the problems are:
(1) the wrong civil servant authorised the snooping;
(2) the paperwork did not specify that the types of electronic communication examined would be e.g. "email" (which is a valid search term!);
and (3) finally, the one with teeth, the fact that investigators should have _some vague idea about what they are looking for_ before they start searching.
I don't know about you, but I'm not reassured by this ruling. This isn't an issue for the political parties in any nation, as far as I can tell, and I don't quite understand why. We have a right to privacy -- let's use it! At the very least, I wish more people would use GPG. (And yes, Mac GPG mail is actually pretty good and usable. I just have nobody listening on the other side).
On (1), the Secretary of State is not a civil servant, that term means a government minister. The point is that the interception should have been authorised by someone who is not part of the government. I don't know who they think that should be - ideally it would be a judge, but often in the UK this stuff can be authorised by a senior police officer, etc. It might end up being the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, who is basically a rubber stamp:
Oh, I know that the Secretary of State is not (officially) a civil servant. Both are indeed part of government. But as you rightly point out, the person that they do get to independently assess this is overwhelmingly likely to agree to whatever the executive wants: it will be a rubber stamp and thus an approval in all but name from the Secretary of State. I very much doubt that if you found yourself in that job saying 'no' a lot, you'd be in a position to keep it for much longer.
She is a Conservative party politician who was elected as an MP, and then appointed to the home office by the prime minister, who is also a Conservative party politician and MP. She is not "not (officially) a civil servant", she is an elected politician.
So, basically court decided that this violation is in general OK and not a big deal at all:
"In order to minimise the risk of the bulk interception power being abused, the court considers that the process must be subject to ‘end-to-end safeguards’, meaning that, at the domestic level, an assessment should be made at each stage of the process of the necessity and proportionality of the measures being taken; that bulk interception should be subject to independent authorisation at the outset, when the object and scope of the operation are being defined; and that the operation should be subject to supervision and independent ex post facto (retrospective) review."
GCHQ cannot be happier seeing "end-to-end safeguards", "necessity and proportionality", "independent authorisation". So many additional employees will be needed to apply "safeguards" (that we will need to make sure look great on paper), budget will have to be extend to pay all those "independent" authorizators. And what is sweeter than nice "necessity" proof in the days when almost anybody can turn overnight to be terrorist because of some twit.
Why the court couldn't just say: this was illegal, all data has to be deleted until X, next time you want to do this, get a court order, as courts are those independent authorizators in all countries that follow Montesquieu's separation of powers system.
I think I read the claim somewhere else on HN very recently that the "fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine" is US-only.
In my opinion courts should be allowed to use all relevant evidence. Deliberately causing a miscarriage of justice is not the right way to punish a different person for having broken a different law.
Given the bulk interception capabilities of countries on their own citizens the irony is they justify the powers because they don't use them? (except they do, just not to support the country) The whole enterprise is illigitimate.
Early in my career in security (many years pre-Snowden) I thought Echelon was a fun conspiracy theory and it was really just something less extreme with good people doing important work. I do not anymore. Our societies should find a way to put an end to these agencies peacefully, not unlike nuclear test bans and disarmament.
> Our societies should find a way to put an end to these agencies peacefully
The reality is that the world is a bad place and these agencies are a necessary evil. When they fail in their duties, we have things like the Manchester Arena bombing, Charlie Hebdo, and so on and so forth.
This does not mean they should be free to run amok, like GCHQ obviously has for decades now. There should be checks and balances, which are sorely lacking at the moment.
The second greatest trick evil ever played on us was to convince us that it was necessary. They have become too powerful to not be held responsible and the order they were ostensibly intended to preserve has disintegrated as a direct consequence of their failure to allow it to evolve naturally, imo.
Their capabilities and their influences on our own democratic processes are about as welcome as leftover minefields from forgotten conflicts, especially as many of them retire to write memoirs and mug for television presenters. They were a 20th century artifact of the nation state (which they have forfeited) and by all popular accounts now they seem to form a kind of seedy post-national shadow government engaged in protecting sympathetic capital flows. As ever it was, perhaps, but we shouldn't be arguing about whether or not their behavior is appropriate so much as whether we should tolerate their continued existence at all.
Of course they're an easy straw man, but being the key source of deception in the world is neither necessary or sympathetic.
It's a clever trap we're caught in. We have to rely on 'courts' to 'rule' to decide basic rights for us like privacy. Every once in a while, the courts throw us peasants a bone, to keep the system looking legitimate.
You see, the government didn't perform the necessary rituals to deny your rights, and the courts have been clear: the government needs to 'vote' and say something about 'the children' before they take your rights. Of course, that's only if the courts decide to hear your case, which is dependent upon the government saying the court is allowed to hear your case.
Just keep working through the system, it's working!
Time and time again Five Eyes have shown that they will do whatever they wish "in the name of national security" and nobody will be punished. That's why we cannot rely on laws that will be "worked around either through legal interpretations or FVEY-shoring the work", and must insist that systems from 2021 and beyond are built with end-to-end security in mind.
Gone are the days of "the government may be listening" as it's now "we definitely know they are listening, recording, indexing, searching, and parallel reconstructing". We must start treating everything as compromised and actively develop against all threats... because if we don't, then we need to swallow the bitter pill and accept that state surveillance is not only actively used, but it's going to be actively used against us, and we should stop complaining about it.
Seeing Snowden still exiled in Russia...the entire system is so incredibly corrupt. It's practically vindictive at this point - setting an example of what happens when you expose the truth.
> setting an example of what happens when you expose the truth.
Snowden came after several others who were persecuted by the US Govt. Some even had their doors kicked in and guns pointed at their faces while they were in the shower. Check out what they did to NSA's Bill Binney, who ran COMINT for the NSA and was talking about the programs used to collect data before 9/11, and after. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
Bradley Manning (now Chelsea) and Tom Drake (NSA) also had some interesting things to say. Here's a good interview with Drake and his lawyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEq42BDBVWk
It was actually because of how these other whistleblower cases were handled being the reason why Snowden went to the press instead of followed in their footsteps and reporting up the chain of command.
51 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadRemember it was our global surveillance dragnet that made us have Nelson Mandela (and other blacks) arrested.
https://www.npr.org/2016/05/16/478272695/retired-cia-agent-c...
The NSA also conducted surveillance (illegally but they were not white) on homegrown black leaders (considered communists/terrorists/traitors by the white US government) like Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24279394
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/26/nsa-surveillan...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
Not sure if this was the inspiration for ‘Person of Interest’ tv series.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-t...
In many ways China's tracking is much more intrusive. Noone should spy on its citizens, but at least you have trials in the West.
https://talkpoverty.org/2017/08/23/u-s-still-forcibly-steril...
It does matter what you do with the surveillance.
Senior DEA officials say they use warrantless mass surveillance to perform parallel construction "almost daily", according to Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R2013...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Trials are mostly for show, as the actual source of the evidence in these kinds of cases is completely illegal under the US constitution, and the evidence admitted and used in the sham trials is actually inadmissible under the rules of evidence ("fruit of the poison tree").
From the Reuters article above:
> The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial.
https://www.saveuighur.org/camps/
I don't know if you are part of the 50 cent army, but your talking points mirror them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
The difference is, the Uighurs only crime is being ethnic, there are other things at play with incarceration numbers.
All races are incarcerated, only Uighurs are rounded up and sent to their own special work camps with no crime needed.
You're trying to compare prison with concentration camps, that's FUD.
People who don't compare US prisons (where overcrowding, rape, physical and psychological abuse, poor medical care, lack of hygiene supplies, and torture are completely routine) to concentration camps are ignorant of the realities of the situation.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918454831/trial-of-sept-11-de...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/31/uighur-men-lea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_detainees_at_Guantanamo...
Orders of magnitudes in difference.
Holding a few dozen suspected terrorists !== holding 3 million people (nearly an entire race)
You can justify there may be proof for those few alleged jihads. You cannot reasonably prove those 3 million people are all terrorists.
Where are the cries to shut down these camps like there were cries to shut down Gitmo?
Plausibly it could be the case that there are 100 wrongly imprisoned people in Camp X-Ray without legal recourse... But equally plausibly there are at the very least 1,000,000 wrongly imprisoned people in the Uyghurstan concentration camps, with thousands added every day...
Where are you?
It's unclear whether most of us are comfortable with it. I know that I personally feel fairly powerless and helpless and unsure as to what to do in the face of it,
Regarding your statement about the Chinese following in the footsteps of the Five Eyes, wouldn't you say that is pure speculation?
> Remember it was our global surveillance dragnet that made us have Nelson Mandela (and other blacks) arrested.
I think it's important to maintain a distinction between the normal so-called spy-craft that led to Mandela's arrest in 1962 to which that NPR article refers and the global surveillance dragnet which Snowden brought to light. There's no suggestion in that NPR article that it was wire-tapping which provided information as to Mandela's whereabouts.
> he NSA also conducted surveillance (illegally but they were not white) on homegrown black leaders (considered communists/terrorists/traitors by the white US government) like Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King:
The BBC article you link to says this: “The agency eavesdropped on civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young as well as boxing champion Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker and Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald.” Tom Wicker and Art Buchwald are white by the looks of it – so I'm not sure why you're trying to crowbar the US's race issue into a topic which is not about race (it's about class struggle and power).
That doesn't quite follow. There are lots of issues where lots of people, even a supermajority, disagree with the status quo for a very long time. Motion seems to depend on it becoming a partisan or culture-war issue. If neither 'side' sees an immediate prospect of wielding an issue against the other, the problem stays a "yeah it sucks but what can you do?" kind of thing.
(Yes that's compatible with many people actually being comfy with it. I'm objecting to the "most of us" part.)
> The court said it had identified three “fundamental deficiencies” in the regime. They were that
> bulk interception had been authorised by the secretary of state, and not by a body independent of the executive;
> that categories of search terms defining the kinds of communications that would become liable for examination had not been included in the application for a warrant;
> and that search terms linked to an individual (that is to say specific identifiers such as an email address) had not been subject to prior internal authorisation.
Out of _everything_ that Snowden revealed -- the fact that _effectively everything_ transmitted electronically from one human being to another on this planet ended up in the hands of five-eyes; including how the US and UK used each others' rules to snoop on each others' citizens without oversight -- how is it the case that the court only finds that the problems are:
(1) the wrong civil servant authorised the snooping;
(2) the paperwork did not specify that the types of electronic communication examined would be e.g. "email" (which is a valid search term!);
and (3) finally, the one with teeth, the fact that investigators should have _some vague idea about what they are looking for_ before they start searching.
I don't know about you, but I'm not reassured by this ruling. This isn't an issue for the political parties in any nation, as far as I can tell, and I don't quite understand why. We have a right to privacy -- let's use it! At the very least, I wish more people would use GPG. (And yes, Mac GPG mail is actually pretty good and usable. I just have nobody listening on the other side).
https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_C...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priti_Patel
She is a Conservative party politician who was elected as an MP, and then appointed to the home office by the prime minister, who is also a Conservative party politician and MP. She is not "not (officially) a civil servant", she is an elected politician.
"In order to minimise the risk of the bulk interception power being abused, the court considers that the process must be subject to ‘end-to-end safeguards’, meaning that, at the domestic level, an assessment should be made at each stage of the process of the necessity and proportionality of the measures being taken; that bulk interception should be subject to independent authorisation at the outset, when the object and scope of the operation are being defined; and that the operation should be subject to supervision and independent ex post facto (retrospective) review."
GCHQ cannot be happier seeing "end-to-end safeguards", "necessity and proportionality", "independent authorisation". So many additional employees will be needed to apply "safeguards" (that we will need to make sure look great on paper), budget will have to be extend to pay all those "independent" authorizators. And what is sweeter than nice "necessity" proof in the days when almost anybody can turn overnight to be terrorist because of some twit.
Why the court couldn't just say: this was illegal, all data has to be deleted until X, next time you want to do this, get a court order, as courts are those independent authorizators in all countries that follow Montesquieu's separation of powers system.
With no poison tree doctrine, we are one of the few places where illegally collected evidence CAN (and is) used in courts.
:(
In my opinion courts should be allowed to use all relevant evidence. Deliberately causing a miscarriage of justice is not the right way to punish a different person for having broken a different law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCpL45_2pOA
However, a recent case clarified that ilicit evidence/proof may be used in favour fo the defense. (Lula and the leaked Moro messages)
Early in my career in security (many years pre-Snowden) I thought Echelon was a fun conspiracy theory and it was really just something less extreme with good people doing important work. I do not anymore. Our societies should find a way to put an end to these agencies peacefully, not unlike nuclear test bans and disarmament.
The scientific community needs to wrest control from the spooks, IMO. Until we do democracy is make-believe.
The reality is that the world is a bad place and these agencies are a necessary evil. When they fail in their duties, we have things like the Manchester Arena bombing, Charlie Hebdo, and so on and so forth.
This does not mean they should be free to run amok, like GCHQ obviously has for decades now. There should be checks and balances, which are sorely lacking at the moment.
Can't even get close, and slay human rights, and therefore humanity, in the process.
See: China.
Their capabilities and their influences on our own democratic processes are about as welcome as leftover minefields from forgotten conflicts, especially as many of them retire to write memoirs and mug for television presenters. They were a 20th century artifact of the nation state (which they have forfeited) and by all popular accounts now they seem to form a kind of seedy post-national shadow government engaged in protecting sympathetic capital flows. As ever it was, perhaps, but we shouldn't be arguing about whether or not their behavior is appropriate so much as whether we should tolerate their continued existence at all.
Of course they're an easy straw man, but being the key source of deception in the world is neither necessary or sympathetic.
You see, the government didn't perform the necessary rituals to deny your rights, and the courts have been clear: the government needs to 'vote' and say something about 'the children' before they take your rights. Of course, that's only if the courts decide to hear your case, which is dependent upon the government saying the court is allowed to hear your case.
Just keep working through the system, it's working!
Maybe it's time it should be.
Gone are the days of "the government may be listening" as it's now "we definitely know they are listening, recording, indexing, searching, and parallel reconstructing". We must start treating everything as compromised and actively develop against all threats... because if we don't, then we need to swallow the bitter pill and accept that state surveillance is not only actively used, but it's going to be actively used against us, and we should stop complaining about it.
Snowden came after several others who were persecuted by the US Govt. Some even had their doors kicked in and guns pointed at their faces while they were in the shower. Check out what they did to NSA's Bill Binney, who ran COMINT for the NSA and was talking about the programs used to collect data before 9/11, and after. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
Bradley Manning (now Chelsea) and Tom Drake (NSA) also had some interesting things to say. Here's a good interview with Drake and his lawyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEq42BDBVWk
It was actually because of how these other whistleblower cases were handled being the reason why Snowden went to the press instead of followed in their footsteps and reporting up the chain of command.