Perhaps we could move collected intelligence data into an agency, specifically tasked with insuring it's only used in a constitutional manner. Search requests would be submitted to agents who know when warrants are required.
A system similar to this was already in place for warrantless surveillance, the FISA courts, which have become a rubber stamp.
These systems that are supposed to be a check on state power eventually become far too comfortable with the agencies they are supposed to have an adversarial relationship with.
I don't have any experience in this area, but how would one know that the FISA courts are a rubber stamp, as opposed to the requests being brought to the court being only the most reasonable and well-defined ones?
It seems like from the outside the observable effect would be the same (high warrant-granting rate), but the reality between the two is very different.
The issue with this editorial is that it quotes the Chief Justice. The next sentence should be: the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court unilaterally appoints all FISA judges himself.
Only recently has FISA been expanded to allow an amici role for government-licensed attorneys to argue against certain requests.
We’ve kind of had three phases of FISA:
Church commission FISA rejected 4 out of 25,000 requests. And those were approved after re-submission. Numbers like that cannot refute rubber stamp allegations.
Then, after 2001, submissions started getting wild. The rejection rate and public statements seemed to show some friction between branches.
Then, cooly around 2013, FISA seemed to allow requests on American citizens. By 2017, Wrey was arguing that FBI depended on this. And only lately do we have the amici roles.
For some reason, Wikipedia doesn’t provide its usual level of detail on the FISA court page. Amendments to FISA look like:
1978, formed out of the Church commission
1994, business communications added to scope, and surveillance might be physical. “Business” would eventually include GPS and cell tower locating information kept by cell provider businesses.
2007, expanded to legitimize a dragnet for cases where foreign agents are included among bulk collection. I say legitimize because in 2005 the intelligence community was busted surpassing the bounds permitted by law. Retroactive immunity of telecom companies is one of the more interesting policy debates, I think.
Since 2008, it has been renewed by every President.
While Snowden is perhaps the most prominent face of what the public is permitted to know, Trump campaigner Carter Page is the most prominent FISA target. Any American citizen is legally protected by FISA unless they’re a foreign agent.
Page acted suspiciously like he was being paid by Russia to courier information. I think we can conclude that the FISA court acted in their typical knee jerk fashion to allow surveillance without bothering with civil rights; four times. The DoJ would eventually conclude it did not have probable cause to surveil Page. Republican legislators felt Page needed to be protected, and he became the face for some changes to FISA. Carter Page lied about trips to Moscow. Depending on your politics, this might be to cover up crimes, or you might fantasize that he was on a secret mission. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also lied about the trips. Anyway, fighting for changes to the kind of suspicion FISA is allowed to investigate is based on Page lying about when he was in Moscow.
The material unconstitutionally gathered on Page is tightly guarded by the government. His lawsuits have been thrown out. Having been at one time such a prominent victim that he was changing FISA law, he would later be described by the White House as an unknown.
The temptation to abuse intelligence data is too great. I can't think of any structure centralized structure that wouldn't eventually be corrupted. This is why police powers reside with the states not the federal government. It is the federal government's responsibility to ensure states are following the Constitution.
> I can't think of any structure centralized structure that wouldn't eventually be corrupted.
Do you mean this literally? Like, if you were to start with a clean slate, free of all norms, premises, and axioms, you couldn't design a system that wouldn't be corrupted (which is different from a system being imperfect)?
Heck, one obvious approach is to involve citizens, and make the death penalty a consequence for corruption in certain roles. I think this would substantially alter people's behavior.
Something else we could do in conjunction with this: start teaching the public how to think skilfully so they are not so easily misled by people who are taught such things (in schools not available to the public).
Blue-collar actions are found to be criminal. White-collar actions are found to be unlawful and stopped. Government or politician actions are found to be unlawful and continue.
It's so weird to me that everyone assumes the NSA simply stopped recording all American phone calls because they were caught doing it and it was actually illegal.
I know they also surveil other forms of digital communication but it still amuses me to think about how they built a huge apparatus for tapping phones and then millennials and gen-z come along who only make calls as a last resort.
Cynically, I think there’s a better explanation than those two. The LEO training is useful for spelling out exactly what you’re supposed to say in public. There’s another training in subtlety; maybe ad hoc. You learn exactly where the line is before a paper trail is made and the public can proclaim you “egregiously overstepped”
What is distressing is that the pattern of misuse seems to mirror other misuses of police arresting authority at the local and state levels.
Would this imply training levels not being what they should be in areas of complying with laws by law enforcement including the FBI, ATF, DOJ, CIA, NSA, etc?
I’m not certain whether it’s an issue of training or an issue of lack of accountability. It certainly seems like a time of reckoning must come for all levels of law enforcement, where we get back to upholding the law rather than being above it.
By now, almost everybody in the country seems to take issue with one or more areas of law enforcement and/or judiciary. Belief in justice seems to be at a very low point.
I think there’s a general lack of confidence in the integrity of elections, especially given what’s been revealed in the Twitter files and that “mules” documentary. I don’t see how anything can change without election integrity and ensuring the standing government cannot interfere in elections.
That’s the only way any of the government overreach can be curtailed. Bureaucrats aren’t going to oversee themselves. They will always fight for larger budgets and more power.
The deeper root level problem is how elections are financed. The politicians themselves are little more than actors at this point. No one is going to win a national level election without the support of the largest lobbying groups.
I don't think this is a problem of election integrity, the abuse is being done by un-elected people which while some are appointed most aren't. It is an accountability issue, call something a threat to national security and now everything's free game. The people doing those violations should at the very least be fired, but repeatedly doing them -or repeatedly overseeing them- should lead to jail, especially if it is targeted at political parties.
I agree, but the lack of arrests despite hard evidence tells you all you need to know.
Every government employee that communicated with social media companies in order to suppress political speech during elections (or at all) violated their Constitutional oath. They must be arrested and tried for treason.
The NGOs that financed the mules that harvested ballots (except in CA where it is somehow “legal”) should be declared domestic terrorist organizations. The people who financed those NGOs need to do a perp walk.
There are mountains of evidence about dominion voting systems. There’s another worthy target.
That would be a good start towards restoring confidence.
That's why you cannot ask any government to protect its citizen digital systems, because there are too much interested in to get security holes for their own benefit...
Yep, we are alone in this, and with all those horrible standards/software(open source or not)/hardware, don't bother that much, it is unreasonable anyway.
I think the issue is more like, the agency that is specialized in security is also responsible for digital surveillance with practically zero oversight.
> That's why you cannot ask any government to protect its citizen digital systems, because there are too much interested in to get security holes for their own benefit...
Any government that currently exists maybe, but not necessarily any government that is possible.
The governmental forms we have now are ancient, designed in a period that pales in comparison to the complexity and power currently available to mankind.
The runtime we are in physically supports improvements, but it appears to not support improvements psychologically - you can test this theory by asking questions of agents within the runtime, and you will discover that there is extreme and almost unanimous opposition to improvements, which to me seems highly counter-intuitive but that is what data suggests.
>While the analyst attempted to remove the US information, in some cases, it said, they “inadvertently failed” to do so.
A reminder that every abuse we hear of is one they failed at covering up. The most famous example of this is MKUltra, where everything we know about the program is from one document cache that survived the incinerator by being mislabeled.
I don’t know what the context of this is (or its legitimacy), but what you’re implying is extremely offensive… especially to the Jewish members of my family who did fight in WWII under extremely anti-semitic leadership who would send them on missions first (not last!) that they thought were the most dangerous.
I did not interpret it in that way; I thought it was “That is offensive to me and even more so to these other people I know”. Your point is correct – it can charitably be interpreted as being a form of refutation argument. However, anecdotes about individual people are a very weak form of argument. I could think of a few better arguments immediately from the top of my head: The clumsy wording of the text (in the PDF) itself. The fact that there seems to be no personal testimonies about what is implied to be an extremely widespread conspiracy. And, of course, your link is a much better argument than any individual anecdote.
But ‘azinman’ did not do any of that; they chose instead to play the “I’m offended!” card. If this is allowed to fly, well, then anyone can be offended by anything, and argument and debate is dead here.
When one sides entire argument was "this flyer apparently exists," criticizing the rebuttal for killing the debate seems silly. They did not try to debate or present a real argument in the first place, though they have since somewhat fixed that.
I didn’t criticize the rebuttal for killing this debate, since this debate is immaterial, and the PDF is easily debunked. I criticize people killing the idea of debate with “I’m offended” rebuttals.
Did you read the page that the GP specifically called out? And yes, none of it is related to MKUltra or the linked topic… which makes it all the more infuriating that this comment is still up and not flagged for removal.
Yes that site is antisemitic and is not even trying to hide it. I was just referring to comment that didn't even bother to read the document. Page 119 of that doc doesn't refer to anything re MKUltra or docs disposal, just some unverifiable antisemitic gibberish.
Unfortunately I can't report that post even with karma above 3500, hopefully somebody else can
Are you sure? To flag comments, you need to click the part that says "x minutes/hours/days ago" and then flag will appear. I flagged the comment hours ago.
I'm sorry that PDF hurt your feelings. I didn't anticipate that. The notice, as well as other materials associated with it seem rather philo-semetic to me. The reaction to it here implies (to me) that it was likely not intended to be made public.
Now that you bring up your grievance about it, though--I do wonder if one of these tools the FBI uses for surveillance is the ADL, as is evident in other declassified documents. You know how the FBI was using Twitter to implement its agendas and goals? Just a thought.
Anyhow, I didn't intend to discount anything any individual in your family experienced. The notice and individual experiences are not mutually exclusive, though. The notice is easily verifiable for anyone interested: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220195545/https://www.nytim...
The NYTimes article only says something more vague in its headline, but the body is talking about the need for Jews to be more active in social justice work, and that communism is incompatible with Judaism. I’ve read what I could find of the report and all it talks about is social justice work. I’d love to learn more about this.
Whatever the context was, we know that a huge amount of jewish soldiers died in WWII as linked by another commenter, so in my mind as a seeming non-sequitor it followed a common anti-Semitic trope that American Jews are more loyal to Judaism and Israel than to the U.S. Of course this has also been the trope for many other immigrants as well.
I cannot guess about the ADL other than it being involved a huge amount of other stuff clearly not related to the FBI. Remember that in 1935 Harvard had an official Jewish quota of 15%, and Israel largely exists because the U.S./UK/France didn’t want to take the Eastern European Jewish diaspora — discrimination was widespread at the levels of power. The population was also small, so its hard to imagine it had much value other than perhaps keeping tabs on intellectuals who were friendly to communism.
For a start, those two documents disagree on when the 47th convention happened, one printed in 36 and the other saying it happened in 37.
Besides that "Rabbi's push for exption from draft" is fairly different than "Rabbi's made a secret deal, support the war and you won't be drafted. Don't tell the gentiles."
Plus, I don't see how this is an example of intelligence agencies doing something and failing to cover it up, so I'm not sure why you brought it up in the first place.
It's good to see here that one part of the government is calling another part to account. But I have to think that's unusual, and I'd love to see a better balance of responsibilities here.
In Greg Bear's novel "Queen of Angels", set in 2047, their solution to the conflicting needs of privacy and crime prevention was a separate organization called "Citizen Oversight". All the digital-trail data (cameras, financial records, etc) flowed into Citizen Oversight. If law enforcement wanted data, they had to ask for it and demonstrate need on a case-by-case basis. In that world it wasn't a perfect solution; if I recall rightly, part of the novel is driven by Citizen Oversight's swing from a too-loose era to a very stingy one. But I liked the idea of there being specific, named people responsible for protecting privacy.
Using civilian oversight of police as a metaphor, the high-profile civilian killings lately have come from police departments with civilian oversight. Less than 1% have it, which means an even smaller fraction have civilian discipline.
I should have picked a milder example. If in the future, civilian oversight has burgeoned to be powerful-enough that it impedes what law-enforcement feels it’s entitled to, then civilian oversight will have passed traditional American powers.
Your metaphor is begging the question, how do we get there from here? America has the institution of juries and grand juries, and in a very small number of police departments, long-term officials with regular contact with the department.
I suppose juries and grand juries are the path toward overpowered civilian roles rather than today’s meager civilian oversight boards.
And that's randomly without jury strikes. There's a reason corporate and government interests have tried to keep more and more matters out of a jury trial -- the outcomes are unpredictable.
Which is exactly as it should be. If the people's will were predictable, democracy would be unnecessary.
And if a bad investigation is allowed, or a good investigation is stopped... that's a fair price to pay for, on the whole, having greater civil control.
The Progressives thought they would eliminate government corruption by making everything, including the proverbial dog catcher, an elected position.
It has not gone well. It turns out the voters can’t be bothered to learn about more than a few top line races. Anything under that is either straight party line or random.
> It's good to see here that one part of the government is calling another part to account. But I have to think that's unusual, and I'd love to see a better balance of responsibilities here.
This is the very reason and design for the three branches of government and the origin of the term, "checks and balances."
The idea of "Checks and Balances" was coined by Montesquieu in his "The Spirit of the Laws" treatise, where it is justified as "balanced forces of equal leverage amongst one another having an embedded tension against each other".
The problem is, despite the Founding Fathers' near-fetishization of Montesquieu's work, and the fact that Checks and Balances are a genuinely good idea, the Founding Fathers weren't true to it. In a country of three branches (Legislative, Executive, Judiciary), it is absolutely paramount that the installment of each branch's authority is independent from the actions of another. Obviously, this didn't happen: Congress itself is THE delegate to assigning the President of the Executive - of whom decides his cabinet (which is also meant to be a Check and Balance to Congress), and Congress (and the President it chooses) not only votes on the Supreme Justices of the Judiciary - but Congress also has the power to ordain any court inferior to the Supreme Court.
This creates a system where Congress seats its utmost authorities intended to act as its checks and balances, and it doesn't work.
> Congress itself is THE delegate to assigning the President of the Executive
Subject to the certification only procedure outlined in the Constitution, as was recently vividly demonstrated. (Originally, under Article II, Section 1, Clause 3; since 1804, under the 12th Amendment)
There's a reason the states transmit their electors' votes to Congress, rather than meeting in DC.
Furthermore, current case law is that states have virtually unlimited rights, subject only to US constitutional protections, to run their elections as they see fit.
> and Congress (and the President it chooses) not only votes on the Supreme Justices of the Judiciary
As above, Congress does not choose the President. Ergo, the President nominating and Congress confirming a Supreme Court justice are two independent branches.
> but Congress also has the power to ordain any court inferior to the Supreme Court.
Which may then be overruled by the Supreme Court. All in all, a surprisingly flexible arrangement that maintains superiority of the explicitly authorized and described Supreme Court.
> Subject to the certification only procedure outlined in the Constitution, as was recently vividly demonstrated. (Originally, under Article II, Section 1, Clause 3; since 1804, under the 12th Amendment)
This stance is nonsense. Bush v Gore, Jackson v Adams, and Hayes v Tilden prove it wrong by vesting in Congress, through prior case law, the power to choose Presidential appointment and nullifying both individual state Electors AND collective certification (depending on which of the three you're pointing at).
Congress itself dictates who is President and Supreme Court Justices through a de-facto oligarchy. Further, the 17th amendment mandated a popular election for Senators in 1913, so to say that States run their elections as they see fit is - generous. Plus, need we mention the upcoming conflict of independent state legislature theory? We'll see how that cooks up.
Also, people make the mistake of believing that direct-democratic elections for members of Congress means that such a superior-leveraged branch of the government is still technically structured as a republic in political theory. This position is scrutinized when considering that the democratically-elected members of Congress conspire to derive additional power amongst each other by sitting the utmost authorities in the branches of government that are also intended to be chosen, by the people, as a check and balance to the very members of Congress they voted in. It's a very complex edifice, but it sure isn't what it's advertised as.
Any group who becomes part of the system will then act to protect the system. I mean, judges are supposed to grant warrants for things already, yet we continually see stories of them just rubber stamping requests, or police lying to obtain them. I assume that system would suffer similar issues.
Sure, term limits can be good in many ways, and random selection can reduce the people chosing it for the wrong reasons. But who is going to give up their career to be a citizen watcher for just a few years? Likewise, random selection may not yield a cohort with the correct capacity to properly administer the system.
I'd almost think the better solution is to use mini-juries to evaluate warrants so the judges aren't just rubber stamping. At least then the judge has to explain the situation and points of law, and aren't the only one making the decision.
> But who is going to give up their career to be a citizen watcher for just a few years?
A Citizen. Rights and responsibilities, etc.
> Likewise, random selection may not yield a cohort with the correct capacity to properly administer the system.
Of course. That's the downside of random cohorts. But compared to the alternatives (that we actively gripe about), occasional lack of ability is the lesser of two evils.
This would also be lessened if there weren't a way to get out of it. Don't want to serve when your number is called? Feel free to be a citizen of another country.
Haha OK. Why not do that for police and judge positions too? Then you'd eliminate the need for this.
"That's the downside of random cohorts. But compared to the alternatives (that we actively gripe about), occasional lack of ability is the lesser of two evils."
That's one opinion.
"This would also be lessened if there weren't a way to get out of it."
In one way I agree. In practice I don't. Forced incompetence is generally going to lead to really poor outcomes. By theway, how are Putin's conscripts doing?
> Why not do that for police and judge positions too?
Because police and judge positions require specialized skill sets and training, and both have access to the force of government, which would seem to merit a higher minimum bar of professionalism.
Oversight's "feature" is that there are fewer negative consequences when it's inappropriately applied.
> By theway, how are Putin's conscripts doing?
You're arguing Putin's conscripts are an example of when a country's best and brightest aren't allowed to excuse themselves from random selection?
Of course we do. Corruption and anti-corruption are well-studied topics. There are wide differentials in corruption levels across space and time. E.g.: https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/
Incorruptible systems aren't possible, but there's a wide library of patterns that make corruption easier and harder, and there are surely more to discover.
> Any group who becomes part of the system will then act to protect the system.
As a True/False binary, sure, but the magnitude of the phenomenon is a function of the quality of the system. As flaws are realized, the system can be improved.
Consider how many known flaws there are in our various systems, and then observe (in an as unbiased as possible frame of mind as possible) how we (everyone (including us here on HN), but especially those with various forms of power) respond to realizations of these flaws: do we fix them, or do we engage in rhetoric, propaganda, post-hoc rationalization/justification, etc?
> I mean, judges are supposed to grant warrants for things already, yet we continually see stories of them just rubber stamping requests, or police lying to obtain them.
If this displeases us, shall we blame ourselves or Mother Nature? Or, not even think about it?
> I assume that system would suffer similar issues.
You may be right. Alternatively, you may not. There's only one way to (possibly) find out, but it is certainly not mandatory that we find such things out.....well, unless we desire certain outcomes, then it might be.
Under all approaches tried so far perhaps, but there are LOTS of approaches that we haven't tried. Heck, very few people can even get their mind to even consider alternative approaches, and actually trying things is a lot harder than that relatively simple task.
Equip all public officials and bureaucrats with camera vests, and livestream their duty hours. Immediately fire anyone who's gear malfunctions, nullify their pensions.
That is insufficient. An institution can be subverted and that isn't even too difficult. No, people need to control their own information and need to be empowered to do so.
Such indirection might make sense for data that must be collected anyway. But it should only be collected if necessary in the first place.
Of course here come the articles undermining the intelligence community, right in the wake of the Chinese balloon incursions and continued Chinese/Russian foreign intelligence efforts, and at its core are republicans. As usual these articles pertaining to the IC massively misunderstand, misrepresent, and downright act against the interests of the United States by so feverently spurring on the de-fanging of intelligence capabilities.
The FBI is already profoundly ineffective. I'd be good with empowering it further it as long as there is bipartisan congressional oversight, same with our police in general.
I am not trying to be flippant, but this is a profoundly naive comment you have made.
The FBI, CIA, NSA is filled to the brim with assholes. Who then blackmail and fund assholes that are meant to oversee them, but don't. Instead they enable the perverse sense of 'justice' we see in this world.
I am not some exterminist-minded person, but there is no denying the fact that FN psychos fill these orgs.
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Ill give you an example from ~2005 or such, I think...
RSA conference in San Francisco.
I met the head of cyber security for the US... him and his team. They invited me to dinner as I worked for Lockheed.
There was a guy sitting at the table, maybe ~24-ish, super black bags under his eyes.. (meaning he didnt sleep much) and he was bragging the entire dinner about their red/blue hacking teams they were doing to hack shit...
Now this was a controlled environ of them plating team agains team to hack/infiltrate(physically -- lock picking etc) eachothers' area to get pay-dirt...
But it was the extreme psycho-pathy that really struck me...
I know that we have the best military there is, but it was truly weird to see the amount of glee that came from one who is empowered by the MIC in this way...
Oh please, here come the green text usernames coming in to defend the greatest threat to civil liberties the world has ever known. The "interests of the Untied States" is not the same is the interests of its people or the people of earth. It really just the interests of the military, industrial, academic complex that is raping and killing the planet.
I'm not sure what's worse, the intelligence agencies brazenly breaking the law and violating the Constitutional rights of US citizens on a daily basis or those who crawl out of the gutter to defend these abuses.
Why would they undermine themselves? These News Companies have _Expert_ IC individuals on payroll. If these articles had teeth wouldn't the embedded pro IC assets stop the undermining or would these individuals not be asked for their "opinion" on the articles prepublication?
even if this gets fixed they can still use 5 eyes to get around it, US and friends use loopholes to have each other spy on their citizens to get around their own laws protecting citizens. It adds an extra step but they still get the info they want
5 eyes as a concept is essentially institutionalized treason.
There’s no such thing as a friendly foreign intelligence service, their goals are directly against the interest of the American public/civilian world (which in theory our intelligence services work for)
A CIA officer conspiring with GCHQ to defraud the United States should result in lifetime imprisonment.
That is not a good take. There are many moral and political concerns with five eyes, but casting all international cooperation as “treason” discredits your position.
GCHQ is not a “counterpart” to NSA, it’s a hostile foreign agency that actively works to undermine the security and privacy of Americans.
Their employee should be sanctioned, and anyone on the gov payroll working with them should be treated just as if they worked with any other hostile group.
Mossad and FSB are functionally identical, even if one is from a supposedly “allied” state, the agency themselves still works against American civilians.
Spying cases that come to light despite 3-letter agencies fighting it tooth and nail unfortunately mostly end up in this category when judged from common folks and moral perspective.
Most US folks here on HN have some moral qualms with that, now imagine how rest of the world sees this, and how it makes us feel (our lives and rights are inferior to US citizens, a great way to build long term relationship as an example)
Allowing hostile foreign actors to spy on your civilians is not “international cooperation” any more than running drugs with the Mexican government would be.
It’s fundamentally a betrayal of your country.
The “bad take” is that these people are allowed to walk free because it’s just “cooperation”. Absurd.
"In another incident, the FBI ran searches using the “names of a local political party,” even though a connection to foreign intelligence was “not reasonably likely.” The DOJ explained the errors away by saying FBI personnel “misunderstood” the search procedures, adding they were “subsequently reminded of how to correctly apply the query rules.”"
Fascinating, FISA was created iirc in part in response to nixon's spying on political groups, half a century later this is what we see and the response is just to...remind them how to correctly apply the query rules? If that is the response to such a thing I find it hard to believe it isn't a common occurrence that is just being hand waved away because it "leaked". And the article itself is filled with even more examples.
I'm not opposed to calling the new age church committee politically motivated, it clearly is, but at the very least they are trying to do something about it. It's pretty sad how after the russiagate conspiracy theory took steam the "left-wing" media started putting the intelligence community in a pedestal and now it seems like distrusting them is a republican position, bizarrely.
There are worse consequences for bank tellers looking up celebrity banking info, or customer service reps looking up celebrity medical info, than there are for this crap.
93% of DC voted Democrat in 2020, surrounding areas about 80% Democrat. Not sure why anybody would be surprised by this. The people in charge are fine with it and only promote people with similar ideology. Anybody in the FBI who might change things gets assigned to some FBI field office in the midwest and their career is over. Similar situation in the Pentagon and most other DC/Federal government institutions
A minority of DC voters work for the government, and only a small minority of those work at the top of their agencies or departments. The people in charge are appointed by nationally elected people, or promoted by the people those nationally elected people appoint.
But that's the thing- it's not illegal. These programs were legislated by the Congress and have been before the Supreme Court multiple times. If you want it to be illegal you need to get on your congressmen.
We don’t, Ron Wyden (mentioned in the OP) is a prominent Dem who has also been campaigning hard on this issue. IIRC he had committee access and said things like “there is unconstitutional stuff going on that folks will be outraged about” prior to the Snowden leaks. He was very critical of the Patriot Act.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadThese systems that are supposed to be a check on state power eventually become far too comfortable with the agencies they are supposed to have an adversarial relationship with.
It seems like from the outside the observable effect would be the same (high warrant-granting rate), but the reality between the two is very different.
Only recently has FISA been expanded to allow an amici role for government-licensed attorneys to argue against certain requests.
We’ve kind of had three phases of FISA:
Church commission FISA rejected 4 out of 25,000 requests. And those were approved after re-submission. Numbers like that cannot refute rubber stamp allegations.
Then, after 2001, submissions started getting wild. The rejection rate and public statements seemed to show some friction between branches.
Then, cooly around 2013, FISA seemed to allow requests on American citizens. By 2017, Wrey was arguing that FBI depended on this. And only lately do we have the amici roles.
1978, formed out of the Church commission
1994, business communications added to scope, and surveillance might be physical. “Business” would eventually include GPS and cell tower locating information kept by cell provider businesses.
2007, expanded to legitimize a dragnet for cases where foreign agents are included among bulk collection. I say legitimize because in 2005 the intelligence community was busted surpassing the bounds permitted by law. Retroactive immunity of telecom companies is one of the more interesting policy debates, I think.
Since 2008, it has been renewed by every President.
While Snowden is perhaps the most prominent face of what the public is permitted to know, Trump campaigner Carter Page is the most prominent FISA target. Any American citizen is legally protected by FISA unless they’re a foreign agent.
Page acted suspiciously like he was being paid by Russia to courier information. I think we can conclude that the FISA court acted in their typical knee jerk fashion to allow surveillance without bothering with civil rights; four times. The DoJ would eventually conclude it did not have probable cause to surveil Page. Republican legislators felt Page needed to be protected, and he became the face for some changes to FISA. Carter Page lied about trips to Moscow. Depending on your politics, this might be to cover up crimes, or you might fantasize that he was on a secret mission. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also lied about the trips. Anyway, fighting for changes to the kind of suspicion FISA is allowed to investigate is based on Page lying about when he was in Moscow.
The material unconstitutionally gathered on Page is tightly guarded by the government. His lawsuits have been thrown out. Having been at one time such a prominent victim that he was changing FISA law, he would later be described by the White House as an unknown.
> constitutional manner.
Collecting the data is the unconstitutional bit.
Do you mean this literally? Like, if you were to start with a clean slate, free of all norms, premises, and axioms, you couldn't design a system that wouldn't be corrupted (which is different from a system being imperfect)?
Heck, one obvious approach is to involve citizens, and make the death penalty a consequence for corruption in certain roles. I think this would substantially alter people's behavior.
Something else we could do in conjunction with this: start teaching the public how to think skilfully so they are not so easily misled by people who are taught such things (in schools not available to the public).
That got a laugh
whether they can find a needle in a lake sized haystack is another
"It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So."
-anonymous
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/
Would this imply training levels not being what they should be in areas of complying with laws by law enforcement including the FBI, ATF, DOJ, CIA, NSA, etc?
By now, almost everybody in the country seems to take issue with one or more areas of law enforcement and/or judiciary. Belief in justice seems to be at a very low point.
That’s the only way any of the government overreach can be curtailed. Bureaucrats aren’t going to oversee themselves. They will always fight for larger budgets and more power.
The deeper root level problem is how elections are financed. The politicians themselves are little more than actors at this point. No one is going to win a national level election without the support of the largest lobbying groups.
Every government employee that communicated with social media companies in order to suppress political speech during elections (or at all) violated their Constitutional oath. They must be arrested and tried for treason.
The NGOs that financed the mules that harvested ballots (except in CA where it is somehow “legal”) should be declared domestic terrorist organizations. The people who financed those NGOs need to do a perp walk.
There are mountains of evidence about dominion voting systems. There’s another worthy target.
That would be a good start towards restoring confidence.
Yep, we are alone in this, and with all those horrible standards/software(open source or not)/hardware, don't bother that much, it is unreasonable anyway.
Imagine getting a notice from the NSA that your Wordpress was vulnerable and exposed customer data because your server devs suck.
Imagine an NSA that actually sent zero days to Apple instead of exploiting them.
BTW, this already exists in multiple countries, like Germany and now the UK [1/2]
[1] https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Unternehmen-und-Organisati...
[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/british-govt-...
Any government that currently exists maybe, but not necessarily any government that is possible.
The governmental forms we have now are ancient, designed in a period that pales in comparison to the complexity and power currently available to mankind.
The runtime we are in physically supports improvements, but it appears to not support improvements psychologically - you can test this theory by asking questions of agents within the runtime, and you will discover that there is extreme and almost unanimous opposition to improvements, which to me seems highly counter-intuitive but that is what data suggests.
A reminder that every abuse we hear of is one they failed at covering up. The most famous example of this is MKUltra, where everything we know about the program is from one document cache that survived the incinerator by being mislabeled.
But ‘azinman’ did not do any of that; they chose instead to play the “I’m offended!” card. If this is allowed to fly, well, then anyone can be offended by anything, and argument and debate is dead here.
Unfortunately I can't report that post even with karma above 3500, hopefully somebody else can
Now that you bring up your grievance about it, though--I do wonder if one of these tools the FBI uses for surveillance is the ADL, as is evident in other declassified documents. You know how the FBI was using Twitter to implement its agendas and goals? Just a thought.
Anyhow, I didn't intend to discount anything any individual in your family experienced. The notice and individual experiences are not mutually exclusive, though. The notice is easily verifiable for anyone interested: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220195545/https://www.nytim...
My apologies for any hurt feelings. Be well.
The NYTimes article only says something more vague in its headline, but the body is talking about the need for Jews to be more active in social justice work, and that communism is incompatible with Judaism. I’ve read what I could find of the report and all it talks about is social justice work. I’d love to learn more about this.
Whatever the context was, we know that a huge amount of jewish soldiers died in WWII as linked by another commenter, so in my mind as a seeming non-sequitor it followed a common anti-Semitic trope that American Jews are more loyal to Judaism and Israel than to the U.S. Of course this has also been the trope for many other immigrants as well.
I cannot guess about the ADL other than it being involved a huge amount of other stuff clearly not related to the FBI. Remember that in 1935 Harvard had an official Jewish quota of 15%, and Israel largely exists because the U.S./UK/France didn’t want to take the Eastern European Jewish diaspora — discrimination was widespread at the levels of power. The population was also small, so its hard to imagine it had much value other than perhaps keeping tabs on intellectuals who were friendly to communism.
Don't wonder, stick to the facts. You are drifting the topic. Your conclusions are baseless for that matter. This is why they are so easy to ridicule.
Besides that "Rabbi's push for exption from draft" is fairly different than "Rabbi's made a secret deal, support the war and you won't be drafted. Don't tell the gentiles."
Plus, I don't see how this is an example of intelligence agencies doing something and failing to cover it up, so I'm not sure why you brought it up in the first place.
In Greg Bear's novel "Queen of Angels", set in 2047, their solution to the conflicting needs of privacy and crime prevention was a separate organization called "Citizen Oversight". All the digital-trail data (cameras, financial records, etc) flowed into Citizen Oversight. If law enforcement wanted data, they had to ask for it and demonstrate need on a case-by-case basis. In that world it wasn't a perfect solution; if I recall rightly, part of the novel is driven by Citizen Oversight's swing from a too-loose era to a very stingy one. But I liked the idea of there being specific, named people responsible for protecting privacy.
Yes, civilian oversight of police in many places is weak. But to me that's an argument for stronger oversight.
Your metaphor is begging the question, how do we get there from here? America has the institution of juries and grand juries, and in a very small number of police departments, long-term officials with regular contact with the department.
I suppose juries and grand juries are the path toward overpowered civilian roles rather than today’s meager civilian oversight boards.
And that's randomly without jury strikes. There's a reason corporate and government interests have tried to keep more and more matters out of a jury trial -- the outcomes are unpredictable.
Which is exactly as it should be. If the people's will were predictable, democracy would be unnecessary.
And if a bad investigation is allowed, or a good investigation is stopped... that's a fair price to pay for, on the whole, having greater civil control.
It has not gone well. It turns out the voters can’t be bothered to learn about more than a few top line races. Anything under that is either straight party line or random.
This is the very reason and design for the three branches of government and the origin of the term, "checks and balances."
The problem is, despite the Founding Fathers' near-fetishization of Montesquieu's work, and the fact that Checks and Balances are a genuinely good idea, the Founding Fathers weren't true to it. In a country of three branches (Legislative, Executive, Judiciary), it is absolutely paramount that the installment of each branch's authority is independent from the actions of another. Obviously, this didn't happen: Congress itself is THE delegate to assigning the President of the Executive - of whom decides his cabinet (which is also meant to be a Check and Balance to Congress), and Congress (and the President it chooses) not only votes on the Supreme Justices of the Judiciary - but Congress also has the power to ordain any court inferior to the Supreme Court.
This creates a system where Congress seats its utmost authorities intended to act as its checks and balances, and it doesn't work.
Subject to the certification only procedure outlined in the Constitution, as was recently vividly demonstrated. (Originally, under Article II, Section 1, Clause 3; since 1804, under the 12th Amendment)
There's a reason the states transmit their electors' votes to Congress, rather than meeting in DC.
Furthermore, current case law is that states have virtually unlimited rights, subject only to US constitutional protections, to run their elections as they see fit.
> and Congress (and the President it chooses) not only votes on the Supreme Justices of the Judiciary
As above, Congress does not choose the President. Ergo, the President nominating and Congress confirming a Supreme Court justice are two independent branches.
> but Congress also has the power to ordain any court inferior to the Supreme Court.
Which may then be overruled by the Supreme Court. All in all, a surprisingly flexible arrangement that maintains superiority of the explicitly authorized and described Supreme Court.
This stance is nonsense. Bush v Gore, Jackson v Adams, and Hayes v Tilden prove it wrong by vesting in Congress, through prior case law, the power to choose Presidential appointment and nullifying both individual state Electors AND collective certification (depending on which of the three you're pointing at).
Congress itself dictates who is President and Supreme Court Justices through a de-facto oligarchy. Further, the 17th amendment mandated a popular election for Senators in 1913, so to say that States run their elections as they see fit is - generous. Plus, need we mention the upcoming conflict of independent state legislature theory? We'll see how that cooks up.
Also, people make the mistake of believing that direct-democratic elections for members of Congress means that such a superior-leveraged branch of the government is still technically structured as a republic in political theory. This position is scrutinized when considering that the democratically-elected members of Congress conspire to derive additional power amongst each other by sitting the utmost authorities in the branches of government that are also intended to be chosen, by the people, as a check and balance to the very members of Congress they voted in. It's a very complex edifice, but it sure isn't what it's advertised as.
I'd almost think the better solution is to use mini-juries to evaluate warrants so the judges aren't just rubber stamping. At least then the judge has to explain the situation and points of law, and aren't the only one making the decision.
A Citizen. Rights and responsibilities, etc.
> Likewise, random selection may not yield a cohort with the correct capacity to properly administer the system.
Of course. That's the downside of random cohorts. But compared to the alternatives (that we actively gripe about), occasional lack of ability is the lesser of two evils.
This would also be lessened if there weren't a way to get out of it. Don't want to serve when your number is called? Feel free to be a citizen of another country.
Haha OK. Why not do that for police and judge positions too? Then you'd eliminate the need for this.
"That's the downside of random cohorts. But compared to the alternatives (that we actively gripe about), occasional lack of ability is the lesser of two evils."
That's one opinion.
"This would also be lessened if there weren't a way to get out of it."
In one way I agree. In practice I don't. Forced incompetence is generally going to lead to really poor outcomes. By theway, how are Putin's conscripts doing?
Because police and judge positions require specialized skill sets and training, and both have access to the force of government, which would seem to merit a higher minimum bar of professionalism.
Oversight's "feature" is that there are fewer negative consequences when it's inappropriately applied.
> By theway, how are Putin's conscripts doing?
You're arguing Putin's conscripts are an example of when a country's best and brightest aren't allowed to excuse themselves from random selection?
Typically this is a 'grand jury' in USA.
Incorruptible systems aren't possible, but there's a wide library of patterns that make corruption easier and harder, and there are surely more to discover.
As a True/False binary, sure, but the magnitude of the phenomenon is a function of the quality of the system. As flaws are realized, the system can be improved.
Consider how many known flaws there are in our various systems, and then observe (in an as unbiased as possible frame of mind as possible) how we (everyone (including us here on HN), but especially those with various forms of power) respond to realizations of these flaws: do we fix them, or do we engage in rhetoric, propaganda, post-hoc rationalization/justification, etc?
> I mean, judges are supposed to grant warrants for things already, yet we continually see stories of them just rubber stamping requests, or police lying to obtain them.
If this displeases us, shall we blame ourselves or Mother Nature? Or, not even think about it?
> I assume that system would suffer similar issues.
You may be right. Alternatively, you may not. There's only one way to (possibly) find out, but it is certainly not mandatory that we find such things out.....well, unless we desire certain outcomes, then it might be.
One man's "flaw" is another man's "tool". The people in power exploiting the flaw are unlikely to fix it.
Make public office publicly accountable.
Such indirection might make sense for data that must be collected anyway. But it should only be collected if necessary in the first place.
DIA seems reasonable.
The FBI, CIA, NSA is filled to the brim with assholes. Who then blackmail and fund assholes that are meant to oversee them, but don't. Instead they enable the perverse sense of 'justice' we see in this world.
I am not some exterminist-minded person, but there is no denying the fact that FN psychos fill these orgs.
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Ill give you an example from ~2005 or such, I think...
RSA conference in San Francisco.
I met the head of cyber security for the US... him and his team. They invited me to dinner as I worked for Lockheed.
There was a guy sitting at the table, maybe ~24-ish, super black bags under his eyes.. (meaning he didnt sleep much) and he was bragging the entire dinner about their red/blue hacking teams they were doing to hack shit...
Now this was a controlled environ of them plating team agains team to hack/infiltrate(physically -- lock picking etc) eachothers' area to get pay-dirt...
But it was the extreme psycho-pathy that really struck me...
I know that we have the best military there is, but it was truly weird to see the amount of glee that came from one who is empowered by the MIC in this way...
and this was the RSA conf nearly 20 years ago...
Why would they undermine themselves? These News Companies have _Expert_ IC individuals on payroll. If these articles had teeth wouldn't the embedded pro IC assets stop the undermining or would these individuals not be asked for their "opinion" on the articles prepublication?
> at its core are republicans
The article names Ron Wyden and Hakeem Jeffries as two lawmakers who are interested in reining in the power of the FBI, hardly Republicans those two.
There’s no such thing as a friendly foreign intelligence service, their goals are directly against the interest of the American public/civilian world (which in theory our intelligence services work for)
A CIA officer conspiring with GCHQ to defraud the United States should result in lifetime imprisonment.
Where in the world did you get that strange claim about what I said?
Their employee should be sanctioned, and anyone on the gov payroll working with them should be treated just as if they worked with any other hostile group.
Mossad and FSB are functionally identical, even if one is from a supposedly “allied” state, the agency themselves still works against American civilians.
It’s a very naive worldview that says you never work with someone whose interests are not perfectly aligned with your own.
Most US folks here on HN have some moral qualms with that, now imagine how rest of the world sees this, and how it makes us feel (our lives and rights are inferior to US citizens, a great way to build long term relationship as an example)
It’s fundamentally a betrayal of your country.
The “bad take” is that these people are allowed to walk free because it’s just “cooperation”. Absurd.
It's like you guys read the editorial of a wikikeaks article in 2012 and then never checked back in.
Fascinating, FISA was created iirc in part in response to nixon's spying on political groups, half a century later this is what we see and the response is just to...remind them how to correctly apply the query rules? If that is the response to such a thing I find it hard to believe it isn't a common occurrence that is just being hand waved away because it "leaked". And the article itself is filled with even more examples.
I'm not opposed to calling the new age church committee politically motivated, it clearly is, but at the very least they are trying to do something about it. It's pretty sad how after the russiagate conspiracy theory took steam the "left-wing" media started putting the intelligence community in a pedestal and now it seems like distrusting them is a republican position, bizarrely.
Ridiculous
A minority of DC voters work for the government, and only a small minority of those work at the top of their agencies or departments. The people in charge are appointed by nationally elected people, or promoted by the people those nationally elected people appoint.