Depends on the types of people who are likely to give up their phone number for national political polling reasons, and in that subset, I'd think that is hardly random.
They don't go out and canvass for phone numbers first. If they don't include cell phone numbers it's possible to bias more towards older persons, but that wouldn't invalidate the survey either.
It's true, I've never taken a statistics course. But, if the experts tell me a 0.0003% sample size is fine so long as it's the RIGHT 0.0003%, then I guess I'll have to concede the point.
The even crazier story is this: In 2006, 61% of Democrats thought it was unacceptable, and in 2013, 34% of Democrats think it is unacceptable. I vote as Democrat as the next guy, but that's some crazy double-think going on there.
Cult of personalities, I think. Fascinating, if not terrifying, human trait. People root for their political party like they root for their home team; issues be damned.
Privacy might not be a big issue for many people and so they use the issue to signal support for politicians that are similar on issues that are important to them.
EDIT:
Or with even less mental effort they saw a question about privacy and didn't have an answer at hand so just substituted it with the question: do you like the President?
It's not double think if they never had an opinion on privacy :)
Keep in mind many Americans have never traveled outside the country, they are fed a constant diet of bullshit by our media alternating between frantic fear-mongering and gushing American paternalism, and simply don't stop to think about what is actually going on.
I would call them complete morons but that is unkind. Incurious and ignorant and perhaps far too trusting is perhaps more polite.
But, for once, this guy wasn't insulting poor people. He was insulting average people. The average person has free time but finds it very very hard to use it for something socially beneficial. This is partially their fault but certainly not wholly their fault.
Maybe if the poster had said we are fed a diet of bullshit; we don't stop to think enough; we are ignorant. Instead, it is always they, they, they. Never the poster- no, the poster is much smarter than they, much too smart to fall for any of that.
You can call me an asshole, it certainly won't be the first or last time.
Most people who meet me find me rather average in pretty much every respect. Probably below average in quite a few. We all have choices we can make with our time and I know nothing about spectator sports, for example.
That's because a majority of Americans don't believe they have anything to hide, or that the stuff they do want to hide is probably so mundane to the average government official that they assume they wouldn't care. I'm guessing the way the survey question is posed has a lot to do with the outcome. Take out the word "terrorism" and I'm sure support would drop. Add the phrase "personal information" and I'm sure it would drop even further. Or perhaps ask "Would you be comfortable with the government tracking your activity on Facebook, Gmail, and Skype?" I'm guessing support for that would be close to 0%.
I get the sense that this doesn't surprise you. My question is: why would it surprise anyone? It's not just that most Americans don't believe they have anything to hide from NSA. It's that they don't have anything to hide from NSA. I'm not invoking the fallacious "nothing to hide" argument; I have stuff I need to keep hidden. But most people really don't, and especially not from NSA.
Yeah. You'll get me too pull out my pitchfork if there is ever evidence this is being used for anything other than national security, I haven't seen that. IMO, the first shady use of this would most likely be the war on drugs, if we see that happen than I'll start getting worried.
Hey: my pitchfork is already within arm's reach. My "problem" over the last couple days is shoddy reporting and rush to judgement, especially with things like "OMG Palantir is even named after the all-seeing eye in Lord of the Rings, they must be in on it".
It's not OK if NSA is hoovering all communications in the US and sifting for national security issues, and that does appear to be what happened with Verizon/ATT/Sprint (though it does not appear to be true of Google and Facebook).
If you're really interested in civil liberties, the battle ground is the drug war. Everything becomes less scary once sending people to prison for drug use and possession is taken off the table.
Drug war far and away #1. Gambling and tax evasion might be #2.
Child porn is probably morally abhorrent enough (and genuinely rare; if >1% of people out there wanted to fuck 4 year olds, I'd probably try to nuke the planet from orbit) to not be an issue.
Maybe terrorism, if "terrorism" is badly interpreted enough to mean any contacts with terrorists, or advocacy of extreme political viewpoints.
> if >1% of people out there wanted to fuck 4 year olds, I'd probably try to nuke the planet from orbit
Er, you should be wary in nuking only people who've done the crimes, not just those who 'want' to (even if it's something like child porn).
That aside, I'm a big fan of the philosophy that if X causes Y, and Y is something really bad, don't treat Y, do something with X. So, if you have a pattern of priests abusing kids, maybe we should focus on more underlying problems: coerce the church to nullify the moronic rules that prohibit priests from marrying women... and let them live as normal humans live with normal human urges. I know pedophilia strikes a certain chord for people... but everyone deserves justice and dignity, even criminals. The first focus shouldn't be on punishment for the sake of punishment, it should be an action intended to curb future occurrences by studying what causes the bad behavior and indeed tending to those underlying causes.
I think it's pitchfork-worthy when this evidence is used to justify the killing of innocent people on the other side of the world even if it's done in the name of "national security."
If you believe the entire enterprise of violently suppressing foreign terrorist groups is counterfeit or immoral, you of course aren't going to be convinced by any reasoning mustered by the USG or its supporters.
But what about counterproliferation? The USG has the world's largest and most capable nuclear arsenal. In terrorist cases, reasonable people can disagree about how the USG's interests line up; maybe those cases have just as much to do with energy security or corporate profits as they do with safeguarding innocent citizens. But the same isn't true of proliferation: it really is in the USG's interests to suppress nuclear proliferation. Not coincidentally, nonproliferation is the other objective to which FISA surveillance has recently been put to use.
There's really two issues here. Firstly, I meant "killing innocent people" to refer to people who are innocent of anything that anyone routinely refers to as "terrorism," like children. Secondly, I have purposefully tried to leave out my own personal views on what constitutes "terrorism" and what constitutes a good response to it, because like you predicted, I'm probably not going to be convinced. But the first point still stands.
I'm deliberately not challenging any perspective you might have on the "global war on terror" and instead trying to sidestep it for the sake of discussion with an isomorphic but distinct alternative issue.
But most people really don't, and especially not from NSA.
How can we say that though, when we don't really know what the NSA is collecting, what they are doing with it, who they are sharing it with, etc.? The actual data collection per-se aside, one of the biggest problems with this whole setup is that we have allowed the development of a "shadow government" (not in the conspiracy theory sense, mind you) that lacks effective oversight (Congress is not sufficient oversight in my book), and is barely - if at all - accountable to the American people. Between the NSA, the CIA, the FISA courts, and FSM knows what other agencies - as well as "National Security Letters" and "gag orders" - we have a monster on our hands that we barely know anything about.
Well, stick me at the place on the Venn diagram of Americans who:
* Have a problem with the NSA getting wholesale access to telephonic metadata for all domestic phone calls.
* Generally do not believe NSA is using that metadata for purposes other than nonproliferation and counterterrorism, where "counterterrorism" means "pursuit of groups with active plans to kill American citizens".
* Agree that the shortcut NSA appears to be taking around existing due process is going to be a problem in the future if it isn't addressed and restricted.
Also, I find the number of acronyms we're tossing around --- NSA, FISA, FAA, &c --- comforting, not alarming. There's a lot of process here. Some of it is really bad and needs to be fixed. But in the 1950s, we had no process; the USG just listened to everything.
Fair enough. I also doubt that the NSA - as an agency in general - are using their snoop data for "purposes other than nonproliferation and counterterrorism"... yet. And while it's admittedly hypothetical, it's that "yet" that concerns me. But fear of how government collection of personal data can be misused is not without valid precedent: see the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, for example.
Who knows, maybe the political winds shift in, say, 5 years, and it becomes very dangerous to have certain ideological beliefs, or to have said certain things. I'm not crazy about making it easy for these guys (doing the whole "we were just following orders" thing, possibly) to go on a wholesale fishing expedition to find people to start giving the "yellow star" treatment.
I know, I know... way hypothetical, and you could argue "paranoid". Unlikely, even. But just because something seems incredible or unlikely doesn't seem, to me, to be a good argument for making it any easier for that scenario to come to pass. :-)
How many different refutations of "I have nothing to hide" have to be posted before it sinks in what a terrible stance that is? Or are you simply explaining the average person's inner response?
The latter. But I'm going a step farther than you probably think I am. I'm terribly annoyed by the presumption geeks like us have that Americans are ok with surveillance because they're stupid. They're not: their stance on surveillance is entirely rational. It is a fact that most of them --- like, 99.999% of them --- really don't have anything to fear from NSA†; in fact, the cost/benefit of NSA surveillance vs. Islamist terrorism probably does favor NSA, for most of them.
I see. I would tend to agree. Some Americans are ignorant and stupid about a lot of things (I say this as an American) but I think you're right. I mean, part of that also is being aware of the implications of saying "I have nothing to hide", etc, but that's for the other discussions.
Anyway, to be clear, I don't think this is one of those "Why does America care about the Kardashians instead of this?!!" issues.
"It's not just that most Americans don't believe they have anything to hide from NSA. It's that they don't have anything to hide from NSA."
I'm not so sure about that. Roughly 90% of Americans use illegal drugs at some point in their lives[1], and supposedly the average American commits 3 felonies per day.[2]
I would be somewhat concerned that NSA records could be used in employment verification (with NSA, or in government, or in general) in the future. Maybe "smoked pot" would not be a disqualifier, but what if a 22yo NSA candidate did coke at a party or something.
Unlikely the Verizon/Sprint hoovering, which may have been de jure lawful even if it violated the spirit/ intent of the law, the use you propose directly contravenes FISA.
FISA limits intercept, surveillance, and search, not collection, from what I've read of it (I don't think there is any restriction on collection). They have chosen the (IMO bad) interpretation that merely collecting information is not special at all.
You'd "voluntarily" wave the protection of that collected data, so it would be identical to "give us your last 10 years of email", except conveniently they would be the ones holding it for you.
(I could be wrong; I'm really not claiming any expertise on FISA or FAA or any of the secret court rulings determining its scope, just trying to figure out ways which collected information could be used to one's detriment. Plus, of course, FISA 2 is always possible, modifying FISA.)
Saying the NSA doesn't care if you've smoked weed is like saying the telephone doesn't care if you've smoked weed. It's technically true, but you can still get arrested for things you say over the phone. Same with the NSA, where they don't actually enforce the laws themselves, they're just a data provider for everyone else. And even if no one cares now, when the data is stored indefinitely, things you're doing/saying now that are completely innocuous could be used against you years or even decades in the future. Ex post facto won't stop the government from banning you from getting on a plane, getting a passport, taking out a bank loan, etc.
I think if you look at all the comments I've made on this thread (I'm not asking you to, just saying), you'll see that I agree that there is data any American might want to hide in their telephone calls or emails. The issue is that NSA doesn't want that data, and that FISA was designed to prevent data from being used the way you say it could be.
Long-term storage of data is certainly a valid issue. Of course, under FISA, NSA is obliged to "destroy" all data they accidentally collect that can't be traced to a specific foreign intelligence purpose.
I have no data to back this up, but I suspect you are wrong. I believe that the majority of American adults (let's say age 18 and above) are guilty of many crimes and that the NSA is very capable of obtaining evidence to convict them. Some of these crimes people are well aware of, like drug use, speeding, or the obvious copyright infringement, but some aren't, like tax crime or breaking safety regulations.
As the quote goes, in a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. And when the government already has all the evidence it needs to convict everyone, then anything can essentially be made illegal by selective prosecution of unrelated crimes. Have you been protesting against the government's foreign policy? Suddenly you're in jail for the mistake you made on your taxes 5 years ago. Have you been active in an alternative currency like Bitcoin? Surprise, you're in jail for that movie torrent you seeded a few months ago.
For starters: the NSA can't convict anyone; it doesn't have that power.
Next: no matter who obtains information under FISA and how it's obtained, it can't be used as evidence in court unless the proceeding pertains to the objective of the FISA warrant, which itself must pertain to agents of foreign powers. If evidence of, say, drug trafficking is collected against you deliberately via FISA, you can move to suppress that evidence and courts are required to do so. If evidence is collected accidentally against you via FISA, the USG is required to destroy that evidence.
> For starters: the NSA can't convict anyone; it doesn't have that power.
That's true (right now anyway), but I don't buy the idea that government agencies (or even branches) are distinct enough that we shouldn't be worried. Similarly, I wouldn't approve of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service employing a network of domestic assassins, and the fact that they are currently not legally permitted to carry out assassinations would be of no consolation.
If you think the NSA is going to sprout (say) a drug enforcement arm, why are you so worried about telephony metadata? Clearly, there's no law constraining NSA at all; were I you, I'd be more concerned about them disappearing me for making public arguments against them.
I am more concerned about them disappearing people for making public arguments against them, although I suspect I would be nowhere near significant enough for anyone to notice.
I'm always interested in people who think like this. If the NSA --- or for that matter any other part of the USG --- was "disappearing" people, what does it matter what FISA says, or how much metadata they're collecting? Clearly no law we have has any impact on them at all.
And I have no problem with them opting in to have their lives and data tracked. The real problem is that everyone is tracked, including those in the minority who do not want their lives and data tracked. But such is democracy.
It's reasonable if you believe that it can also work as an alibi. It would be like state level fraud protection for those who do opt in, and obviously a mark of suspicion towards those who don't.
In theory, that's why we have the notion of "probable cause" and warrants, etc. But what we have instead, is a "rubber stamp" mechanism from a secret court which - essentially - is completely free from an accountability to the American people.
Given that, I don't really care so much what the NSA tries to do... I now realize that the real answer is promotion, advocacy and education around technological tools to evade their snooping (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they can't break strong crypto). My goal going forward is to dive into helping promote the use of, and education regarding, Tor, I2P, PGP, and their ilk. Part of that is going to mean educating myself to a considerable degree as well, as I've admittedly been too cavalier about this stuff in the past.
All federal courts are (basically) free from public accountability. That is literally one of the objectives of the design of the Judicial Branch; complain to the founding fathers.
It's not quite the same thing though. Yes, judges are appointed for life, and can't (usually) be removed from office, etc. But with the "regular" federal court system, at least we know who the judges are, who appointed them, and we can see / read / review the actual decisions and what-not. To me, that's a pretty marked difference from the FISA courts.
Nonetheless, I do agree with your basic point. When I get my hands on a TARDIS, I'll be sure to let Thomas Jefferson know how I feel about all this! :-)
FISA judges are US District Court judges. We don't know exactly which ones they are (for no good reason, I agree) but they aren't, as I understand it, random party functionaries.
(Crazy that anyone would have modded you down; did my part to try to fix).
We do know who appointed them. They are 11 federal judges who are appointed to 7 year terms by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. At least 3 must live within 20 miles of Washington, DC, they can only serve one term, and none can be sitting on the Court of Review.
I stand corrected. But the more important point is that the decisions and discussion are private and without oversight, and the presumption that they basically "rubber stamp" all these surveillance requests. Now, maybe they don't just "rubber stamp" everything. But without more info, who's to say?
Edit: Also, for anyone more interested in details of the FISC (some of which I obviously misremembered), here's a good resource:
The rubber stamp argument is brandished in any discussion about FISA anywhere, from message boards to NPR. But it's not hard to see that there are at least two phenomenon that can account for it:
(1) That FISA courts are not a meaningful check on the authority of NSA and the FBI to surveil people, or
(2) That the overwhelming majority of FISA cases involve prima facie legitimate surveillance targets.
I do not find (2) that hard to believe. I'm not a firm believer in FedGov competence, but I really don't think NSA analysts are making up random targets; neither, for that matter, does Snowden, who intimated as much when he was interviewed.
(Just because I don't think surveillance in the 2000's has been abusive, it does not follow that I think we should be unconcerned with checks on surveillance).
#1 is true whether or not #2 is true, because there is no adversarial process in the FISA courts. A one-sided legal process is never a meaningful check. With regular courts, even when the initial process is similarly one-sided (as it is with search and arrest warrants), the fact that the outcome will be subject to adversarial process down the road is something of a constraint (but, even then, I don't think anyone is going to be point to the regular warrant process as a particularly strong check on executive power.)
The FISA warrant process, because of its secrecy and because it is generally not subject to downstream adversarial process, isn't a meaningful check. If the judges on the FISA Court are extremely diligent, it might be better than nothing, but given the secrecy around it, its unlikely that anyone not directly involved will ever really know whether or not it is (which is one of the things that makes it less likely that it will be.)
> How could there ever be an adversarial process for foreign intelligence surveillance?
I didn't say their could be.
Pointing out that the status quo structure doesn't provide a meaningful check doesn't mean that there is an easy framework that does provide a meaningful check while enabling the same scope of powers in "the right" kind of cases.
If I read your preceding comment and then this one, I'm left with the conclusion that you think either that there should be no foreign surveillance of any sort, or that any attempt to check the authority of our intelligence services is pointless.
Which illustrates why it is probably better to address what is said rather than what else you think a person might think in addition to what is said.
EDIT: To amplify: I've explicitly laid out why the existing FISC system is not a meaningful check, and I have explicitly declined to take a position on whether it would be possible to reform the system in a way which would retain its essential character as a judicial oversight system while fixing the problems that prevent it from being meaningful oversight. We haven't addressed any other (e.g., non-judicial) checks, existing or potential, nor have I commented at all on what should exist. So your inference that I must believe certain things about what should exist, or that I have a particular belief about what checks are possible on foreign surveillance, is unwarranted.
I disagree. I think the incentives of all branches of government are very similar, and I do think this is a flaw in the design of the United States government. However, I don't think the founding fathers could have done any better, because I believe this is an inherent flaw with any government.
The people don't vote for federal judges, who have lifetime tenure. Federal judges are thus insulated both from popular opinion and, to some extent, from politics. That's all I meant.
I find it hard to believe that you actually believe federal judges to be in any way insulated from politics. Being subject to elections is in no way the only incentive affecting those in political power. People like to be well-known and well-loved, they like to be on the news, they like to have other people in power "on their side," etc.
I don't like certain things happening to me (like my own activity being tracked), and it doesn't matter to me that the majority of the country or society is okay with those things happening to me. I was pointing out that there's a difference between certain people being okay with their own activity being tracked and the idea that it's okay to track everyone simply because the majority is okay with that.
I think that people like us (that is, people who think in a systems fashion about the electronic communications networks and the data flowing over them) are more likely to view this with alarm than the normals. I think that's because we actually know how much power having things like metadata gives you. The question is, how do we explain this to non-engineers in a way that they will listen to so that they will be as alarmed as we know they should be?
until ppl get problems, they have no idea what the nsa does with the data.
if they have no idea and get no problem, "why would it bother them?"
that yeah. its like if i had the right to sentence anybody on earth to death, but i wasn't doing it too often, and when i do it, nobody has any idea it happened.
So people would think its ok.
I'd like to see more surveys or reviews of this survey's methods. It isn't difficult for the phrasing of the questions to skew results in one direction or another (e.g. Gallup).
I'm sure it's possible for people to be a bit apathetic and support widespread data snooping, but I'm wary of the inevitable attacks and possible drummed up support for current policies.
I think we need to make a choice as a society where the line is drawn. We chose to allow privilege for religious, medical, and legal conversations. Sure, in individual cases, it would be better to get the data from someone's confession, but overall, it's better for society (or people decided) to allow those conversations to encourage religious confession.
Maybe there needs to be special protection for certain classes of cloud service, computing service, or communication. Certainly allowing people to use an "exocortex" without fear of seizure would make people smarter. It might make some crimes harder to punish.
Luckily, technology gets a vote, too.
I think a clear/easy line is that anything which is "personal thought" or approximates thought should be immune to search, ideally though technical means. Notes (for yourself), a journal, etc. Maybe "quantified self" measurements. etc.
The line is probably in a different place than in the telephone era, or even the disconnected Internet era.
I'd prefer it be defined through legislation (and maybe through constitutional amendment) vs. through legal decisions. The problem with legal decisions is they tend to involve criminal cases, and "a person was keeping a personal diary of his child rapes" is an exceptionally hard thing to argue privacy for, even if that's only 0.001% of the use case enabled by making personal notes private.
IANAL but aren't warrants designed to override privacy when there is existing probable cause? IMO one problem is sweeping collection and indefinite storage for the purposes of trawling for crimes. The other is that the FISA court could be a token "APPROVED" rubber stamp for all we know, taking a "guilty until proven innocent" stance on anyone outside the US.
The bit that really bothers me is the total lack of transparency and accountability.
The collect-first and degree of oversight in FISA are issues, but generally you can't get a warrant to access protected communications (lawyer, doctor, priest) unless that professional is actually a co-conspirator, not just a professional service provider. There are exceptions (e.g. child abuse, imminent harm, etc.) to the privilege, though. And I think weaker spousal privilege (not being compelled to testify, but if wiretapped, that's fine). IANAL.
I think I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA. Maybe other things like that, with some checks in place (mostly to prevent this data getting out of their hands).
But I want to know about these trade-offs, and I don't care if that makes them less effective.
There's no way NSA should be looking at private email, phone, VOIP, social networking communication en masse.
Why do you think people looking to do harm don't use phones? Why do you assume the use of burners makes telephonic surveillance pointless? Are you attributing to adversaries the best possible set of circumstances and smallest possible set of constraints?
I think the argument I wanted to make was that the people NSA claim to be after aren't using your typical contractual phone plans, since OP was suggesting they should simply track call logs.
Sure they used pre-paid phones as well as pay phones, hotmail and were still using coded and hidden messages.
Today they'd be using that steganography over cryptography.
The fact that these people might use disposable phones is actually one of the reasons USG supporters give in favor of hoovering all the telephony "metadata".
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThe conclusion most people are likely to draw from it and apply it overarchingly, that is what I question.
EDIT:
Or with even less mental effort they saw a question about privacy and didn't have an answer at hand so just substituted it with the question: do you like the President?
It's not double think if they never had an opinion on privacy :)
I would call them complete morons but that is unkind. Incurious and ignorant and perhaps far too trusting is perhaps more polite.
But, for once, this guy wasn't insulting poor people. He was insulting average people. The average person has free time but finds it very very hard to use it for something socially beneficial. This is partially their fault but certainly not wholly their fault.
I've been a poor person. Shit, I'm poor now, with no real assets. I do love reading your assumptions though. Tell me more about me.
Most people who meet me find me rather average in pretty much every respect. Probably below average in quite a few. We all have choices we can make with our time and I know nothing about spectator sports, for example.
It's not OK if NSA is hoovering all communications in the US and sifting for national security issues, and that does appear to be what happened with Verizon/ATT/Sprint (though it does not appear to be true of Google and Facebook).
Right there with you. I've started digging in my heels at breaking stories simply for the speed at which people start jumping to conclusions.
Child porn is probably morally abhorrent enough (and genuinely rare; if >1% of people out there wanted to fuck 4 year olds, I'd probably try to nuke the planet from orbit) to not be an issue.
Maybe terrorism, if "terrorism" is badly interpreted enough to mean any contacts with terrorists, or advocacy of extreme political viewpoints.
Er, you should be wary in nuking only people who've done the crimes, not just those who 'want' to (even if it's something like child porn).
That aside, I'm a big fan of the philosophy that if X causes Y, and Y is something really bad, don't treat Y, do something with X. So, if you have a pattern of priests abusing kids, maybe we should focus on more underlying problems: coerce the church to nullify the moronic rules that prohibit priests from marrying women... and let them live as normal humans live with normal human urges. I know pedophilia strikes a certain chord for people... but everyone deserves justice and dignity, even criminals. The first focus shouldn't be on punishment for the sake of punishment, it should be an action intended to curb future occurrences by studying what causes the bad behavior and indeed tending to those underlying causes.
But what about counterproliferation? The USG has the world's largest and most capable nuclear arsenal. In terrorist cases, reasonable people can disagree about how the USG's interests line up; maybe those cases have just as much to do with energy security or corporate profits as they do with safeguarding innocent citizens. But the same isn't true of proliferation: it really is in the USG's interests to suppress nuclear proliferation. Not coincidentally, nonproliferation is the other objective to which FISA surveillance has recently been put to use.
How can we say that though, when we don't really know what the NSA is collecting, what they are doing with it, who they are sharing it with, etc.? The actual data collection per-se aside, one of the biggest problems with this whole setup is that we have allowed the development of a "shadow government" (not in the conspiracy theory sense, mind you) that lacks effective oversight (Congress is not sufficient oversight in my book), and is barely - if at all - accountable to the American people. Between the NSA, the CIA, the FISA courts, and FSM knows what other agencies - as well as "National Security Letters" and "gag orders" - we have a monster on our hands that we barely know anything about.
* Have a problem with the NSA getting wholesale access to telephonic metadata for all domestic phone calls.
* Generally do not believe NSA is using that metadata for purposes other than nonproliferation and counterterrorism, where "counterterrorism" means "pursuit of groups with active plans to kill American citizens".
* Agree that the shortcut NSA appears to be taking around existing due process is going to be a problem in the future if it isn't addressed and restricted.
Also, I find the number of acronyms we're tossing around --- NSA, FISA, FAA, &c --- comforting, not alarming. There's a lot of process here. Some of it is really bad and needs to be fixed. But in the 1950s, we had no process; the USG just listened to everything.
Who knows, maybe the political winds shift in, say, 5 years, and it becomes very dangerous to have certain ideological beliefs, or to have said certain things. I'm not crazy about making it easy for these guys (doing the whole "we were just following orders" thing, possibly) to go on a wholesale fishing expedition to find people to start giving the "yellow star" treatment.
I know, I know... way hypothetical, and you could argue "paranoid". Unlikely, even. But just because something seems incredible or unlikely doesn't seem, to me, to be a good argument for making it any easier for that scenario to come to pass. :-)
† IN 2013!
Anyway, to be clear, I don't think this is one of those "Why does America care about the Kardashians instead of this?!!" issues.
I'm not so sure about that. Roughly 90% of Americans use illegal drugs at some point in their lives[1], and supposedly the average American commits 3 felonies per day.[2]
[1] http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/vol2_2009...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
Getting a clearance already means allowing a bunch of background investigations, medical records, financial records, etc. to be turned over.
You'd "voluntarily" wave the protection of that collected data, so it would be identical to "give us your last 10 years of email", except conveniently they would be the ones holding it for you.
(I could be wrong; I'm really not claiming any expertise on FISA or FAA or any of the secret court rulings determining its scope, just trying to figure out ways which collected information could be used to one's detriment. Plus, of course, FISA 2 is always possible, modifying FISA.)
Long-term storage of data is certainly a valid issue. Of course, under FISA, NSA is obliged to "destroy" all data they accidentally collect that can't be traced to a specific foreign intelligence purpose.
As the quote goes, in a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. And when the government already has all the evidence it needs to convict everyone, then anything can essentially be made illegal by selective prosecution of unrelated crimes. Have you been protesting against the government's foreign policy? Suddenly you're in jail for the mistake you made on your taxes 5 years ago. Have you been active in an alternative currency like Bitcoin? Surprise, you're in jail for that movie torrent you seeded a few months ago.
Next: no matter who obtains information under FISA and how it's obtained, it can't be used as evidence in court unless the proceeding pertains to the objective of the FISA warrant, which itself must pertain to agents of foreign powers. If evidence of, say, drug trafficking is collected against you deliberately via FISA, you can move to suppress that evidence and courts are required to do so. If evidence is collected accidentally against you via FISA, the USG is required to destroy that evidence.
That's true (right now anyway), but I don't buy the idea that government agencies (or even branches) are distinct enough that we shouldn't be worried. Similarly, I wouldn't approve of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service employing a network of domestic assassins, and the fact that they are currently not legally permitted to carry out assassinations would be of no consolation.
[0] http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/patriot-act/
It's meant to calm the masses.
Given that, I don't really care so much what the NSA tries to do... I now realize that the real answer is promotion, advocacy and education around technological tools to evade their snooping (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they can't break strong crypto). My goal going forward is to dive into helping promote the use of, and education regarding, Tor, I2P, PGP, and their ilk. Part of that is going to mean educating myself to a considerable degree as well, as I've admittedly been too cavalier about this stuff in the past.
Nonetheless, I do agree with your basic point. When I get my hands on a TARDIS, I'll be sure to let Thomas Jefferson know how I feel about all this! :-)
(Crazy that anyone would have modded you down; did my part to try to fix).
Edit: Also, for anyone more interested in details of the FISC (some of which I obviously misremembered), here's a good resource:
http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html
(1) That FISA courts are not a meaningful check on the authority of NSA and the FBI to surveil people, or
(2) That the overwhelming majority of FISA cases involve prima facie legitimate surveillance targets.
I do not find (2) that hard to believe. I'm not a firm believer in FedGov competence, but I really don't think NSA analysts are making up random targets; neither, for that matter, does Snowden, who intimated as much when he was interviewed.
(Just because I don't think surveillance in the 2000's has been abusive, it does not follow that I think we should be unconcerned with checks on surveillance).
The FISA warrant process, because of its secrecy and because it is generally not subject to downstream adversarial process, isn't a meaningful check. If the judges on the FISA Court are extremely diligent, it might be better than nothing, but given the secrecy around it, its unlikely that anyone not directly involved will ever really know whether or not it is (which is one of the things that makes it less likely that it will be.)
I didn't say their could be.
Pointing out that the status quo structure doesn't provide a meaningful check doesn't mean that there is an easy framework that does provide a meaningful check while enabling the same scope of powers in "the right" kind of cases.
EDIT: To amplify: I've explicitly laid out why the existing FISC system is not a meaningful check, and I have explicitly declined to take a position on whether it would be possible to reform the system in a way which would retain its essential character as a judicial oversight system while fixing the problems that prevent it from being meaningful oversight. We haven't addressed any other (e.g., non-judicial) checks, existing or potential, nor have I commented at all on what should exist. So your inference that I must believe certain things about what should exist, or that I have a particular belief about what checks are possible on foreign surveillance, is unwarranted.
that yeah. its like if i had the right to sentence anybody on earth to death, but i wasn't doing it too often, and when i do it, nobody has any idea it happened. So people would think its ok.
I'm sure it's possible for people to be a bit apathetic and support widespread data snooping, but I'm wary of the inevitable attacks and possible drummed up support for current policies.
Maybe there needs to be special protection for certain classes of cloud service, computing service, or communication. Certainly allowing people to use an "exocortex" without fear of seizure would make people smarter. It might make some crimes harder to punish.
Luckily, technology gets a vote, too.
I think a clear/easy line is that anything which is "personal thought" or approximates thought should be immune to search, ideally though technical means. Notes (for yourself), a journal, etc. Maybe "quantified self" measurements. etc.
The line is probably in a different place than in the telephone era, or even the disconnected Internet era.
I'd prefer it be defined through legislation (and maybe through constitutional amendment) vs. through legal decisions. The problem with legal decisions is they tend to involve criminal cases, and "a person was keeping a personal diary of his child rapes" is an exceptionally hard thing to argue privacy for, even if that's only 0.001% of the use case enabled by making personal notes private.
The bit that really bothers me is the total lack of transparency and accountability.
But I want to know about these trade-offs, and I don't care if that makes them less effective.
There's no way NSA should be looking at private email, phone, VOIP, social networking communication en masse.
Why? Someone looking to do harm doesn't use phones (maybe Burners) or other communication methods where they know they'd be easily tracked.
Sure they used pre-paid phones as well as pay phones, hotmail and were still using coded and hidden messages.
Today they'd be using that steganography over cryptography.
Few sources: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-4985597.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/al_qaeda_secre...
"The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/
Seems fear, ignorance and apathy is still working out just fine unfortunately.