In which the President offers an amazing interpretation of what it means for a program to be transparent--i.e., that it allegedly goes through a secret court whose rulings are not publicly available.
This is not transparency. This is the regurgitation of obfuscating talking points.
Transparency: a secret court with secretly appointed judges who make secret rulings on requests whose details are kept secret from the judges.*
* I've seen allegations of this last bit, but not evidence. The claim was that it mostly goes on the word of the requesting agency/analyst and the judge has no real way of knowing whether it's a legitimate request or not.
I wish he had then been asked how they determine if someone is a U.S. citizen. From other sources we've heard that they only need 51% confidence that they are a non-US person.
They invented a device that can discern the US-Citizenship-status of anyone merely by knowing the phone's local usage details and privacy-respecting information about the data transmitted.
Well, not really, but that's what would be necessary for such a claim to hold any water.
Why would that be necessary? If they are targeting an individual for investigation at this level certainly they have already determined their citizenship status well in advance. From there obtaining permission to investigate citizens who are in contact with this individual probably isn't too difficult. I guess I just don't see why it would have to be some magical automated system when it can be handled on a case-by-case basis quite easily.
I guess I'm used to a more technical definition of "can't" than politicians nowadays.
Apart from that, I'm German, and every time I read this "not to US citizens" excuse, all I understand is that they'll happily rape all my data without any questions asked.
Indeed, it is not at all reassuring; it is creepy that they think it ought to be reassuring.
My wife is not a US citizen, so the feds are apparently happy to admit they are spying on her, or could if they cared to. That's pretty bad in itself, but then consider the fact that more of my electronic messages go to or from her than any one else. They can't spy on her communications without spying on mine, too, and I am a US citizen. So are they spying on US citizens or not? Of course they are, en masse, no matter what denials they make about it.
Here's something interesting I found on wikipedia. According to the "General Data Protection Regulation", which is a data protection law and is supposed to take effect in 2016 in the EU:
the Regulation also applies to organizations based outside the European Union if they process personal data of EU residents.
Further in the section "Discussion and challenges":
The new regulation conflicts with other non-European laws and regulations and practices (e.g. surveillance by governments). Companies in such countries should not be acceptable for processing EU personal data anymore.
However, it is a self-certification program and it isn't really a US law, just a regulation enforced by the FTC. So while it should protect your data from third parties, e.g., being sold to advertisers, etc., it most likely does not protect your data from the US government.
the Safe Harbor asks compliance with the Data Protection Directive which is supposed to become obsolete in the following few years. Not to mention that it's apparently opt-in, which is basically useless.
Data on intra-european transactions and matters is often deliberately shared with the US for intelligence purposes OR is processed by companies in the US, which automatically means that it is used by the US for intelligence.
So, if I use Gmail as a non US citizen, I have to assume that the US government will read/analyze my emails. That's a well recognized fact that I've also been told by people working with classified (German) government data on multiple occasions.
But that does not address the fact that according to the GDPR in its current state, a company such as Google should not have the authority to process EU citizen's data unless it's fully compliant with GDPR.
How they're going to enforce that, I have no idea. Now if I've understood this correctly, this means that if a foreign company is fully complaint with this new law, we would have much greater access to data that is being collected, and we also have the power to request the removal of said data. The US government might still collect all those incoming data before it has the chance to be removed, but having a law such as GDPR being enforced would be a huge step forward.
Every story on this subject from the government uses very specific technical qualifiers. "Listen" in this case. Likely there is some kind of natural language processing done to each call - either to give a complete (written) transcript or a categorical summary. In both cases the verb is not 'listen' - but in both cases the action is similarly egregious.
Obama is still treating this problem as though it's a case of privacy vs security. The real issue is trust. U.S. citizens can't trust what private U.S. corporations tell them if the government has the power to coerce and then muzzle them. This is a poisonous environment to do business in. International business is going to go elsewhere, and domestic business will also choose to outsource to more transparent countries.
Well put. Trust has become the underlying issue here, everything else is semantics.
At the same time though, I think Obama is looking at a comfortable point where trust is traded off for security. Problem with such points is that they can shift in either direction depending on who is in charge - that's what's scary.
In parallel with the effect on business, there is likely to be an effect on culture, too.
I predict that a significant number of Americans will begin to treat the internet as something like a hazardous, but sometimes necessary and useful substance. Like weed killer. It might not be very dangerous but you sure don't rub it all over your body. Maybe internet will be something you keep in a certain room, and only turn it on when necessary.
That's a pity. It was nice to think "Let's try something potentially weird and intrusive but maybe valuable." I don't thank that will ever be thought of the same way.
True. I'd add that this is an issue of privacy, security, and trust--and the need of a people and its government to never violate privacy and dilute trust while achieving security.
It is a difficult task, and the government--as well as the corporations they have involved in the process--are egregiously failing.
Serious companies will do that, but for me it would be interesting to see how many individuals already moved away from those companies and their services.
Clapper: "the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails"
Obama: "the NSA can't listen to your calls"
The denial I would like to hear: the NSA does not collect your e-mails, phone calls or internet traffic. The lack of a denial is looking very suspicious, and a careful reader is forced to act as if it's all being vacuumed up.
Their promises only relate to when that data may be used.
No... Collect has a very specific meaning to the NSA. Collect means when data have "been received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence [that is, NSA] component in the course of his official duties" http://atsdio.defense.gov/documents/5242.html
"Acquire" or "intercept" or "intake in any way" would be better. The language is very slippery here.
Additionally, imagine them reading a stream in real-time -- they could still certainly analyze passing traffic - and keep a ticker of flagged items, by type, rather than "collecting"
Thank you for helping me decode the double-speak. I had previously read that "collect" had a specific meaning for the NSA, but I'd assumed that meaning also made sense within the context of the English language.
In Obama-speak, "can't" means "we have a law that says they cannot, so they certainly must not be doing it."
In human-speak, "can't" means, "do they have a system capable of letting your average NSA analyst do this easily without oversight?" I suspect we'll never get the answer to this question unless it is leaked.
Let's at least take a wider view and recognize this is not Obama-speak, but is general political doublespeak. Obama is not the first to employ such language, nor will he be the last. Politicians, pundits, and the general media are working off the talking points we heard about earlier, and everyone is using the same words in the same way. As the executive, Obama is merely putting himself out there as another political actor joining in the shared deceptions, and all ought to be held accountable for this.
The buck stops with him, and honestly most people who support Obama expect at least a little better from him. This is why his approval rating is at an all time low this month of 47%.
EFF's position (from the CNET article): "The evidence shows that the NSA seeks a warrant only after the communication is initially acquired and analyzed by computers according to algorithms designed by humans, placed in a government database, and reviewed by an analyst."
"Cannot" as in do not have the technical ability to, or "cannot" as in absolutely have the ability but are prohibited by some easily-ignorable legislation?
It comes down to trust. No one trusts Government anymore. They can get up on stage with pretty pictures and screenshots of "proof" that they're not listening to calls. It won't matter. No one believes them anymore. They have to fix that first and the only way to do that is to vote the lifelong Politicians out of office and get some fresh meat in there. Senators and Congressman need to have term limits. They collectively have more power than the President yet they can stay office for life. Checks and balances? Nope!
Why should we believe him? When companies are legally required to lie on behalf of the government, i find it hard to trust the government to tell me the truth directly.
This. Applied to both parties--the corporations and the government agencies/branches/actors.
I find it very disturbing and dangerous to the healthy operation of a free society when any individual or collective entity is required to lie about receiving legal orders to turn over information to the government.
I haven't thought through all the ramifications of that sentiment, of course, but it is very unsettling.
Lets assume everything said in the interview is true. This would only serve to reassure the public that the state is not proactively looking for threats among U.S. citizens. That's a good thing.
However, as my only other comment on the leaks indicates, I still think it's appalling that the infrastructure exists to 'passively' collect the content of U.S. citizens' online communication in the first place. From my experience working with 'big data', the step of collecting information is the difficult part. Mining the data is relatively trivial and can be 'switched on' at any point.
So my original concern still stands: there is no reason to assume that power won't be abused in the future. What happens when a terrorist threat born and bred in the U.S. successfully attacks a target? I'm willing to bet these statements about not actively monitoring U.S. citizens would quickly be forgotten and new rationalizations would be put into place instead -- e.g. the state only searches for key phrases in citizen generated content, like 'hate government'
the "US Persons" protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal."
"...remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance."
It could very well be that no US government agencies are spying on Americans. Think outsourcing the "grunt work" to foreign partners or subsidiaries. The CIA rendition flights to Jordan are a good example.
If by "all men", the founders most definitely did intend to leave out blacks and women, why on earth would you assume they nonetheless intended to include foreigners?
See U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 265-267:
"""
The Fourth Amendment provides:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That text, by contrast with the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, extends its reach only to "the people." Contrary to the suggestion of amici curiae that the Framers used this phrase "simply to avoid [an] awkward rhetorical redundancy," Brief for American Civil Liberties Union et al. as Amici Curiae 12, n. 4, "the people" seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained and established by "the people of the United States." The Second Amendment protects "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to "the people." See also U. S. Const., Amdt. 1 ("Congress shall make no law. . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble") (emphasis added); Art. I, § 2, cl. 1 ("The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the people of the several States") (emphasis added). While this textual exegesis is by no means conclusive, it suggests that "the people" protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community. See United States ex rel. Turner v. Williams, 194 U. S. 279, 292 (1904) (Excludable alien is not entitled to First Amendment rights, because "[h]e does not become one of the people to whom these things are secured by our Constitution by an attempt to enter forbidden by law")."""
The framers were not "global citizen" radicals circa 2013. They were very conscientiously creating a social compact to govern a country of a well-defined set of people. It is entirely natural to assume, as has been assumed, that they did not intend Constitutional rights to be universal.
You evolve the meaning of a phrase when you decide that a digital Word document on a USB key is a "paper" within the meaning of the 4th amendment. Changing something fundamental like the scope of rights in the document, changing it from a social compact, a contract among a community of people, into some universal statement of principles applicable to anyone isn't evolving the meaning, it's rewriting the document and an exercise in historical revisionism.
You are familiar American history, right? Or is this a troll?
The origins of the revolutionary movement were demands for equal treatment as British citizens (foreigners). Thus the rhetoric of "no taxation without representation" and the initial focus on appealing to the British Monarchy for redress. Pedantic legalism aside, arguing that the founders of the American republic saw morality as nationally rather than divinely circumscribed ("under God") is shockingly wrong.
Utter historical revisionism. The founders were upset that they were part of the community of englishmen but not treated the same as other englishmen. They did not hold themselves out to be foreigners then demand universal rights from the English king.
The 4th amendment did not come out of nowhere. It is not a distillation from first principles of rights common to humanity. Its a codification of what the framers believed was a right of englishmen in the English constitution.
This isn't "pedantic legalism." Its about the nature of the country we live in. The Constitution was rooted in the magna carta (rights common to subjects of the English king) and the unwritten English constitution (rights common to englishmen). It is a social compact, among a community, not a universal declaration of rights.
The Declaration of Independence explicitly states that men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". Rights are divine in origin. They are not contingent on being British or American, or belonging to any particular social compact.
Beyond the founding documents of the American Republic, this is self-evident in many other early republican writings. If you've read Thomas Paine ("Rights of Man") you'd know he even picks a fight with Edmund Burke over this very issue when it comes to the French Revolution, with Paine supporting the cause of the French people on the grounds that they held "natural rights" to liberty. It was Burke (who believed in the social compact) who opposed the revolution because of its violence and social unrest.
It was Paine's position which dominated among American republicans. Among many others, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin supported the French Revolution and linked the struggle to the struggle for "the liberty of the whole earth". Their conceptualization was here and elsewhere repeatedly and consistently one of rights belonging universally and naturally to man, regardless of his language, or country, or existing social compact.
The rights recognized by the Constitution are human rights. We are not granted those rights by any law. Our Constitution simply recognizes rights we inherently possess due to the fact we are human beings.
To say that other people do not possess those rights implies that the Constitution is granting US citizens those rights, not simply recognizing those rights. Its a subtle but very important difference.
I think this interview perfectly illustrates the distinction Snowden mentioned between technical capability and policy.
Note that the president says "if you're a US person the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls" instead of saying "if you're a US person, the NSA isn't recording your phone calls".
The word "cannot" in this context means "they aren't supposed to", not "it is technically impossible".
He's saying that listening to your phone calls is "against the rules" but that doesn't mean this data isn't still being captured and put into an NSA data warehouse somewhere, in case circumstances change.
If Snowden is to be believed, then Obama may as well have said that the NSA doesn't have time to listen to your phone calls and will not, unless it has reason and gets a warrant.
The problem is the retroactive profiling possible by fishing through a citizen's recorded history. If they want to build a case against you for something, and go through your history of phone calls, locations, emails, IMs, etc. with a bias toward connecting you to a crime or conspiracy, they'll undoubtably find something that helps them assassinate your character enough to convince the public you are a bad person and deserve what's coming to you.
So how does this work? If I talk to my wife (she is a US citizen, I am European) on the phone about, say for instance, groceries, are the NSA going to listen to it?
But the NSA can certainly listen to his wife's calls... many of which may include him as the other endpoint. This is an obvious edge case even if this legal smoke-screen offered any actual protection, which seems unlikely.
Also, because I don't believe that these policies are worth anything; what really matters are capabilities, and the NSA clearly has whatever access it needs to listen to anyone it wants.
Last time I checked, most web services (or even telephone providers) are not keeping track of or verifying nationalities. Thus, any blanket surveillance means they are inadvertently spying on US citizens/persons.
Let's say you have an American, living abroad. He signs up for a Skype account. Skype does not verify nationality or identity. He starts using Skype to call phones in some country the NSA finds suspicious (say, Afghanistan). A dragnet which would intercept these communications automatically would be illegal, as one of the parties was a US Citizen... and they would need a warrant.
The whole thing is ridiculous. The whole question of "do I need a warrant or not" requires you to prove that you do not. But to whom? You are in the pre-warrant phase... Crazy.
Title says "If you are a US citizen the NSA can’t listen to your calls" when in the text it says that "If you are a US PERSON the NSA can’t listen to your calls". This is misleading as in reality the Fourth Amendment protects not only citizens but a broader group of people named "the people" in the amendment. As per United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez: The Fourth Amendment phrase "the people" seems to be a term of art used in select parts of the Constitution, and contrasts with the words "person" and "accused" used in Articles of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments regulating criminal procedures. This suggests that "the people" refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community. Pp. 494 U. S. 264-266.
In related news, policemen also cannot break the laws.
But isn't it a good thing we have the public with their smartphones recording the police as they work? Isn't it great that there are multiple separate, public, open channels to provide feedback when the police go astray?
The idea that he's referring to policy prohibitions - not technical limitations - is even more unsettling when violations of law as egregious as Clapper's lying to Congress go so conspicuously unpunished.
The entire concept of illegality as an impediment becomes meaningless when a class that's demonstrably above the law emerges in public.
Not how I read it. Obviously the technical ability to do so exists so "cannot" can only mean "aren't supposed to" in this context. Honestly I think people would have to be grasping at straws to read it any other way. What else could it possibly mean? Of course it's technically possible that's not even open for debate is it?
If you're a stickler for language, then yes. The word "can(not)" refers to the ability, while the words "may (not)" or "must (not)" refer to a policy constraint rather than ability.
But in common vernacular, the word "can" is used in both cases, so it's ambiguous.
"Mom, can I play on the Xbox now?" "No, you haven't finished your homework." Obviously Junior has the ability to play, but his mom won't allow him to do so.
The debate might be how Joe Public interprets that phrase. I'd bet that more people would think that 'cannot' means 'not possible', rather than 'not supposed to'. I think that choice of words was quite deliberate for exactly this reason.
It is interesting how violating the privacy of a US person can be considered some kind of issue, not that big, but still a bit of a problem, on the other hand if you are a non US person everything is fine because your life doesn't matter anyway.
This is exactly the kind of thought I hoped the internet would break, and I have worked quite hard to help it happen, the day of the feuds are over, no more lords to came and lie to us telling that people who lives on the other side of that river want bad things to happen us, no more divide and conquer, the middle ages is over, is it?
Two elements of the government rhetoric surrounding this issue really bug me.
First, they use phrasing like "listen to calls" which is nonsensical in the modern world. If a computer observes all packets traveling across a fiber line, transcribes VoIP traffic into text, and then only persists counts of keywords to magnetic storage medium -- does that count as "listening"? If they do this proactively, but no human ever looks at those counts unless a warrant is pulled, does it count as listening? When we conduct the debate around outdated language, it is impossible to be specific about what is taking place.
Second, the government tends to regurgitate the law, rather than existing practice.
What I find a bit more insidious is that "listening" is being discussed in the public sphere in the way it is expected to mean--that is, as a real-time, present-tense, current action. In practice, what is occurring and actually under debate, but being evaded because of the language employed, is "listening" in the context the government is doing it--that is, as a retroactive, past-tense, stepping-back-in-time action.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadThis is not transparency. This is the regurgitation of obfuscating talking points.
* I've seen allegations of this last bit, but not evidence. The claim was that it mostly goes on the word of the requesting agency/analyst and the judge has no real way of knowing whether it's a legitimate request or not.
It's not like anyone is gonna find out or held them accountable at the listening level.
Well, not really, but that's what would be necessary for such a claim to hold any water.
Apart from that, I'm German, and every time I read this "not to US citizens" excuse, all I understand is that they'll happily rape all my data without any questions asked.
My wife is not a US citizen, so the feds are apparently happy to admit they are spying on her, or could if they cared to. That's pretty bad in itself, but then consider the fact that more of my electronic messages go to or from her than any one else. They can't spy on her communications without spying on mine, too, and I am a US citizen. So are they spying on US citizens or not? Of course they are, en masse, no matter what denials they make about it.
the Regulation also applies to organizations based outside the European Union if they process personal data of EU residents.
Further in the section "Discussion and challenges":
The new regulation conflicts with other non-European laws and regulations and practices (e.g. surveillance by governments). Companies in such countries should not be acceptable for processing EU personal data anymore.
What are your thoughts on this?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
However, it is a self-certification program and it isn't really a US law, just a regulation enforced by the FTC. So while it should protect your data from third parties, e.g., being sold to advertisers, etc., it most likely does not protect your data from the US government.
So, if I use Gmail as a non US citizen, I have to assume that the US government will read/analyze my emails. That's a well recognized fact that I've also been told by people working with classified (German) government data on multiple occasions.
Examples: http://epic.org/privacy/intl/passenger_data.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Worldwide_Interbank...
How they're going to enforce that, I have no idea. Now if I've understood this correctly, this means that if a foreign company is fully complaint with this new law, we would have much greater access to data that is being collected, and we also have the power to request the removal of said data. The US government might still collect all those incoming data before it has the chance to be removed, but having a law such as GDPR being enforced would be a huge step forward.
At the same time though, I think Obama is looking at a comfortable point where trust is traded off for security. Problem with such points is that they can shift in either direction depending on who is in charge - that's what's scary.
I predict that a significant number of Americans will begin to treat the internet as something like a hazardous, but sometimes necessary and useful substance. Like weed killer. It might not be very dangerous but you sure don't rub it all over your body. Maybe internet will be something you keep in a certain room, and only turn it on when necessary.
That's a pity. It was nice to think "Let's try something potentially weird and intrusive but maybe valuable." I don't thank that will ever be thought of the same way.
It is a difficult task, and the government--as well as the corporations they have involved in the process--are egregiously failing.
Obama: "the NSA can't listen to your calls"
The denial I would like to hear: the NSA does not collect your e-mails, phone calls or internet traffic. The lack of a denial is looking very suspicious, and a careful reader is forced to act as if it's all being vacuumed up.
Their promises only relate to when that data may be used.
"Acquire" or "intercept" or "intake in any way" would be better. The language is very slippery here.
In human-speak, "can't" means, "do they have a system capable of letting your average NSA analyst do this easily without oversight?" I suspect we'll never get the answer to this question unless it is leaked.
EFF's position (from the CNET article): "The evidence shows that the NSA seeks a warrant only after the communication is initially acquired and analyzed by computers according to algorithms designed by humans, placed in a government database, and reviewed by an analyst."
I find it very disturbing and dangerous to the healthy operation of a free society when any individual or collective entity is required to lie about receiving legal orders to turn over information to the government.
I haven't thought through all the ramifications of that sentiment, of course, but it is very unsettling.
However, as my only other comment on the leaks indicates, I still think it's appalling that the infrastructure exists to 'passively' collect the content of U.S. citizens' online communication in the first place. From my experience working with 'big data', the step of collecting information is the difficult part. Mining the data is relatively trivial and can be 'switched on' at any point.
So my original concern still stands: there is no reason to assume that power won't be abused in the future. What happens when a terrorist threat born and bred in the U.S. successfully attacks a target? I'm willing to bet these statements about not actively monitoring U.S. citizens would quickly be forgotten and new rationalizations would be put into place instead -- e.g. the state only searches for key phrases in citizen generated content, like 'hate government'
- Edward Snowden
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...
"...remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...
See U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 265-267:
""" The Fourth Amendment provides:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That text, by contrast with the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, extends its reach only to "the people." Contrary to the suggestion of amici curiae that the Framers used this phrase "simply to avoid [an] awkward rhetorical redundancy," Brief for American Civil Liberties Union et al. as Amici Curiae 12, n. 4, "the people" seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained and established by "the people of the United States." The Second Amendment protects "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to "the people." See also U. S. Const., Amdt. 1 ("Congress shall make no law. . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble") (emphasis added); Art. I, § 2, cl. 1 ("The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the people of the several States") (emphasis added). While this textual exegesis is by no means conclusive, it suggests that "the people" protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community. See United States ex rel. Turner v. Williams, 194 U. S. 279, 292 (1904) (Excludable alien is not entitled to First Amendment rights, because "[h]e does not become one of the people to whom these things are secured by our Constitution by an attempt to enter forbidden by law")."""
The framers were not "global citizen" radicals circa 2013. They were very conscientiously creating a social compact to govern a country of a well-defined set of people. It is entirely natural to assume, as has been assumed, that they did not intend Constitutional rights to be universal.
The origins of the revolutionary movement were demands for equal treatment as British citizens (foreigners). Thus the rhetoric of "no taxation without representation" and the initial focus on appealing to the British Monarchy for redress. Pedantic legalism aside, arguing that the founders of the American republic saw morality as nationally rather than divinely circumscribed ("under God") is shockingly wrong.
The 4th amendment did not come out of nowhere. It is not a distillation from first principles of rights common to humanity. Its a codification of what the framers believed was a right of englishmen in the English constitution.
This isn't "pedantic legalism." Its about the nature of the country we live in. The Constitution was rooted in the magna carta (rights common to subjects of the English king) and the unwritten English constitution (rights common to englishmen). It is a social compact, among a community, not a universal declaration of rights.
Beyond the founding documents of the American Republic, this is self-evident in many other early republican writings. If you've read Thomas Paine ("Rights of Man") you'd know he even picks a fight with Edmund Burke over this very issue when it comes to the French Revolution, with Paine supporting the cause of the French people on the grounds that they held "natural rights" to liberty. It was Burke (who believed in the social compact) who opposed the revolution because of its violence and social unrest.
It was Paine's position which dominated among American republicans. Among many others, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin supported the French Revolution and linked the struggle to the struggle for "the liberty of the whole earth". Their conceptualization was here and elsewhere repeatedly and consistently one of rights belonging universally and naturally to man, regardless of his language, or country, or existing social compact.
To say that other people do not possess those rights implies that the Constitution is granting US citizens those rights, not simply recognizing those rights. Its a subtle but very important difference.
Note that the president says "if you're a US person the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls" instead of saying "if you're a US person, the NSA isn't recording your phone calls".
The word "cannot" in this context means "they aren't supposed to", not "it is technically impossible".
He's saying that listening to your phone calls is "against the rules" but that doesn't mean this data isn't still being captured and put into an NSA data warehouse somewhere, in case circumstances change.
The problem is the retroactive profiling possible by fishing through a citizen's recorded history. If they want to build a case against you for something, and go through your history of phone calls, locations, emails, IMs, etc. with a bias toward connecting you to a crime or conspiracy, they'll undoubtably find something that helps them assassinate your character enough to convince the public you are a bad person and deserve what's coming to you.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230398250457642...
Can you imagine what kind of weapon this massive library of data would be in the wrong hands?
Also, because I don't believe that these policies are worth anything; what really matters are capabilities, and the NSA clearly has whatever access it needs to listen to anyone it wants.
Let's say you have an American, living abroad. He signs up for a Skype account. Skype does not verify nationality or identity. He starts using Skype to call phones in some country the NSA finds suspicious (say, Afghanistan). A dragnet which would intercept these communications automatically would be illegal, as one of the parties was a US Citizen... and they would need a warrant.
The whole thing is ridiculous. The whole question of "do I need a warrant or not" requires you to prove that you do not. But to whom? You are in the pre-warrant phase... Crazy.
But isn't it a good thing we have the public with their smartphones recording the police as they work? Isn't it great that there are multiple separate, public, open channels to provide feedback when the police go astray?
The use of "cannot" here is very problematic.
The entire concept of illegality as an impediment becomes meaningless when a class that's demonstrably above the law emerges in public.
But in common vernacular, the word "can" is used in both cases, so it's ambiguous.
"Mom, can I play on the Xbox now?" "No, you haven't finished your homework." Obviously Junior has the ability to play, but his mom won't allow him to do so.
The talking points are winning here, and language is being abused to signify the opposite of what it actually means.
The constitution of one country is being used to govern an infrastructure that powers many more.
If there's a fix, it should be some means of taking out of governmental hands altogether.
Though I was thinking more along the lines of making the internet less reliant on American-housed or -owned infrastructure.
This is exactly the kind of thought I hoped the internet would break, and I have worked quite hard to help it happen, the day of the feuds are over, no more lords to came and lie to us telling that people who lives on the other side of that river want bad things to happen us, no more divide and conquer, the middle ages is over, is it?
If you're a foreign living, studying or for holidays in the USA there is no problem that the NSA spies you.
First, they use phrasing like "listen to calls" which is nonsensical in the modern world. If a computer observes all packets traveling across a fiber line, transcribes VoIP traffic into text, and then only persists counts of keywords to magnetic storage medium -- does that count as "listening"? If they do this proactively, but no human ever looks at those counts unless a warrant is pulled, does it count as listening? When we conduct the debate around outdated language, it is impossible to be specific about what is taking place.
Second, the government tends to regurgitate the law, rather than existing practice.