The Question the NSA is Not Answering
The NSA is claiming that the data that they grabbed in essentially warrant-less Hoovering up of telephone and Internet metadata has helped in certain investigations.
I have no doubt that is probably true.
But that is not the right way to frame the problem. The real issue is: Did being able to data mine metadata for all Americans help solve the case better and faster than had they been required to seek specific probable cause warrants for data from specific people?
To make clear the distinction, let's suppose I were trying to justify stealing a copy of every book in Barnes & Noble. I might be able to accurately say that those books helped me writing a good Napoleon paper for school. But could I have achieved the same goal - writing a paper on Napoleon - by purchasing individual books as needed via legal shopping processes? The answer is probably "yes." Having all the books pre-stolen only contributed in that it saved me the hassle of going down to the store and finding a specific book I needed.
In the same way, I suspect that having this data base merely saved FBI and others the hassle of filling out some paperwork in each case. I am not sure incremental success rates in a few cases is enough justification to rip up the Constitution, but I am sure that laziness is not.
That's exactly what they were doing, and even Jim Sensenbrenner (author of PATRIOT) said that the FISA courts were simply rubber-stamping the requests (Section 215), defeating the gatekeeping purpose.
Obviously, he was naive to believe that FISA would not be used this way when he wrote the law, but nonetheless, the FISA Court has improperly fulfilled their mandate.
So when everybody says “Gee, don’t worry, there are checks & balances against government abuse for this,” don’t believe it.
That's a stupid quote.
Or something.
It turns out McCarthy was 100% correct, and that is exactly the argument we are having now: at what point does private vs. public begin.
In the McCarthy era, that line was pretty bright, but his tool was innuendo backed with circumstantial evidence; now, technology has made it so easy to survey, the line is nonexistent. They're about to put video cams into cable boxes (won't happen - people will revolt immediately/debug).
The 4th Amendment still applies, and if we don't push back now, it's basically gone.
Note the key word "unreasonable". Reasonable searches don't need a warrant.
Note the lack of supervision by the FISA Court, Gil.
Was that in keeping with “the spirit of the law?”
I'll answer that for you, confused Gil.
No, it wasn't.
Your response should be: Wasn't the PATRIOT (Act) surveillance scheme naively conceived on this basis?
Why yes, yes it was. Great question Gil. (LMFAO - purely hypothetical).
"Why not just audit/harass Rove directly?"
Because they want to find out who he is talking to and then find out who they are talking.
Very simple SQL query to do that, and even get unique numbers (no dupes, I sure Rove calls some people several times a week) and then you can very easily match the phone numbers to actual groups and people. That way you can find out who Roves people are supporting and harass them.
Again simple SQL query, servers do 99% of the work for you, and you get the results in seconds. It is not overwhelmingly difficult to search the meta data as you say, it is not the early 90's. And I have come up with a credible scenario that could be repeated on other people and other groups. And we now know the NSA has been using the database searching for folks without FISA permission. Oops. The story is getting and worse, and I can tell that you are winging it, with your great knowledge of large databases.
I love models.
What kind?
I like the Giselle Buendchin R^2 + 6.
Back to your dunce corner now, Gil.
Here’s the text, Gil, fyi
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861
It is pretty obvious he is winging it, he doesn't know much about putting aggregate data into databases and doing simple to moderately complex queries to get quality information out. I don't know where he gets the idea it is just one big mush that no-one could search in any reasonable amount of time. Oracle, IBM, even Microsoft sell databases that can store and retrieve data quickly from terabytes of data in very short time.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have multiple such systems in operation to rapidly sort through terabytes of info and give everybody on earth search results in milliseconds based on a simple query, and the NSA can't do this - please.
Even if the data is just phone numbers and links to other phone numbers it can contain some pretty revealing information.
While physical security is indeed paramount to national security, the founders were very, very careful to construct a system deliberately designed to thwart central control and planning.
You ignore these at great peril in your justifications.
You are ignorant, currently.
Just to bludgeon you a bit more, Gil, here’s an excerpt from Section 502 of PATRIOT:
(a)
On a semiannual basis, the Attorney General shall fully inform the Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives and the Select
Committee on Intelligence of the Senate concerning all requests for the
production of tangible things under section 402.
Since the Attorney General is a known perjurer, how well do you think this will work, Gil?
Do you still think he/she/it will adhere to “the spirit of the law”?
You are a fucking moron.
"Getting the meta-data allows them to do all sorts of analysis....."
Full stop.
That's the problem.
Please forward your bank account information to me to compensate for any future government abuse of my personal non-public information.
Thanks.
Traffic analysis is an old and vast discipline in the intelligence world. Explaining it here, and I'm not an expert at it anyway, wouldn't work too well. Lots of smart amateurs have thought they could outsmart signals analysts, and they were usually wrong.
Just a simple example: if someone and a co-conspirator both use new "burner" cell phones on every call, the location data still provides pattern information. There are some seriously smart mathematicians who spend their careers just figuring out ways to extract every little bit of information from a pile of data. NSA has a lot of really amazing talents working there. A high school friend who was a first-class mathematician (PhD at young age, contributed to the 4 color problem, etc), went to work for them, for example.
I hope they believe you.
Uh huh. First please show actual damages.
Uh huh.
Wrong premise.
4th Amendment.
Nice try. SCOTUS has long held that phone metadata is not your property, and the government getting it does not violate your rights. That data belongs to the phone company.
Wrong.
SCOTUS has never held that en masse data collection can or should drive any individual inquiry, only that a PROBABLE CAUSE can do such.
What this collection does is pervert an individual suspicion into a potential mass grab. Nothing prevents any future administration from doing this, which they will anyway (so you win).
There is zero precedent to give government that power under the 4th.
Sorry.
You are 100% correct that the Phone Co. data is “theirs,” however the warrant requirement for retrieval of that data is virtually absent under Section 215 of PATRIOT.
The FISA Court has never fulfilled its “check and balance” utility (naïve) under section 215.
Thus, the implementation of PATRIOT under that guise was completely unconstitutional. It constitutes warrantless wiretapping, expressly proscribed.
Here’s actual damage:
Let’s say I was a top donor to Mitt Romney. Let’s say someone (who is under suspicion) leaked my tax info to a third party, due to complete surveillance and total institutional governmental lack of accountability and control.
That info was used not only to persecute me, but influence the election.
Do you see the problem yet?
Let’s say that further in the future, retroactively, since I was deemed an “enemy of the state” for my previous actions, that I was thrown in jail, and my friends and relatives were audited and harassed, like Andrew Mellon’s were, by FDR’s goons?
Do you see the problem yet?
There is nothing different between IRS data collection, cell phone data collection, Google Glass data collection, and any other channel, when used against private parties by government, illegitimately.
That is what is happening. That is the problem.
The 4th Amendment expressly prohibits that.
Cite for precedent *contrary* to the NSA actions? Comment on why all three branches of government consider it lawful?
If 1000 police drive around a city, and observe suspicious behavior, is this any different? In both cases, vast amounts of non-private data is gathered, and a small bit of it leads to specific inquiry.
Beyond that, have you read the actual criteria the NSA uses for exploitation of that data?
You are conflating wire-tapping with metadata acquisition. There is a big difference. A wiretap uses the *content* of the call, not the origin or destination only.
Nice hypotheticals, but there is a huge difference between IRS data collection and NSA collection, contrary to your assertions.
The fourth amendment does not guarantee privacy where none actually exists, such as these cases. If you want privacy, don't provide information to third parties.
“Cite for precedent *contrary* to the NSA actions? Comment on why all three branches of government consider it lawful?”
Ipse dixit. Next.
“Beyond that, have you read the actual criteria the NSA uses for exploitation of that data?”
Unlike you, I’ve read a good portion of the law. Here it is:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861
Here’s another nifty section:
(a)
On a semiannual basis, the Attorney General shall fully inform the Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives and the Select
Committee on Intelligence of the Senate concerning all requests for the
production of tangible things under section 402.
Think that works, with perjurer E. Holder at the helm?
LMAO
“If 1000 police drive around a city, and observe suspicious
behavior, is this any different?”
Absolutely, because they aren’t breaking & entering, EXPRESSLY PROHIBITED BY THE 4th AMENDMENT.
Yes, because government never misuses acquired data.
No. There is not.
Material Nonpublic Information is governed by multiple statutes, and monitored very tightly by the SEC under Reg FD, the 1934 Act, and various others.
Virtually all IRS data falls under NPI, and should be tightly controlled, but apparently isn’t, due to institutional incompetence.
Whoever leaked that data is highly prosecutable. That’s not hypothetical.
And stop blaming the victims.
Here’s what this looks like:
http://occ.gov/topics/compliance-bsa/bsa/occ-bulletins-and-fincen-advisories/index-occ-bulletins-and-fincen-advisories.html
Non-hypothetical:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0517/Playing-the-IRS-card-Six-presidents-who-used-the-IRS-to-bash-political-foes/President-Franklin-Roosevelt-D
The huge counterterrorism effort isn't about pin prick attacks like Boston. It is focused on two threats: nuclear and contagious biological. On just the latter the government has spent over $70 bn since 911. Little attacks scare people and are small scale tragedies but don't represent a serious threat to our country.
See my response above. The threat they are worried about isn't what we've already seen, it's loose nukes and lose germs - truly devastating attacks on a scale of death and destruction the U. S. Has never experienced in its entire history.
“Should we stop having active patrolling by police on the
beat or in squad cars because they could abuse their power”
Uh, chief, we already do, it’s called the 4th Amendment.
And, for additional protection, you may have noticed the Fif
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/81460739/
And your Miranda rights with a cherry on top. Those are all protections against state
intrusion, dude.
That's a really naive way of looking at what is really a war of civilization vs radical Islam. Pakistan is effectively at war with us due to the radical elements throughout its government and their support of terrorists. In that part of the world, injustice is the norm as
is war and intolerance. A few drone strikes are of little significance in the scale of this conflict.
You are conflating IRS behavior and Nsa. They are very different organizations with radically different cultures, missions and leadership. The Nsa is military and focused on external threats that can be dealt with or detected through technical means. They are far more isolated from politics than the IRS.
Ultimately you have to give some powers to government that you'd rather not - is an unfortunate fact of modern life.
Repeat after me three times: NSA not IRS. The behavior of the IRS was both predictable and illegal. I'm not talking about them and neither is this thread.
Milhouse, while I agree with you on the reasonableness of this policy, you are dead wrong on the usefulness of the data. You are looking at it from a narrow perspective: statistical inference. The NSA has a lot of other ways to look at it. They also have a lot of people whose credentials, for their purposes, are far greater than yours or mine.
Example usage: intelligence data comes in that leads them to want to look for a particular pattern. They use techniques to do so - AI techniques, cluster analysis, etc. And, they don't just use SQL databases, they use modern stuff too like Hadoop and who knows what else. The history of information processing shows that many techniques were first developed by the NSA. A lot of computer hardware development, especially early on, had NSA input in order to make it more powerful - because they were the first customers. These guys have a very long history of being extremely smart and being extremely quiet about it. Look at their crack of the Venona code - they broke a one-time code (theoretically unbreakable) because of bureaucratic nonsense in the Soviet office responsible for producing the one time pads - and they worked on Venona (with the FBI at first) for FIFTY YEARS. They have a fascinating history of this (along with the decrypts) on their web site: nsa.gov. As an aside, those transcripts proved that every suspect Soviet spy or agent of influence was, in fact, a spy or agent of influence.
Another example: they receive information that person X is a possible terrorist. They might get that from a radio intercept or decrypt from Pakistan, or from a CIA source. But they have the info. So they go back to their vast pile of data and dig that person out - because now they have referents.
They have been at this for a very long time. For example, when I was in the military in the late '60s, the NSA had listening stations all over the world which simply recorded a huge chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum onto high bandwidth tape, and then they stored the tape. They didn't have the computer power to do much analysis on that. But when KAL 007 was shot down, they could go to the tapes from that region from that time, and pull out all the relevant communications, which they did.
This is the same sort of thing. One use is to sift for patterns - not huge statistical averages, but individuals our signal sources behaving in odd ways - ways more likely to be associated with what NSA is looking for. Another use is like KAL007 - dig out very specific data given very accurate information with which to locate it. They are essentially memorizing history, making it available in the future when other information directs them to dig. There are lots of uses for this stuff.
The good news is that NSA as an organization is far more likely to resist abuse of the information than bureaucracies like the IRS. The US intelligence agencies are pretty good about that, and NSA is special because it is run by the military with lots of civilian staff, and has its own ethos.
"They also have a lot of people whose credentials, for their purposes, are far greater than yours or mine"
Speak for yourself. I have a PhD and spent 20 years in private industry doing essentially the same thing.
The issue that you really do not understand is this: the limiting factor is the dependent variable, not the independent variables. I will let you ponder that for a while.
Your response indicates your lack of knowledge of what signals intelligence is all about. It is *not* essentially the same thing, and your repeated insistence and argument from (false) authority is tiring.
You, Mesa, clearly quoted the 4A requires warrants for law enforcement officers to enter a property in an ordinary situation The 4A has always meant that reasonable searches and seizures don't require a warrant. In other words, if a cop hears bloody screams from a house then such a cop isn't supposed to say "darn it, a vile crime is being committed but I don't have a search warrant so my hands are tied."
Yes. You are 100% correct that those are in fact 3 completely different letters.
That is a virtual iron-clad guarantee that N-S-A won’t act illegally and abusively as the other 3 letters I-R-S did.
What an amazing leap of faith on your part.
Again, irrelevant. Same government, same (top-level) leadership.
An interesting documentary to see is the Spy Factor a Nova film. Although it is basically an advertisement for them (otherwise they would provide no data for the documentary). A big point is that NSA has around 40,000 employees and spends around 35 billion dollars a year. Now when you add that to the thousands of CIA, FBI, Secret police, Military, National guard, city, state police, constables etc. etc. can you say police state.
The NSA and CIA together have four times the amount of employees than the town I grew up in. There combined budgets around 70 billion dollars a year is more then the GDP of countries. WHY, WHY, WHY of course the lie is to protect us. NO country of Gov that is good or doing good has any need for these, either at all or in any way the insane scale of these in our country. The only thing about these agencies we know about are only what they tell us, when they want to, which is not exactly too often. Only when it is found out what they are doing does anything come out and of course only only only their sides.
It is more than a leap of faith. It is an understanding of the different organizational goals and viewpoints of the two. NSA is military and has a long tradition of being a-political and mission focused. If it were as political as the IRS, it would never have been able to keep the secrets as well as it has. For example, the Venona decrypts, which clearly settled the issue about whether suspected '40s/'50s communists were Soviet agents (most were), were kept secret until the lat '90s, - 52 years, even though the content was politically explosive and would have been useful to some administrations (such as Nixon's).
Again, see prior response on the difference in cultures and ethics between the two.
You know I give more credence to the CIA. At least the CIA is spying on other countries on our behalf to allegedly make sure they are not planning nefarious acts against us. Well that is the theory anyway.
NSA spys on American Citizens. I don't see why we need it when we have an FBI for domestic law enforcement. NSA should be closed.
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Seems like the NSA's role is changing. They seem more involved with the political rather than Defense. How is the Department of Defense suppose to carry out a domestic war against terrorists? The FBI is suppose to take care of domestic crime. Military is not suppose to be involved. CIA is suppose to handle Intelligence for civilian government purposes. It is up to the CIA to inform the FBI if they find in an international scope that someone is going to domestically terrorize us.