I love how this is meant to sound like a large amount. On the actual topic of the article, this is the result when you have large swathes of people in the country that still adamantly believe that...
“Inside the country, the Constitution applies, and this enormous 702 database I would guess has tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of bits of information on Americans." - Rand Paul
I love how this is meant to sound like a large amount.
On the actual topic of the article, this is the result when you have large swathes of people in the country that still adamantly believe that Trump is or should be president. The representatives of those people are, by some definition, doing their job by listening to and following on with whatever random whims Trump has - because that is what their constituents want them to do.
They are accurately following up on what their people want them to do. They get voted in on campaigns that say "Pro Trump". Acting shocked and awed when they do something Trump wants them to do is not productive.
I would file this under "a broken clock is right twice per day." This is an issue that Trump and the ACLU agree on. Under this act, the federal government flagrantly disregards the US...
Exemplary
I would file this under "a broken clock is right twice per day." This is an issue that Trump and the ACLU agree on.
Under this act, the federal government flagrantly disregards the US constitution. The electronic activities of every American are tapped, recorded, archived, and analyzed. Every time you visit a website, that data is recorded by the government. Every text you send is archived forever. Every phone call you make is sent through a voice-to-text converter and archived. The NSA installs elaborate monitoring equipment right into the offices and data centers of telecom companies. They don't even need to do it in secret. The telecom companies and ISPs allow or are required to allow the NSA to install their equipment in their networks. Everything is recorded; nothing is secret. Electronic communications are all monitored. The 4th amendment means nothing anymore.
This act is an abomination. This act is precisely the surveillance apparatus that Snowden martyred himself for. The federal government, through the NSA and other agencies, monitors and records essentially every form of electronic communications we have access to. We currently live under a surveillance state far, far more intrusive than anything the Soviet Union or East Germany could ever dream of.
It's a flagrant violation of the US constitution. The courts have looked the other way through the strained legal gymnastics that developed post-9/11. But regardless of what the court say, there is simply no way a sane human being could argue that the complete warrantless recording of all digital communications of all Americans somehow is compatible with the 4th Amendment.
I have no doubt that Trump is opposing this for entirely selfish reasons. The man has no soul; he is an empty husk, utterly incapable of empathy for any other human being. He opposes it because he fears some of his actions are illegal and could be discovered through this mass unconstitutional dragnet. If a law were passed that kept section 702 the same, except it specifically exempted Donald Trump from surveillance, Trump would support the law. Again, he is fundamentally incapable of empathy. The man does not have a soul.
Yet still, despite being in it for entirely selfish reasons, Trump is actually right on this. The act should not be renewed. In fact, we should pass a Constitutional amendment explicitly prohibiting anything like it from ever being attempted again. As much as it pains me to say, Trump is actually right on this one.
I hope it didn't come across as me thinking that Trump is wrong. I am not well educated enough on the law itself to have an opinion (though with your explanation I suspect that I would very much...
I hope it didn't come across as me thinking that Trump is wrong. I am not well educated enough on the law itself to have an opinion (though with your explanation I suspect that I would very much agree with you).
My commentary is more on the infighting within the Republican party, and their shock that Senators are not falling in line like they usually do. The Republicans are currently two parties - Republicans and Trump followers. They have the same name next to their entries on ballots, but to the latter group Trump is law and it is their obligation to do what he says.
Democrats pretty much always have infighting, so far as they kind of agree that something needs to change for a given issue but are divided on how to go about doing something. Republicans have not had to deal with that as much, and it is very fun to see the schism happening.
I agree generally with the sentiment, but I believe you're overstating things. PRISM was dismantled, and online security has been upgraded considerably since those days. Outside of targeted...
I agree generally with the sentiment, but I believe you're overstating things. PRISM was dismantled, and online security has been upgraded considerably since those days. Outside of targeted surveillance via Section 702, what proof is there that the US government is doing these things?
Do you have any evidence for that? The Wikipedia article doesn't mention its dismantling. Plus there are any number of other mass surveillance programs. One way the NSA can get around legal bars...
PRISM was dismantled
Do you have any evidence for that? The Wikipedia article doesn't mention its dismantling. Plus there are any number of other mass surveillance programs. One way the NSA can get around legal bars against mass surveillance is through international agreements such as Five Eyes. This way, the NSA can claim they're not spying on US citizens. The US will spy on the citizens of the other Five Eyes members and share that info with them. In turn, the other members will spy on US citizens and share the info with the NSA. That way, everyone can pretend that they're not spying on their own citizens.
I'm sorry, but I simply do not believe that the NSA just gave up tracking. After you've spent decades weaving your spying apparatus into the entire global telecommunications system, you don't just let that go overnight.
The proof is in the fact that the NSA has been involved in such mass surveillance actions before and has gone to extraordinary lengths to skirt around laws and constitutional protections. While we don't have any big leaks since Snowden documenting the scale of their surveillance, we don't have any evidence that they're curtailing their work either. Has the NSA's budget shrunk? Are they employing fewer people than they used to? By the time you've reached the point where you're monitoring all electronic communication of the entire populace, the default assumption is you're going to keep doing that until proven otherwise. And this is especially true since the NSA does have a proven track record of skirting around privacy laws by outsourcing their surveillance to other governments.
Let me clarify my position. PRISM as a program includes multiple components, but the two key pieces that people objected to were: 1) the MITM interception of data at the level of large tech...
Do you have any evidence for that? The Wikipedia article doesn't mention its dismantling.
Let me clarify my position. PRISM as a program includes multiple components, but the two key pieces that people objected to were: 1) the MITM interception of data at the level of large tech companies, and 2) the collection of phone metadata onto government servers. Both of these factors have been considerably changed from their original incarnation, though still exist in some form. So "dismantle" may have been a poor word choice, but certainly they have undergone changes.
Specifically, Section 702 allows targeted investigations into individuals (as mentioned in my previous comment), though does not allow for widespread data collection. Additionally, the phone metadata collection program was ended when the "FREEDOM Act" went into effect. The government must now make requests to the phone companies for individual data.
I'm sorry, but I simply do not believe that the NSA just gave up tracking.
The NSA certainly does still employ tracking. And I don't doubt that some agents are abusing the programs that remain in place, contrary to laws that govern them. The ALCU has reported on that issue before.
But the claim that "The electronic activities of every American are tapped, recorded, archived, and analyzed", as I said, appears to be overstated. At this time there isn't evidence of a program like that, and such a program would likely be illegal under currently written laws.
I may be misinformed, but I don't know if this is actually the case anymore. It certainly was when Snowden made headlines, and the surveillance apparatus was definitely intended to function that...
This act is precisely the surveillance apparatus that Snowden martyred himself for. The federal government, through the NSA and other agencies, monitors and records essentially every form of electronic communications we have access to. We currently live under a surveillance state far, far more intrusive than anything the Soviet Union or East Germany could ever dream of.
I may be misinformed, but I don't know if this is actually the case anymore. It certainly was when Snowden made headlines, and the surveillance apparatus was definitely intended to function that way. But in the years since then, the internet has made great strides in rolling out SSL, end-to-end encryption, and the like. Anyone can configure their systems to use DNS over HTTPS, and tunnel their traffic through an anonymizing VPN. The NSA is likely continuing to siphon off every bit of data they can (aka, all of it within the USA) but the vast majority of it is meaningless noise at this point. I think the goal at this point is to store everything in giant datacenters, in case the ability to decrypt portions of it becomes feasible in the future.
That said, I'm sure they've got tons of other nefarious things in the works since Snowden. Highly classified things we can only speculate until another whistleblower comes forth. The things we do know about that I'm most concerned about are data brokers, who hoover up every detail they can get their mitts on and sell that info to others, including state actors. Defense against this is more complicated but using uBlock Origin and a browser with strict tracking protection can go a long way. Also, the gov't is involved in the zero-day exploit trade which is generally terrifying but usually those attacks are targeted at specific individuals. Not mass surveillance. Same with subpoena'ing tech companies to find out what particular people are doing on their platforms.
I don't want to be all "stop worrying, everything is fine" when the NSA is very assuredly continuing to do what we know it does, in secret. I'm sure they've got some horrifying powerful tech in use right now that no one knows about. But I'm not sure how much value there is in being paranoid about unknown unknowns. Better to address the problems we know to be real, and apply smart defenses against them wherever we can.
One thing to keep in mind is that the NSA is involved way deeper than anyone else. They get back doors put into hardware. Often even software with encryption in it has backdoors in it. Even if you...
Exemplary
One thing to keep in mind is that the NSA is involved way deeper than anyone else. They get back doors put into hardware. Often even software with encryption in it has backdoors in it. Even if you download what you think is an open-source application, often the publicly hosted versions of it will have backdoors. Unless you're actually reviewing the code yourself on hardware you can verify yourself, you have no idea if your communications are really secure. Hell, even searching for privacy tools gets you flagged by the NSA for increased surveillance.
At this point, with all that has been revealed, the default assumption is that the NSA can read literally any form of electronic communication. Hell, the only reason Osama was able to survive so long was because he refused to use electronic communication all together; he relied on couriers for everything.
Encryption is a good thing. It certainly can help prevent fraud and identity theft. But the NSA? They're a whole different ballgame. They don't need to hack your phone, as they contracted with its manufacturer to get backdoors placed into it when it was still on the drawing board.
This kind of thing has actually affected how I interact with the internet. My username is not just a username, that's my literal name. I've started preferring to use my real name on the internet for two reasons. First, it reminds me that nothing I post or comment on is secret. Anonymity doesn't really exist. If someone really wants to dox you, they can, let alone the NSA or law enforcement. Second, I find it helps cool some of the passions that social media can otherwise generate. I find myself commenting in anger or passion far less when using my actual name than when using a screen name. If anonymity doesn't really exist, then perhaps the best we can do is to simply accept it and be careful about what we post in public. Treat it no differently than how you would handle speaking at a large public gathering.
Even just on the web browsing side all it takes is very well known (at least in the tech space) fingerprinting techniques to almost completely render VPN's and privacy extensions useless for...
Even just on the web browsing side all it takes is very well known (at least in the tech space) fingerprinting techniques to almost completely render VPN's and privacy extensions useless for preventing tracking. Websites can easily identify exactly who you are, and those common end to end encryptions (that do still help) only protect you until your traffic reaches the company providing the service. Most of those company's then just directly sell your data to corporations and state actors, and many of those that don't very likely have incredibly top-secret backdoors installed allowing government surveillance that even they may not know about. We have proof the government has been doing this in recent history, there's no reason to think they've stopped now that their tools have only gotten stronger.
remember 'SSL added and removed here! :^)'? yeah... e2ee works when it works but many things are not e2ee, and metadata is often more interesting anyway (even nsa doesn't have the resources to...
the internet has made great strides in rolling out SSL, end-to-end encryption, and the like
remember 'SSL added and removed here! :^)'? yeah...
e2ee works when it works but many things are not e2ee, and metadata is often more interesting anyway (even nsa doesn't have the resources to store all the data indefinitely—but it does store metadata and doesn't even have to decrypt anything for that)
There are a few issues that I'm aware of. Warrants require a crime, but FISA can target anyone operating as an agent of a foreign power. Warrants are generally public and disclosed to the target,...
There are a few issues that I'm aware of. Warrants require a crime, but FISA can target anyone operating as an agent of a foreign power. Warrants are generally public and disclosed to the target, but FISA is secret.
For context my understanding of the compromise is that they lowered the length of their re-authorization from five years to two. Their thought process is that this will allow Trump to revisit the...
For context my understanding of the compromise is that they lowered the length of their re-authorization from five years to two. Their thought process is that this will allow Trump to revisit the issue during his presidency if he gets elected.
The amendment to prevent warrantless spying on Americans failed in a 212-212 tie, the passed bill does not include those protections. It's not totally through the House however as a Republican representative filed an unexpected motion to reconsider that will require the House to vote once more before heading to the Senate, but as the compromise passed 273-147 it is expected to carry to the Senate without additional amendments.
Here is the party breakdown of the amendment vote to require warrants for American citizens ("Ayes" in this vote would increase protections for American Citizens):
Party
Ayes
Noes
Present
Not Voting
Republican
128
86
0
7
Democratic
84
126
0
6
Here is the party breakdown of the final vote with the lowered authorization length ("Ayes" in this vote allow warrantless spying on American Citizens for the next two years):
The yes vote proves that eroding civil liberties remains a bipartisan pastime. That said, there's a bizarre contradiction within the GOP, as they're the ones most aggressive about curtailing...
The yes vote proves that eroding civil liberties remains a bipartisan pastime. That said, there's a bizarre contradiction within the GOP, as they're the ones most aggressive about curtailing freedoms in state houses, yet they have the larger faction willing to say no to the FISA nonsense.
God i hate this. I really think one of the utterly worst aspects of Trump is the MASSIVE security breach he constantly represents. I'm all for privacy and think FISA should fuck right off for the...
Their thought process is that this will allow Trump to revisit the issue during his presidency if he gets elected.
God i hate this.
I really think one of the utterly worst aspects of Trump is the MASSIVE security breach he constantly represents. I'm all for privacy and think FISA should fuck right off for the most part, but the only thing worse is letting Trump decide what parts we do and don't see.
I love how this is meant to sound like a large amount.
On the actual topic of the article, this is the result when you have large swathes of people in the country that still adamantly believe that Trump is or should be president. The representatives of those people are, by some definition, doing their job by listening to and following on with whatever random whims Trump has - because that is what their constituents want them to do.
They are accurately following up on what their people want them to do. They get voted in on campaigns that say "Pro Trump". Acting shocked and awed when they do something Trump wants them to do is not productive.
I would file this under "a broken clock is right twice per day." This is an issue that Trump and the ACLU agree on.
Under this act, the federal government flagrantly disregards the US constitution. The electronic activities of every American are tapped, recorded, archived, and analyzed. Every time you visit a website, that data is recorded by the government. Every text you send is archived forever. Every phone call you make is sent through a voice-to-text converter and archived. The NSA installs elaborate monitoring equipment right into the offices and data centers of telecom companies. They don't even need to do it in secret. The telecom companies and ISPs allow or are required to allow the NSA to install their equipment in their networks. Everything is recorded; nothing is secret. Electronic communications are all monitored. The 4th amendment means nothing anymore.
This act is an abomination. This act is precisely the surveillance apparatus that Snowden martyred himself for. The federal government, through the NSA and other agencies, monitors and records essentially every form of electronic communications we have access to. We currently live under a surveillance state far, far more intrusive than anything the Soviet Union or East Germany could ever dream of.
It's a flagrant violation of the US constitution. The courts have looked the other way through the strained legal gymnastics that developed post-9/11. But regardless of what the court say, there is simply no way a sane human being could argue that the complete warrantless recording of all digital communications of all Americans somehow is compatible with the 4th Amendment.
I have no doubt that Trump is opposing this for entirely selfish reasons. The man has no soul; he is an empty husk, utterly incapable of empathy for any other human being. He opposes it because he fears some of his actions are illegal and could be discovered through this mass unconstitutional dragnet. If a law were passed that kept section 702 the same, except it specifically exempted Donald Trump from surveillance, Trump would support the law. Again, he is fundamentally incapable of empathy. The man does not have a soul.
Yet still, despite being in it for entirely selfish reasons, Trump is actually right on this. The act should not be renewed. In fact, we should pass a Constitutional amendment explicitly prohibiting anything like it from ever being attempted again. As much as it pains me to say, Trump is actually right on this one.
I hope it didn't come across as me thinking that Trump is wrong. I am not well educated enough on the law itself to have an opinion (though with your explanation I suspect that I would very much agree with you).
My commentary is more on the infighting within the Republican party, and their shock that Senators are not falling in line like they usually do. The Republicans are currently two parties - Republicans and Trump followers. They have the same name next to their entries on ballots, but to the latter group Trump is law and it is their obligation to do what he says.
Democrats pretty much always have infighting, so far as they kind of agree that something needs to change for a given issue but are divided on how to go about doing something. Republicans have not had to deal with that as much, and it is very fun to see the schism happening.
I agree generally with the sentiment, but I believe you're overstating things. PRISM was dismantled, and online security has been upgraded considerably since those days. Outside of targeted surveillance via Section 702, what proof is there that the US government is doing these things?
Do you have any evidence for that? The Wikipedia article doesn't mention its dismantling. Plus there are any number of other mass surveillance programs. One way the NSA can get around legal bars against mass surveillance is through international agreements such as Five Eyes. This way, the NSA can claim they're not spying on US citizens. The US will spy on the citizens of the other Five Eyes members and share that info with them. In turn, the other members will spy on US citizens and share the info with the NSA. That way, everyone can pretend that they're not spying on their own citizens.
I'm sorry, but I simply do not believe that the NSA just gave up tracking. After you've spent decades weaving your spying apparatus into the entire global telecommunications system, you don't just let that go overnight.
The proof is in the fact that the NSA has been involved in such mass surveillance actions before and has gone to extraordinary lengths to skirt around laws and constitutional protections. While we don't have any big leaks since Snowden documenting the scale of their surveillance, we don't have any evidence that they're curtailing their work either. Has the NSA's budget shrunk? Are they employing fewer people than they used to? By the time you've reached the point where you're monitoring all electronic communication of the entire populace, the default assumption is you're going to keep doing that until proven otherwise. And this is especially true since the NSA does have a proven track record of skirting around privacy laws by outsourcing their surveillance to other governments.
Let me clarify my position. PRISM as a program includes multiple components, but the two key pieces that people objected to were: 1) the MITM interception of data at the level of large tech companies, and 2) the collection of phone metadata onto government servers. Both of these factors have been considerably changed from their original incarnation, though still exist in some form. So "dismantle" may have been a poor word choice, but certainly they have undergone changes.
Specifically, Section 702 allows targeted investigations into individuals (as mentioned in my previous comment), though does not allow for widespread data collection. Additionally, the phone metadata collection program was ended when the "FREEDOM Act" went into effect. The government must now make requests to the phone companies for individual data.
The NSA certainly does still employ tracking. And I don't doubt that some agents are abusing the programs that remain in place, contrary to laws that govern them. The ALCU has reported on that issue before.
But the claim that "The electronic activities of every American are tapped, recorded, archived, and analyzed", as I said, appears to be overstated. At this time there isn't evidence of a program like that, and such a program would likely be illegal under currently written laws.
I may be misinformed, but I don't know if this is actually the case anymore. It certainly was when Snowden made headlines, and the surveillance apparatus was definitely intended to function that way. But in the years since then, the internet has made great strides in rolling out SSL, end-to-end encryption, and the like. Anyone can configure their systems to use DNS over HTTPS, and tunnel their traffic through an anonymizing VPN. The NSA is likely continuing to siphon off every bit of data they can (aka, all of it within the USA) but the vast majority of it is meaningless noise at this point. I think the goal at this point is to store everything in giant datacenters, in case the ability to decrypt portions of it becomes feasible in the future.
That said, I'm sure they've got tons of other nefarious things in the works since Snowden. Highly classified things we can only speculate until another whistleblower comes forth. The things we do know about that I'm most concerned about are data brokers, who hoover up every detail they can get their mitts on and sell that info to others, including state actors. Defense against this is more complicated but using uBlock Origin and a browser with strict tracking protection can go a long way. Also, the gov't is involved in the zero-day exploit trade which is generally terrifying but usually those attacks are targeted at specific individuals. Not mass surveillance. Same with subpoena'ing tech companies to find out what particular people are doing on their platforms.
I don't want to be all "stop worrying, everything is fine" when the NSA is very assuredly continuing to do what we know it does, in secret. I'm sure they've got some horrifying powerful tech in use right now that no one knows about. But I'm not sure how much value there is in being paranoid about unknown unknowns. Better to address the problems we know to be real, and apply smart defenses against them wherever we can.
One thing to keep in mind is that the NSA is involved way deeper than anyone else. They get back doors put into hardware. Often even software with encryption in it has backdoors in it. Even if you download what you think is an open-source application, often the publicly hosted versions of it will have backdoors. Unless you're actually reviewing the code yourself on hardware you can verify yourself, you have no idea if your communications are really secure. Hell, even searching for privacy tools gets you flagged by the NSA for increased surveillance.
At this point, with all that has been revealed, the default assumption is that the NSA can read literally any form of electronic communication. Hell, the only reason Osama was able to survive so long was because he refused to use electronic communication all together; he relied on couriers for everything.
Encryption is a good thing. It certainly can help prevent fraud and identity theft. But the NSA? They're a whole different ballgame. They don't need to hack your phone, as they contracted with its manufacturer to get backdoors placed into it when it was still on the drawing board.
This kind of thing has actually affected how I interact with the internet. My username is not just a username, that's my literal name. I've started preferring to use my real name on the internet for two reasons. First, it reminds me that nothing I post or comment on is secret. Anonymity doesn't really exist. If someone really wants to dox you, they can, let alone the NSA or law enforcement. Second, I find it helps cool some of the passions that social media can otherwise generate. I find myself commenting in anger or passion far less when using my actual name than when using a screen name. If anonymity doesn't really exist, then perhaps the best we can do is to simply accept it and be careful about what we post in public. Treat it no differently than how you would handle speaking at a large public gathering.
Even just on the web browsing side all it takes is very well known (at least in the tech space) fingerprinting techniques to almost completely render VPN's and privacy extensions useless for preventing tracking. Websites can easily identify exactly who you are, and those common end to end encryptions (that do still help) only protect you until your traffic reaches the company providing the service. Most of those company's then just directly sell your data to corporations and state actors, and many of those that don't very likely have incredibly top-secret backdoors installed allowing government surveillance that even they may not know about. We have proof the government has been doing this in recent history, there's no reason to think they've stopped now that their tools have only gotten stronger.
remember 'SSL added and removed here! :^)'? yeah...
e2ee works when it works but many things are not e2ee, and metadata is often more interesting anyway (even nsa doesn't have the resources to store all the data indefinitely—but it does store metadata and doesn't even have to decrypt anything for that)
Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of bits. Maybe even a million, maybe even a whole Megabit.
Well, he's not wrong, it probably does.
I don't know the context of the quote but could he have meant "on every American" instead of "on Americans" (collectively)?
My question is, why would being required to get a warrant be crippling? Would the searches that the government wants to do be denied?
There are a few issues that I'm aware of. Warrants require a crime, but FISA can target anyone operating as an agent of a foreign power. Warrants are generally public and disclosed to the target, but FISA is secret.
And it looks like a compromise has been found.
House passes reauthorization of FISA
For context my understanding of the compromise is that they lowered the length of their re-authorization from five years to two. Their thought process is that this will allow Trump to revisit the issue during his presidency if he gets elected.
The amendment to prevent warrantless spying on Americans failed in a 212-212 tie, the passed bill does not include those protections. It's not totally through the House however as a Republican representative filed an unexpected motion to reconsider that will require the House to vote once more before heading to the Senate, but as the compromise passed 273-147 it is expected to carry to the Senate without additional amendments.
Here is the party breakdown of the amendment vote to require warrants for American citizens ("Ayes" in this vote would increase protections for American Citizens):
Here is the party breakdown of the final vote with the lowered authorization length ("Ayes" in this vote allow warrantless spying on American Citizens for the next two years):
And here is the breakdown of which Representatives voted which way for the final bill if like me you wish to see who should be primaried or sent emails. Here is the breakdown for the amendment.
The yes vote proves that eroding civil liberties remains a bipartisan pastime. That said, there's a bizarre contradiction within the GOP, as they're the ones most aggressive about curtailing freedoms in state houses, yet they have the larger faction willing to say no to the FISA nonsense.
God i hate this.
I really think one of the utterly worst aspects of Trump is the MASSIVE security breach he constantly represents. I'm all for privacy and think FISA should fuck right off for the most part, but the only thing worse is letting Trump decide what parts we do and don't see.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/what-is-fisa-surveillance-law-in-spotlight/story?id=109138345