One wonders: is there ANY point at which the Congress or even the Courts will step in and say that the abuse has been excessive? Is there really any threshold, and they're just waiting to see if we reach it? I'm really starting to believe that there's no limit at all. It's the proverbial frog in hot water.
Are you quoting someone with that comment? Because it looks to be a great statement to quote. Only thing I could add is possibly turning the 'and' into a 'but.'
This is what a broken system looks like- the people are no longer represented, and corruption has no check or balance. Question is, what do we do about it?
Side note: it would be foolish to think that these two things are not related. The motivations for removing our civil rights dovetail with the goals for keeping us under control.
I really don't see how anybody is actually being kept under control, so far. Not disputing the overreach of many of these transgressions that have become public over the last years. But to suggest that they are actively used to influence US domestic politics and elections just doesn't seem plausible.
Even if the theory is that the two parties act as a duopoly and protect their shared interests, which seems unlikely given they barely contain their mutual hatred in public–wouldn't they have used such subversion to avoid the current president?
> But to suggest that they are actively used to influence US domestic politics and elections just doesn't seem plausible
Have you heard the name J. Edgar Hoover[1]? Have you read about the FBI's, ah, interactions, with MLK[2]?
If so, on what grounds do you believe that such things don't happen today? With more subtlety, of course; things change, and the FBI has had a long time to refine technique.
I don't think you actually need a conspiracy for this behaviour to hold true. As different as the parties are, there's huge amounts they both agree on. (It's positively ridiculous how much time is spent presenting everyone's minor differences in approach on Terrorism and Syria, for instance)
It's pretty ridiculous that America's idea of an anti-establishment candidate is pro-foreign intervention, pro-big business, anti-drugs and favours mass incarceration. I mean, seriously, how is this different from Bill Clinton's policies.
TL;DR; Whilst there are genuine and important differences between the two parties and specific candidates, American policy in general is pretty damn stable.
But unlikely to do so when they're threatened e.g. by "someone" leaking evidence of "transgressions"... e.g. sexual encounters with affairs/prostitutes, excessive drinking, inappropriate conduct with minors, clandestine meetings with "sponsors" (aka corruption)... and Congressmen (or, politicians in general) are not exactly known for ethical behavior, which makes them all extortionable.
A lot of this kind of "searching for evidence" can already be done using existing surveillance infrastructure, I believe it was called LOVEINT after the Snowden leaks.
The LE and intelligence agencies just go back to doing exactly what they were doing, with zero accountability as usual, and nothing really changes. Except they get a little bit better at covering their tracks.
The Church Committee really didn't have any effect beyond forcing the CIA to rely on electronic surveillance, putting them at a disadvantage vs the Soviets.
That agency leaked sensitive information to embarrass Bush when he crossed them, and then did the same thing to Obama (for the same reason). This is what people are talking about when they mention the "deep state". The best thing that could happen is for the CIA to be defunded and disbanded completely, with a new agency staffed by entirely new people created in its place.
MKULTRA. Iran-Contra. CIA supporting the drug trade. People threatening any of that getting assassinated. It's hard to tell if it was worse, though, given all the things exposed over past 10-20 years. If anything, public resistance seems to have gone down a lot.
'“If we require our agents to write a full justification every time think about if you wrote a full justification every time you used Google. Among other things, you would use Google a lot less,” a lawyer told the court.'
Wow. Of course performing a search through such private information should be done with far more care than is taken in a typical Google search. Except to this guy.
"This same declassified FISA ruling also held that Obama’s NSA conducted improper searches of “upstream” surveillance data on Americans for years" -FTA
I'd never heard of Circa (circa.com, the publisher of the story) before, so did a little digging. Apparently it's owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group [0].
Or lack there of. They're busy getting hysterical over the highly damning allegations of the day that is our current 'NightmareTV' political situation.
Because the Obama admin was implicated in it, the coverage seems to be broad in Republican circles (i.e. Fox News). I wish us non-tribal people could form some common-sense, bipartisan group.
Are we ready yet, to say that everything that's been predicted about this stuff has come true?
Mass information gathering and mass classification of government information has led to, AFAICT, every accide tal breach and malicious actor scenario the "paranoid" privacy advocates said it would.
That of course has little to do with it. You sound familiar enough with HN to know how many major threads about surveillance this site has hosted in the last 4 years. Probably hundreds of them by now.
The original site was penalized the way all partisan/political sites are penalized here. We changed the URL to the article it pointed to.
I would not claim HN readers are pro government, they are frighteningly pro government when those they do not agree with are in the cross hairs.
this is exactly how the system gets to be so abusive. government, politicians and those in power, manipulate the system by playing off the fears, desires, and hatred, of the constituency.
what those who frequent sites like this need to learn is to see that manipulation for what it is and stand firm against it regardless of who is the target. wrong is wrong, it does not become magically right if someone you don't like gets taken down. when they go we all go.
the danger specific to FBI is that it has become way to political in recent years due in part with how the Department of Justice has. Organizations with powers such as these should have all political leanings minimized if not actively sought out and ended.
Sure, you have the tribal-ists that are anti-Trump or anti-Obama, but I find there are many civil libertarians on HN. In 2013, during the wake of the Snowden release there must have been 3-5 threads per day.
I don't feel qualified to assess the inner workings of the FBI, but there appear to be no checks on this surveillance power with any teeth. We need to fix this immediately. It should not be a partisan issue.
Because the military isn't supposed to act domestically under normal circumstances, to prevent other kinds of abuses.
So we have a federal police organization separate from the military, theoretically trained to obey the rules of domestic operations (eg, constitutional protections). And it is that police organization which handles intelligence about, eg, terrorism and foreign spies that originates inside of the country.
There are some caveats about cooperation between different agencies, but I'm not going to try and defend those as they currently exist -- the domestic police shouldn't have access to some of our spy apparatus that doesn't obey domestic laws.
However, there is a legitimate reason to have a domestic police force separate from the military, and a legitimate need for them to have some intelligence operations, to eg crack terrorist rings and track spies.
"So we have a federal police organization separate from the military, theoretically trained to obey the rules of domestic operations "
Interesting enough, its power came from public relations, military and intelligence-style operations against its opponents under J Edgar Hoover. The story you told came as propaganda supporting that. I agree with separating military and law enforcement plus different procedures. It's just that the FBI was more like a foreign opponent shoring up power for itself, esp its leader, than a traditional LEO w/ federal power given for legitimate reasons. Then, it kept and expanded on that power despite how it achieved it in the first place.
Not even close to the actual intelligence structure. The nsa doesn't have to answer to dod at ALL.
Hurr durr the military is the state, you have no clue what you're talking about. I served for 6 years doing naval intelligence, sigint, and we never once heard from nsa, cia, fbi, etc. All our orders came from one of two generals in charge of our task force.
Nuclear subs night have to work with intel agencies for technical purposes, but I never served on one.
I don't have the experience you do, but all of the big violent acts we have had over the last 20 years that I remember were perpetrated by US citizens (except 9/11).
I agree that we should not shape our laws based on edge-case criteria (e.g comic book villains), but their has to be some cross-state law enforcement.
"The military is capable of gathering all of the defensive intelligence that we need to protect ourselves."
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
Military intelligence focuses on identifying and tracking threats to military forces. During the Cold War, for instance, this meant having a decent understanding of Soviet doctrine, equipment, and tactics. Civilian intelligence agencies focused on government operations, infrastructure, and the like. Overlap existed (and still exists), but their focus was different.
But let's say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to close civilian-run intelligence agencies and turn it all over to the military.
How do you get enough green-suiters to fill all those chairs previously filled by civilians and, more importantly, keep those chairs filled by qualified individuals?
Enlistments end, and soldiers/airmen/sailors are generally given other duty assignments on a routine basis. That's institutional knowledge that walks right out the door, that doesn't necessarily happen if you've got civilian employees.
What you may be saving budget-wise (military personnel being cheaper than civilian), you're spending on training and retention. Why would an E-6 with plenty of analysis and personnel management experience stick around when he or she could make a lot more in the private sector?
And when all is said and done, does this really prevent the kind of abuses we're already seeing with civilian-run agencies?
I was in military intelligence. I am qualified to make the evaluation I made.
Violent citizens can be dealt with through police channels and public servants, not lawless shadows in the dark in a giant data center somewhere.
How many civilian whistleblowers have there been compared to how many enlisted whistleblowers there have been? I myself once spoke up about an unscrupulous sailor, but I went to an E-8 and asked him for his advice (hey, a friend of a friend is doing something wrong, blah blah) and he pointed me in the right direction to handle it without fucking this guy over, and the behavior was corrected and we all went happily about our missions, no harm, no foul. It's easy to do.
Civilians don't have as much of a moral obligation to the rest of the country, they aren't ready to die to serve it.
Your argument is basically, "well, private sector is going to do this shit anyways" but that's ridiculous to say that we should continue to be complicit in letting the NSA exist just because if we don't let them do it, someone else will.
Citizen's hands are dirty for being complicit, and more people need to realize that a unified effort of enough magnitude could make HUGE cuts to state intel sector a reality, and we could pump that money into better police training, better resources for investigators and people who are invested in their communities rather than some asshole with an xkeyscore login and a name on a screen.
I'm not saying state intel agencies don't contribute to ethical sources like infrastructure and civ eng stuff, of course they do, but it doesn't excuse all the other terrible things they do, and it'd be possible to redirect that talent and those resources into those areas through other agencies.
DOT could offer special hire credits for intel workers with infra design experience, for example. That could be made possible by NOT running $10-digit datacenters full of civilian facebook messages with tax payer money.
I was also in military intelligence (Army SIGINT, 89-93) and worked in DoD and the intelligence community as a contractor for more than a decade afterward. I don't think I'm completely unqualified from making an evaluation, either.
I agree that issues involving the citizenry should be handled by civilian police organizations and the justice system. In the open and transparent, as much as existing privacy laws permit.
Your argument is basically, "well, private sector is going to do this shit anyways" but that's ridiculous to say that we should continue to be complicit in letting the NSA exist just because if we don't let them do it, someone else will.
No, my argument is that if you turn all of this over to the military, you're going to add a whole new set of problems and you're not guaranteed to solve the existing ones. I am certainly not fine with what appears to be an increasingly lackadaisical approach to collection against previously off-limits targets and an inability to properly protect citizens against online threats.
You're still going to have corruption. You're still going to have waste, fraud and abuse. But if you're turning your workforce from civilian to military, you're now introducing additional issues of training and retention. Think about the E-1s through E-3s in any unit you've served with: they're a mixed bag, some of them may not even really be qualified to be there, they generally lack much of the actual training they need to be effective in their job, and a good number are just counting the days until they can be out.
It appears to be proper judicial oversight of national security operations.
Unsurprisingly, having the rule of law applied even in the pursuit of those who seek to end it is smeared by those who would prefer to weaken the United States' national security and the institutions of liberal democracies the world over.
> It appears to be proper judicial oversight of national security operations.
I'm not sure how you consider a toothless, secret court applying secret law "proper judicial oversight". If the FISC ruled that left-handed people were a threat to national security, would the FBI be justified in rounding up all lefties? If not, how do the lefties appeal this ruling?
I've mentioned it before, but it seems that the mods only enforce this rule (and similar ones) very selectively: precisely those times that "grandiose ideological rhetoric" disagrees with groupthink. This comment is no more grandiose, ideological, or rhetorical than hundreds I've seen recently on a myriad of topics.
I think the very notion of "flamebait" is an Orwellian euphemism for not agreeing with popular sentiment: it's not mere disagreement, it's flamebait, so of course we must censor it!
I'm very curious: what are the statistics on times you've applied this rule to comments you agree with versus those you don't -- or do you always disagree with "flamebait"?
> "flamebait" is an Orwellian euphemism for not agreeing with popular sentiment
Well, there's also the manner in which you present yourself and your argument that counts for something. It's flamebait if it is presented in such a way to do nothing but start an argument (i.e. not constructive).
Your pro-NSA shilling is so flatly contradicted by what's in that document, that your opinions are total garbage. You should be so embarrassed at flaunting your ignorance in public that I recommend you delete your account.
Let's examine the pdf page by page.
NSA admits it broke its own rules and spied on Americans. This is no longer theoretical or a "smear" by "those who would prefer to weaken the US" (LOL I can't believe you said that).
NSA admits that it has no idea how many ways its own analysts can access UPSTREAM in order to perform the abuse mention in my previous screencap.
Think about that. UPSTREAM is over 10 years old. They had all the time is the world to lock it down, to shore up their defenses, to comply with some basic fucking rules that they set for themselves. They totally failed.
What if $MEGA_BILLION Corporation out there had no idea how its employees were logging into the ERP as root and poking around whatever they felt like for a decade? What if it was a HIPAA business? What if it was one of the top 5 accounting firms?
UPSTREAM is one of the most powerful cyberweapons ever built, and here NSA themselves tell the FISA judge that they lost control of it.
They first told FISA about these problems back in 2015. They told the judge in 2015 that they found abuses going back to 2011. Well here we are 3 years later and NSA is still telling FISA "we're working on it."
What if the National Nuclear Security Agency lost a nuke 6 years ago? You'd think the world would stop immediately, top dogs would be severely punished and the most severe remedies would be applied to fix the problem.
Right there NSA admits they have no way to audit UPSTREAM access. Remember when the Snowden leaks began? Remember The Clap and all the 17 Nazgul swearing up and down to everyone that it's not as bad as it seems, they have elaborate comprehensive compliance rules, random auditing, and log trails of everything.
"Trust Us, we're the Good Guys, Marty!"
Right there NSA admits they spy on all Americans in order to put us all on a "Master Purge List", which they share with all the other 16 SpyTels and everyone who gets access to raw, unminimized UPSTREAM SIGINT. NSA says they have to spy on Americans in order to know which IP addresses, which traffic, which connections, which metadata, which Content belongs to Americans, in order for them to filter it out of UPSTREAM.
This is the most perverted twisting of Surveillance State logic I can imagine. Like the saying in Vietnam "we had to destroy the village to save it."
NSA had to spy on Americans in order to not spy on Americans.
So what's your smarmy uninformed reaction to that one? Still best buddies with Deep State? How much do you trust FBI or the Dept of Agriculture with your UPSTREAM data to abide by the honor system and obey NSA's Master Purge List and not read your home Internet traffic, the websites you visit, your emails, texts, all of it?
Remember when Snowden first leaked and all the "Infosec" poseurs and "Thot Leaders" (none of whom can code) gave TED talks and conference keynotes advising everyone to "HTTPS All The Things! 2FA Brah! E2E! Trust The Math!" then patted each other on the backs on stage when receiving their Humanitarian Awards for Fierce Intrepid Journalism, Speaking Truth to Power and all that circle jerking off to look like Heroes who stood up to the NSA and empowered the People and now everything's fine, let's go shopping Barbie, we defeated the Big Bad NSA.
Bullshit.
Right here NSA admits to FISA that FBI keeps all encrypted traffic forever. You used to use HTTP for most traffic, but now you use HTTPS and Signal and Tor and Keybase and you're a Good Cypherpunk
cosplaying at "changing the world."
If you ever believed that load of bull, you are the problem. Your idiocracy just led millions of non-coder sheep into allowing FBI to save everyone's encrypted traffic forever. At least when they spied on unencrypted traffic they would delete it after seeing that your lolcats are not steganographic messages to your ISIS sleeper cell about your next bomb plot.
Now that everyone uses encryption, everyone is a suspect, forever. FBI says they only apply their retention deletion rules after the moment it is decrypted. Which could be 5 years from now, or 20.
Great job Cypherpunk Beliebers, instead of directly challenging NSA on policy, you fucked us all with your ridiculous Larpfest about beating the Govt by using encryption.
The worst part about this declassified pdf is that NSA even admits to FISA that all of these rules and oversight and compliance are just a stage show and they don't have to tell FISA anything about what they do! Remember how John Yoo wrote the secret memoes that approved Bush to unleash NSA from rules and "Collect It All", memoes which we little people didn't even get to know existed just until 2015? The President's Inherent Constitutional Authority means his privacy to use his powers trumps every right you thought you had in the Bill of Rights.
Free Speech? Nope, not for you. The President gets that. Unreasonable search and seizure? Nope, the President trumps you. It's not a "physical search", it's an "electronic search", which you don't know yet, but this is the most important Secret Law that you still don't know about. An "electronic search" is not a wiretap, so no rules apply to it going back to Nixon's 1969 Omnibus Crime Act which established the first rules for wiretaps.
Quartering soldiers in your home? Wrong again bucko. The President can quarter the entire NSA virus arsenal on your home router and infect every computer you own and you can't do jack shit. And if you discover you have been hacked and if you talked about it, then you go to jail for leaking National Security secrets. General Warrants? The President can rendition, disappear and assassinate anyone he wants and you have no right to know, and even if you did know, you can't prove it effects you personally, so you have zero standing in any Court in the nation.
But wait it gets worse, if such a thing is possible.
You think you know what UPSTREAM is? You read The Intercept, you respect Greenwald, and maybe you glanced at a few Snowden docs to see what the fuss was for yourself. Oh, NSA is wiretapping 100's of undersea cables, 10's of thousands of Satellite uplink stations, and 800,000 cell phone towers all over the planet, exfiltrating all of your data, so the entire Internet backbone is siphoned back to Bluffdale.
You're probably a smart guy and you smirk and say to yourself "well of course, I always KNEW they did that, what's the big deal?"
Well right there NSA says there is another source feeding into 702 that is NOT UPSTREAM. Do you get butterflies in your stomach when you realize for the past 10 years NSA has lied to FISA about what 702 and UPSTREAM even is? Why are they only now telling FISA there is more access to more data outside of UPSTREAM?
"If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear"... isn't that what all the Good Germans and idiots say when they go along with whatever NSA is doing?
Well if NSA had nothing to fear from FISA, why did they hide it?
It gets even worse. Remember last month when NSA announced they were ending 702 "About Data" and everyone cheered like lobotomized vegetables, "we won against NSA! yay! our Right are restored."
Wrong.
Right there FISA tells NSA they are now allowed to spy on Americans in the US at will using 702 because they ended the "About Data."
There are too many redactions to understand what is "About Data", how far did they go with it in terms of building an automated encyclopedia of all Americans and all people, that knows everything about everyone by inference on other people communicating "about" you.
I remember reading a prescient comment on Slashdot back in the week when the Patriot Act first passed in October 2001. They said "child porn is the root password of the Constitution."
Well here we are. The FBI invoked child porn to justify their abusing their access to NSA's raw 702 UPSTREAM SIGINT to trawl for dirt on Hillary's political opponents, any Democrat leakers, all of Trump's inner circle and anyone who opposes Soros and Barry Soetoro importing the Caliphate into White Christian Nations.
Why does it take 3 years for NSA to still not close all their holes in the UPSTREAM boat? Why does FISA keep rolling over and letting NSA data-rape them? "It's ok NSA, thanks for telling us, we're not mad at you, as long as you promise that you're trying, you can keep on abusing us indefinitely.
"
This one ought to enrage all HN readers, who are technically competent enough to understand the problem. Here NSA admits they only use a single criteria to determine if some packets intercepted into UPSTREAM belong to an American or a Foreigner: IP Address.
Now you may ask, how can NSA be so rock solid certain that an IP address is evidence enough to either process your data into their ingest system or mark you on their Master Purge List for deletion in 10 years and to let other spy agencies know they should not use your data for anything?
cough cough You still don't know what is TREASUREMAP and BONESAW. Those programs are the key to understanding why NSA is so confident in attribution of Americans. Which is hilarious, when you realize they couldn't attribute a high profile APT hack if their lives depended on it.
Remember after the Snowden leaks began, when General Alexander and The Clap desparately declassified their internal IG compliance reports that showed some questionable math stating they only "touch" 1% of Internet traffic? I bet you went back to sleep after believing Snowden was exaggerating, it's not that bad, and NSA certainly doesn't record a full copy of the entire Internet in Bluffdale, now that's just crazy talk.
Right here NSA admits they lied and they "touch" 3% of all Internet traffic via UPSTREAM.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Why should you believe NSA this time, given that they provably lied about this not 3 years ago?
Why should you believe NSA even knows how much total Internet traffic that they "touch"?
You don't even know what the NSA's definition of "touch" is, yet you're so willing to believe them and ignore their disasters, time after time after time.
Right here NSA admits to FISA that their querying UPSTREAM breaks their own rules 85% of the time.
If you care at all about the Internet, privacy and free speech, this astonishing fact should launch your fat lazy keester out of your office masseuses chair in your kushy SF office and into the streets to demand someone do something.
Right here NSA snitches to FISA and admits FBI gives their raw UPSTREAM SIGINT to Contractors who are not "assisting" the Govt. Let that sink in. We know UPSTREAM access at FBI is restricted to a very small group of less than 100 FBI personnel.
As if the horror of seeing the Matrix for yourself isn't enough, it gets worse yet.
Here NSA throws FBI under the bus to FISA by snitching that FBI abuses raw UPSTREAM SIGINT to spy on American's communications with their Attorneys.
If you've read the DNI's declassified documents post-Snowden, you'll remember this issue coming up.
According to NSA and FBI logic, until you are charged with a crime by a Court, then it is OK for them to spy on all of your communications with your Attorneys and any legal counsel.
Being charged still doesn't stop them from continuing to spy on you and your Attorneys, it just changes to another Secret Law you don't know about to let them do it.
Why would NSA burn FBI before FISA like this? NSA must know Comey and FBI abused UPSTREAM so badly, that it threatens to endanger NSA itself.
NSA doesn't give a shit about Americans, but they do care about their own self-preservation. Isn't it a bizarre Wonderland we've entered when the only guarantee we have to stop NSA abuse is others abusing NSA so badly that NSA has to step in to stop them to save their own necks?
In conclusion, I am deeply disappointed by the shills on this board. You know who you are and you are hugely irresponsible for spreading FAKE NEWS and talking down stunning NSA leaks like nothing is going on, "these are not the droids you're looking for", why not OBEY and SLEEP my fellow hacker news technically proficient nerds who might be the only demographic who can actually do something to stop NSA?
Like David BrockBots would shill on 4chan in thousands of threads to flood the narrative and make Normies ignore reading the truth for themselves:
"just went through it and it appears to be nothing substantial sadly"
