NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday | Hacker News Reader

NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday

reuters.com

67 pointsbenologist32 comments

As required by law, the NSA will end its wide-ranging surveillance program by 11:59 p.m. EST Saturday (4:59 a.m. GMT Sunday) and expects to have the new, scaled-back system in place by then, the White House said.

"As required by law"? The government violated the Fourth Amendment and the director of national security committed perjury (1). As required by law, justice officials and prosecutors should have brought charges against Clapper and other responsible parties ... yet nothing happened.

What makes the government think that we will trust them to investigate and prosecute anyone violating our rights in the future, "as required by law"?

1. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/james-clapper-says-he-misspoke-d...

Yeah, and are they starting a new program on Saturday?

Not surprising to anyone who follows greenwald. Read his book With Liberty And Justice For _Some_

Where was it found the NSA violated the 4th amendment?

Oh, please. There comes a time when even you have to give up the legalistic approach, and just acknowledge plain fact.

The NSA has had dragnet surveillance of most or all of the US internet for some years. If that's not a 4th Amendment violation, then nothing is.

If you want legalistic, narrow (razor thin!) interpretations of all "rights", then they're not really rights, they're just something for lawyers to natter on about. Further, Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American" becomes nothing but parody.

> The NSA has had dragnet surveillance of most or all of the US internet for some years. If that's not a 4th Amendment violation, then nothing is.

Even assuming that were true, I disagree it would be an archetypal 4th amendment violation. Privacy on the Internet doesn't exist as a matter of fact. Anyone who controls a router between you and your destination can see your Internet traffic. When you try to apply the 4th amendment to the Internet, you're not asking the government not to intrude on an otherwise private space (i.e. the heart of the 4th amendment). You're asking it to indulge a purely legal fiction of privacy.

And on even number days you will argue the people don't have the right to create unbreakable privacy for themselves, and that a search warrant has to be a guarantee of being able to read what the searcher finds.

I think encryption does get you a reasonable expectation of privacy that protects against warrantless attempts to decrypt the information or coerce you to decrypt it, if you're a U.S. person and your data doesn't cross the border.

If data isn't encrypted, it's simply exposed to too many people for any expectation of privacy to be "reasonable." If the government has a warrant, that has always meant the power to coerce people into opening locks. And the Constitution does not apply to foreigners abroad, and to searches at the border. These are not just legal technicalities, they are well-accepted limitations on the power of a 200+ year old document to override the decisions of a democratically-elected government.

Encryption isn't just a lock, as you no doubt know. It also enables undetectable concealment and deniability.

Also, since keys are trivial to hide and destroy, it's also impossible to prove who thwarted a search.

In other words, the same level of care that it takes to go up against a state actor unconstrained by the law would easily thwart a supposedly legal warrant.

State power isn't absolute, and states will have to get used to that.

The crux of this argument and the propaganda the current administration lawyers have been shilling centers around whether these searches (ie, mass collection of US citizen data) are unreasonable. I reject your argument that searches are reasonable because the internet infrastructure is currently fundamentally flawed; as already concluded in Katz v. United States, an unlawful search occurs when a "reasonable expectation of privacy" is violated. Given your own argument, any and all attempts by end users to obtain privacy, via https or otherwise, constitute an individual reasonably expecting privacy and therefore any information gathered is done so illegally.

The "reasonableness" standard is objective not subjective reasonableness. It's objectively unreasonable to think that your data in say gmail, which is stored in a form accessible to many people you've never met, and is in fact data-mined by the host, is somehow "private."

If I keep an unlocked box full of papers in my neighbors garage, and he sometimes rifles through them looking for something interesting, can I say that box is "private"? Maybe if the box is locked and only I have the key (I.e. Client-side encryption) but not if I send it to him locked but give him the key (I.e. HTTPS). Again, it's not about legal technicality or technical technicality. It's about whether the information is actually "private."

Millimeter wave imaging means any building can be made transparent, and your privacy within that building is a social construct.

  "Some Republican lawmakers want to preserve bulk collection until 2017, citing the Nov. 13 Paris attacks in which 130 people died."

It always leaves a bad taste in my mouth when politicians use an event (bad or otherwise) to prop up controversial legislation. If their reasoning is that the bulk surveillance program is necessary to avert terrorism, then surely they must have known or, at least, gotten a hint of what was due to happen on that day. Of course, it doesn't work like that.

The NSA's "metadata" collection policies means that a great majority of the data they collect is harmless "noise". I can understand data collection when they have narrowed down their leads to a specific person or group, but the current dragnet they've set up is costing taxpayers millions to store and manage the data.

> It always leaves a bad taste in my mouth when politicians use an event (bad or otherwise) to prop up controversial legislation

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel

A somewhat inaccurate headline. As Marcy Wheeler writes:

"Just a tiny corner of the phone dragnet will shut down, and the government will continue to collect “telephony metadata records in bulk … including records of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons” under EO 12333. Hypothetically, for every single international call that had been picked up under the Section 215 dragnet and more (at a minimum, because NSA collects phone records overseas with location information), a matching record has been and will continue to be collected overseas, under EO 12333."

https://www.emptywheel.net/2015/11/27/the-government-wants-y...

> international call

It's important to remember that Snowden has confirmed several times that "international" is referring to the physical wire/fiber/radio they are tapping, not the people at each end of the call. In a packet switched world, any call can become "international" if the packets are sent by way of the Bahamas. ("misconfigured" BGP is a traditional method)

And the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus will be holding a press conference on Monday.

"... and from Monday, the official language of the USA will be Swedish. In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now... 16 years old..."

(adapted from Woody Allen's Bananas)

There's no way to win here. If the government outright abolished the NSA at noon, there would be dozens of hn comments at 12:01 saying "Yeah, but did they really abolish it?" or "But what about all the bad things they did when they existed? or "They'll just do something even worse next".

It seems like distrust of authority is just a part of some people's personality. Perceived wrong doing by the government in the past has caused them to distrust the government into perpetuity, even if that same government does exactly what those people demand. So why should the authorities listen at all? It's like a convicted felon who can no longer get a job or be part of society. Why not just go back to a life of crime? You're damned if you and damned if you don't.

Wow, I don't know that I've seen such a perfect example of Battered Woman Syndrome outside of a rerun of Cops. By "Perceived wrong doing", you mean clear and well documented violations of the law - right? Portraying people who don't immediately prostrate themselves before the throne of state power as having some sort of personality defect is pretty funny as well.

Our security apparatus is the boy who cried "wolf" (okay, actually they cried "terrorist", but close enough). They've repeatedly lied to Congress and to the people, including lying about having programs and lying about shutting down programs. Given that background context, distrust is appropriate here!

There is no short-term fix but in the long run the authorities could probably win back some trust if they henceforth were consistently truthful and transparent and actually held somebody responsible the next time lawbreaking occurs.

> As required by law, the NSA will end its wide-ranging surveillance program by 11:59 p.m. EST Saturday (4:59 a.m. GMT Sunday) and expects to have the new, scaled-back system in place by then, the White House said.

Except every time the White House has said "we're only doing X.." we find out later that it wasn't true so why should we believe them now?

I'm sure this will go as well as shutting down the bulk email surveillance program did.

Sure they will.

What, again?

Good. We can all pretend we believe it.

On Monday, the Pope will convert to Islam.

On Tuesday, Elon Musk will start his journey to Mars.

Wednesday, Isis declares peace.

By Thursday, the static vs. dynamic typing debate will finally be solved.

On Friday, king Salman of Saudi Arabia will donate all his wealth to charity.

And finally, on Saturday, Elon Musk will land on Mars.

On Sunday, the Vim vs Emacs debate will finally come to an end.

This sudden bout of positivity on HN is worrisome.

No they won't.

Can you trust Obama and the NSA to do what they say they are going to do?

1) NSA shuts down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday.

2) NSA starts totally different and with even less oversight "aggregate" phone surveillance program by Monday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/us/politics/records-show-e...

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