Obama Administration Set to Expand Sharing of Data That N.S.A. Intercepts
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Edit: A lot of speculation and guesses in the replies here. If anyone's got actual evidence that the NSA "has data on everyone" or "wouldn't share their intel with the FBI", please post it. Otherwise, why make the claim?
If you all really think the NSA can simply magic their way into an encrypted system, then why even bother? You're flying in the face of every security expert's opinion on the matter. No one with expertise in this area is going to agree that the NSA has data collection ongoing for every person in the US, that's patently absurd. The Snowden leaks showed us what they're capable of, and while it was substantial, it wasn't universal. Not by a long shot, and especially not after so many fixes were made as a result of those leaks.
No they would not. Different government agencies are tasked with different resources, different objectives, and different guiding laws. What is legal for some agencies is blatantly illegal for others. The NSA has no domestic mission and cannot generally operate on American soil - true of the entire US military [1]. This blurring of those lines is exactly the problem. By permitting the FBI to take on NSA-like capabilities, and giving the NSA FBI-like responsibilities one gives the military a role in monitoring its own citizens, and an adversarial law enforcement agency unlimited espionage powers - very dangerous precedents - digital or otherwise.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/25/us/25stellarwi...
A key part of the FBI's mission is "to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats" after all:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/facilitating-an-enhanced-...
As to the point about selectors, if a selector has an even remotely domestic terrorism related component, and is authorized by the FISA court, the FBI can and does see that information.
Edit: added qualifier about terrorism
DOD and DOJ in particular I don't think have such a close buddy-buddy relationship.
Where did you hear that? It's not in anything that's been leaked, and the NSA surely didn't say it, so I'm curious where you got that information.
To be fair, I'm assuming you're talking about data collected clandestinely, not stuff like tax information or social security number (obviously the government has that data). If you're just talking about the data that gets generated as part of being a citizen of the US, then yes, the NSA, FBI, IRS, etc. probably does have that information.
Yes, it has been, though the exact nature of that "data" depends on your interpretation, and "everyone" is obviously only and approximate value. The NSA has even admitted to collecting most telephone records under the "phone metadata program".
They also keep a sliding-window capture of data that includes a "full take" of the backbone in some areas. This was still being deployed at the time the leaked documents were written, so the coverage is variable, but we can assume it's only increased. Note that this is covered by one of the NSA's "creative reinterpretations"; they pretend that the data isn't "captured" until someone actually looks the data up in XKEYSCORE. This is patently absurd.
You're the NSA, trying to gather information foreign agents in the United States. You have access to some firehose of network packets, some of which may include communication between such agents and their home nations, but most of which is purely domestic. You also lack the technology to pull the needles out of the haystack in real time.
Why is it "patently absurd" to retain a window of such data for long enough to identify the communications of interest and discard the rest? Is there an alternative?
He said it was "patently absurd" to pretend that they haven't "captured" any data until someone searches for it.
> long enough to identify the communications of interest and discard the rest?
I have no reason to think that they wouldn't keep all of it, forever, period. Or at least retain a long enough window to render this statement pointless.
> Is there an alternative?
Old fashioned police work? Only gather data with a warrant?
Fishing trawlers don't capture everything they catch: Most of it gets thrown back. This is all semantics, but without more context for the word "capture" (like, why it wouldn't be legal to capture data you'll never look at), I don't think it's patently absurd to read the term in a way that makes reasonable intelligence work possible.
What if they only buffered the data for a few seconds while picking out the "good stuff"? A few hours? Where is the line?
I have no reason to think that they wouldn't keep all of it, forever, period. Or at least retain a long enough window to render this statement pointless.
If you think the NSA has no effective oversight and is lying to the FISA court or the President about what it does and doesn't do, you have bigger problems.
Old fashioned police work? Only gather data with a warrant?
The NSA isn't a domestic law enforcement agency. You're thinking of the FBI.
That's not what they do. They keep it. Indefinitely. That's the whole point- If they find a terrorist, they can back-search and find everyone he has communicated with.
> If you think the NSA has no effective oversight and is lying to the FISA court or the President about what it does and doesn't do,
This is an outright fact, and if you think it's not true, then I don't know what I can do for you. Is there an opposite-of-conspiracy theorist, someone who believes any outlandish theory that supports the status quo? Just bizarre.
This is just false. It's literally the main reason Snowden went public.
Prosecutors with agendas wait long and patiently for a case with the appropriate circumstances to make a request. If a prosecutor was waiting for a way in which to make sure that Apple wasn't able to eliminate the possibility of making requests that the government couldn't get access to, they would likely have to wait a long time for a better set of circumstances to make their case against.
In this case - the victims are unsympathetic, and dead - the victims are unambiguously terrorists - the victims themselves do not own the phone - there's no concern of having to get things done secretly (e.g., there's no imminent attack that the government has to keep under wraps)
A prosecutor who wants the All Writs Act to have the power they think it does would not allow this case to go unused, even if there was no material need for them to win the case.
The NSA's lawyers have twisted the definition of "collection" to mean the accessing of information already present in storage. By any reasonable definition of the word, they already collect virtually everything they can on Americans. Not just metadata, but full content—everything.
Asking the NSA to disclose incidental collection on Americans would only reveal incidental access to Americans' information in context of foreign-targeted operations.
It still blows my mind we've spend such huge sums of money on what is effectively a very iffy interpretation of the law, designed to violate civil rights on a mass scale. The other top story in the news is how another security agency is essentially trying to get easy access to people's private data (phones) whenever needed.
The worst part is that whatever system is publicly described, it can simply be secretly subverted by classified presidential directive.[1]
[1]: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/06/24/presi...
The public, though, is largely against these mass surveillance programs, and should be informed from the horse's mouth exactly what they are.
Former NSA Director Michael Hayden said last year that he was glad to see that as a result of the Snowden leaks the NSA only lost ease of access to their small 215 program, and didn't even lose the program entirely [1]
Mass surveillance and our right to privacy need to become election issues if any of this is ever to change.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2015/06/17/hayden-mocks-extent-post...
Was there any doubt? One of the core pillars of the Republican party is massive defense spending while the party's opinion on Snowden is not exactly favorable (to say the least). Furthermore, a current Rubio ad is literally claiming we will enter into the Apocalypse (due to terrorism and economic collapse) if he isn't elected as the GOP nominee.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/18/us-voters-bro...
Really? That's not my impression. I remember after September 11 - most Americans seemed more than happy to give up their freedoms and privacy in order to fight terrorism. And didn't most of the politicians that enacted the Patriot Act get re-elected? Bush certainly did. I often get the impression that most people think surveillance is ok because "they have nothing to hide" (they don't seem to think further than that).
Has there been any opinion polls on mass surveillance? Anybody got links?
“Consensus on this issue is bipartisan,” said Strimple.
“There’s real concern about what the government’s accessing about your personal life.”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/18/us-voters-bro...
What I think you mean, in a modern context, is "Our right to privacy needs to the straw man for a number of groups whose continued income and existence is directly tied to a certain point of view. They need to be large enough and wealthy enough to lobby this point of view on my behalf using tools such as PACs, PR releases to news media, and polls designed to prove the issue can be leveraged for the purpose of electing a candidate."
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/18/us-voters-bro...
And in reality, increasing the very real possibility of a police-state at unprecedented levels.
> “Before we allow them to spread that information further in the government, we need to have a serious conversation about how to protect Americans’ information,” said Alexander Abdo, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.
And as a non-American, this kind of things makes me want to scream. Why aren't we talking about human rights instead of just Americans' rights. It sounds like something out of "Animal Farm", i.e. everyone is equal in principle but Americans are "more equal" than the others.
It is a crime what the NSA is doing. Against Americans, the world and the first principles of governance (i.e. classical liberalism).
If Jefferson's notion of an Empire of Library was alive and vibrant today, the target would not be Canada but the United States government.
Jefferson on defending the concept of popular sovereignty etc all over the world-
"...we should then have only to include the North [Canada] in our confederacy...and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government." - Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809
"where this progress will stop no-one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth" - Jefferson to William Ludlow, 6 September 1824
A significant minority are extremely nationalistic in a terrifying, we-can-do-no-wrong manner.
The NSA or analogue in the late 1700s in the time of the Founding Fathers would probably lead to a revolution. The NSA of today is common news and no one cares that someone is always listening, not might be but is (it's being recorded somewhere), to everything they type or do and might share that with people who are literally out to get you if it's convenient to do so.
Ultimately this is to create a further atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and paranoia about anything you might do or say that could come back to haunt you later... to protect the government's fear, anxiety, and paranoia that the citizens are always doing something wrong and need to be found out.
Nefarious plans are always being hatched that can be prevented if the right agency just knew what everyone was doing at all times. And the specter of the panopticon keeps everyone from even contemplating doing anything wrong.
And maybe they are not wrong. But I hate living in a paranoid world like that, which can make people mentally ill if they think about it too much. The scene from the Simpson where Bart is on Focusyn comes to mind.
The intent of the 4th amendment was to guarantee privacy in our personal lives. This protection has obviously been eroded as the the information of our lives has become digitally interconnected.
I think the real question is what do we do from here?
The same technology that binds us together could be used to create a true democratic system. It's time for us to evolve past the American democratic process, which was designed to protect against the "tyranny of the majority."
To some of the Founders and some of the people, slavery was a big "problem" from the start. And some of the language of the Constitution was, no doubt, aspirational. Don't assume it was written for the reality of the day.
Looking back, as a history buff, I think the problem is that each generation felt that it was a special snowflake, so the rules didn't apply to them.
Early on we had terrible travesties -- the Alien and Sedition Act, for instance. But people came to their senses and it was repealed.
Over time, however, as each generation thought it was facing something nobody could have planned for, the boundaries got pushed.
Fast-forward 240 years, and what you have is the natural result of systemic drift. With each travesty and reversal, maybe you lose 1% over a decade. Add that up over 24 decades and its amazing anything is left at all.
Technically, both the Supreme court and the Senate are charged with preventing this from happening. But the Senate was gutted and turned into another House of Representatives when they went to direct elections, so the only thing those guys are good for now is pandering to the TV cameras. The courts tend to give wonderful speeches on liberty and such -- but usually end up keeping things much as they are. (They have nibbled a bit around the edges, but in general they've been more part of the problem than part of the solution. Part of the reason for this is the gradual and incremental nature of the drift.)
That's what's happened internally, with a huge set of checks and balances in place. Externally? It never had a chance.
There is a gradual drift over time; most complex systems accumulate errors, imbalances, and unexpected problems over time. However, there is another problem happening right now that I've only seen mentioned[1] by Dan Geer. He suggests that technology has changed the balance of powers:
The central dynamic internal to government is, and always
has been, that the only way for either the Executive or the Legislature
to control the many sub-units of government is by way of how much
money they can hand out.
...
Suppose, however, that surveillance becomes too cheap to meter,
that is to say too cheap to limit through budgetary processes. Does
that lessen the power of the Legislature more, or the power of the
Executive more? I think that ever-cheaper surveillance substantially
changes the balance of power in favor of the Executive and away
from the Legislature. While President Obama was referring to
something else when he said "I've Got A Pen And I've Got A Phone,"
he was speaking to exactly this idea -- things that need no
appropriations are outside the system of checks and balances.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI#t=625 http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt
As much as I like ranting about the security and surveillance state, the real problem with automation is that even if you somehow implement it perfectly according to our traditional values, it takes all the slack and human judgment out of the middle tiers of the system. You've got just one guy at the top at the steering wheel.
We're already in a situation where we're all guilty of felonies; it's simply a matter of whether the executive wants to go to the trouble of enforcing the law or not. Now imagine a scenario where the proof of our guilt was automatically generated. Where we're all observed, tried, found guilty -- all without any cost at all.
That makes the executive for all intents and purposes a modern day absolute ruler, a king. (I know it's popular to accuse the executive of being a king as part of political rhetoric, but I'm talking about real, objectively-measurable political power.)
When I look at the lack of any real third party challenge, the absence of real policy changes no matter who takes control, the regular, almost clockwork change of power at the executive level between parties, and the apathy both parties seem to feel when they lose big at the polls? This may already be reality. It's just the common man hasn't felt the stick yet.
ADD: You want a real nightmare scenario, imagine President Bozohead walking around with a set of VR googles hooked into a national surveillance system. He could walk up to anybody, point at them, and the system would review that person's previous decade's worth of records. Speeding tickets that were never given. Misstatements on tax forms. When they picked up that rock to take home on their trip to the Grand Canyon. The pond that formed in their backyard due to poor drainage. The time they fudged the truth about whether or not they were camping to that park ranger -- remember, lying to a federal employee is a felony.
He could just point at the guy, think the right thought, and the appropriate subpoenas and summonses would be electronically generated, and auto-signed by a judicial official. Or perhaps it's all administrative. Hell, they can always pick you up for 24 hours just on good measure -- the automated system can figure out everything you've done while you're cooling your heels. With ten years of detailed records, the government can create trouble for you faster than any team of lawyers could hope to defend.
Add in a little civil asset forfeiture if you want to complete the picture. Do you really need that house?
This puts the president, and his agents, completely outside the law. The only thing preventing abuse in such a scenario is public opinion and the personality of the guy in office. And there are lots of ways to deal with public opinion.
Scary stuff.
ADD2: Might be a good time for some science fiction writer to re-do Kafka's The Trial, this time with the crime hidden by computational complexity. (We could tell you, but there's actually 4,749 charges, 117 of which your AI thinks we could get lifted....)
There was one notable exception, though, that is the French during the Revolution. I'm now reading an excellent book by Mona Ozouf (it's in French: http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Quarto/De-Revolu..., the author is a notable historian of the French Revolution and its aftermath in the "long" 19th century: the 3rd Republic) where in one of the essays she says that one of the defining aspects of the French nation and its people was the fact that the people who made the Revolution actually believed in the universality of their beliefs, hence the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen" of 1793 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...), which was supposed to be universal and apply to all humans.
For some time the French did actually believe that they were superior to other nations because of their universalist approach in bettering the human condition. It all went downhill from there, obviously, as time marched on.
Is the Drug Enforcement Agency one of them?
Nobody actually thinks the US government will suddenly implement martial law, extrajudicial detention, or unsanctioned executions. Nobody actually thinks the US is on the verge of collapsing into totalitarianism. So why would anyone actually care about the privacy debate?
The privacy debate promulgates fear of government overreach, and as a result tends to attract isolated clusters of libertarian idealogues rather than a grassroots distribution of everyday citizens.
To achieve mainstream viability, the privacy debate needs to shift direction to focus on more realistic risks of constant monitoring of metadata on the habits of citizens.
Do you know who's far more interested in your metadata than the government?: Private organizations that derive profit from actuarial models where you are a datapoint and a confidence interval. Who's going to have a better actuarial model: a century-old health insurance company that has access to your most basic metadata, or a modern insurance company with access to realtime intelligence on your consumption and fitness habits?
Insurance companies stand to benefit the most from collecting metadata paired with unique identifiers. The more accurate models an insurance company can develop, the more profit it can make as it hedges against its risk with greater certainty.
Of course, this isn't necessarily bad for the consumer. Imagine a healthy 22 year old who wears a Fitbit, connects with his college educated social network on Facebook, and pays only with Google wallet. As a 22 year old, he should be in one of the lowest risk categories for health insurance. But the health insurance company, without access to metadata, does not know for sure how healthy his habits are. But if he's healthy anyway, why shouldn't he opt into sharing his metadata with the insurance company? If he needs to surrender a little privacy to prove he's a healthy 22 year old, but he saves 15% on his insurance because of it, isn't that a worthwhile tradeoff?
Recent attempts at insurance startups are already doing this. In NYC for example, Oscar discounts your health insurance if you share your fitness tracker data with them. Who wouldn't take that deal?
But if you opt in once, what happens as you age? Will your insurance company increase your rates if you refuse to continue sharing metadata? Will such refusal, a desire to hide metadata previously shared freely, act as evidence in itself of poor health?
There are many questions to be asked and answered around the privacy debate, including what exactly is the privacy debate? What is its cause? What will get people to rally behind that cause?
Clearly, it's not fear of the government. So maybe it's time to try inducing fear of higher bills.
The problem with this approach is people honestly (but mistakenly) think that even these things only happen to "other people."
The US government already does these things. It has even done some of those things to US citizens, although obviously the vast majority of the people extrajudicially executed or detained are foreigners.
In terms of public opinion you are probably right though. You aren't going to change the opinion of American voters by talking about how foreign children get executed by the US government based on dragnet surveillance.
Why are we analyzing this? Why aren't we telling our representatives that this is wrong & it must stop?
peace
What this says to me is that people at his level in the CIA and NSA, etc at the time and probably still are trading classified information to friendly governments and large corporate clients. What the CIA didn't expect was that Ames was so utterly stupid as to be selling information to the Soviets instead of say the French Government, or the someone at a hedge fund, or a VP of sales at Boeing.
I helped Demand Progress build a website to promote a fix, the Email Privacy Act. The act actually has 310 cosponsors, which is more than any other bill in the House! The website goes into greater detail: https://savethefourth.net/
We have to choose our battles, and I think this is a good one. By the way, please feel free to send a PR / issue on GitHub: https://github.com/demand-progress/ecpa-www
Nobody is worried about this. We think that companies have the right to keep dossiers on people, as long as they make a scout's promise that it's only for advertising. And selling to each other. But don't give data to the government, that would be unethical.