Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

And lets face it, the NSA claim - and win in court with this claim - that "collecting and storing" personal communications doesn't count as surveillance, until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions.

While a personal hard drive full of child porn is unlikely to be "innocently" explained away quite that easily, I wonder if owners of, say, usenet binary hosting newsservers ever need to claim that defence?

View on HN

Bogus defense IMHO. Acquiring the ability to query a database is enough to constitute surveillance. I wonder if my land lord could use the same logic to legally record me in the shower.

We have to understand that, much like it's a military's responsibility (and desire) to go to war, it is the goal of spy agencies to gather all the intelligence it possible can. In both cases it is up to law making bodies comprised of "the people" to check these agencies' ambitions.

I completely agree with you. It baffles me that anybody can stand up in front of their peers and claim "bulk collection" doesn't violate your privacy until/unless some human ever reads the data you've collected, and it's beyond parody that a judge in a court agreed with this example of mental gymnastics...

>until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions.

Didn't it go further than this? Just searching the data for some signal wasn't a "search" because a machine did it, it was only a "search" if you were a match and if you were a match then they had "probable cause" for the search.

Not entirely sure how accurate that is but FWIW it seemed like that was the accepted reading of the twisted reasoning on HN back when that came out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com