NSA deleted surveillance data it pledged to preserve | Hacker News Reader

NSA deleted surveillance data it pledged to preserve

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278 pointstony10178 comments

Would anybody else vote on this one issue? Any candidate who said flat out "your government is spying on you through giant corporations and they're all lying about it, and I'm going to Washington to put a stop to it" would have my vote.

It's not his only issue, but Ron Wyden (D-OR) is pretty reliably one of the "good guys" on surveillance.

Ron Wyden, Al Franken, and Rand Paul are the only consistently good guys on this, imho. I believe Wyden and Paul have worked across the aisle many times. Paul was set to filibuster the PATRIOT act extension until both dems and republicans banded together to vote to block the filibuster, limiting discussion to 30 hours.

Don't forget Amash

It's coming. not in the 2018 elections, but the 2020 democrat party will be forced from below and unpredictable other sides to be far more leftist and treat privacy as a crucial issue

Both left and right dug the US - and your allies like Australia, where I live - deeper into this hole. It is a bipartisan problem.

Nope. Both parties are unified on this issue.

"We Must Fight Even Harder Against Trump's Authoritarian Impulses Now That We've Voted To Enable Them" is another true to life, accurate Onion article. Obama administration certainly made no effort to correct any of the Bush DoJ authorized spying programs, until Wired and then Snowden forced some kind of response, resulting in FISA. Which seems to be a star court that refuses to answer any questions from congress or deny any request. https://politics.theonion.com/pelosi-we-must-fight-even-hard...

It's a shit show everywhere. Very very few congress-people seem to have any backbone what-so-ever. Ron Wyden of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is one of the only people that seems to even try to ask questions, and he is shut down and denied by the military at every turn. https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/dont-pass-surv...

  Which seems to be a star court

Did you mean a "star chamber" court?

I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that FISA has been around for 20 years or more. Wiki says it was established 1978 as part of an act passed that same year.

The FISA Act was an attempt to reign in domestic spying. It didn’t create it.

No they are not unified. Going by the congressional vote about 25% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats voted against the spying. If this issue is important to you you're generally better off voting Democrat unless you have a Ron Paul type of Republican.

>"Going by the congressional vote about 25% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats voted against the spying"

What were the percentages when there was a democratic party president?

That doesn't say much, probably less of an issue to be seen as "soft on terror" these days than supporting anything the president even offhandedly says he might be in favor of.

Personally, I find it more likely that the NSA or another organization ends up leaking some sort of damning info about Trump. This would give them a huge opinion boost, and the Democrats would end up owing the organization for their victory. We're already seeing this, the Democrats seem to love Comey despite his role in mass surveillance.

Why "despite"? Mass surveillance is a legacy of both the Democrats and the Republicans.

> huge opinion boost

You think people would warm to the NSA if only they demonstrated an inability to keep secret the findings of their domestic spying, and revealed they'd been spying on the president?

You don't think that would make them look like they were illegally meddling in partisan politics?

This doesn't seem too unlikely to me. Fighting Trump has become something that seems to override concerns about democracy or any other principle for a wide swathe of people. Supporting intelligence agency meddling in partisan politics is one of the milder, more widely normalised and expected parts of being anti-Trump today; the more extreme fringe views involve support for tactics like a literal military coup.

>You think people would warm to the NSA if only they demonstrated an inability to keep secret the findings of their domestic spying, and revealed they'd been spying on the president?

They may not need to make it domestic or seem like they were spying on the president, finding some sort of scandal involving a different nation doesn't seem that hard. Or they could use some intercepted knowledge from a foreign spy agency.

As a whole though, I suspect they'd see an opinion boost even if it came from domestic surveillance. The hatred of Trump is ridiculous, Democrats have even praised Bush following his attacks on Trump. Plus, Mark Felt did basically did this and just got had a movie made about him.

The dems getting their shit together has been "just around the corner" for decades.

At some point you've gotta admit they're just scrambling to be slightly less detestable than the GOP, to just enough voters to win elections.

> At some point you've gotta admit they're just scrambling to be slightly less detestable than the GOP, to just enough voters to win elections.

absolutely. i'm arguing that that has finally (obviously) become untenable, the shift left will be bolstered by the vivid, insurmountable gulf in inequality

Why would someone who says that lie have your vote? Unless you're under investigation or living somewhere like Iraq, the government is not spying on you through giant corporations, as both the law and Snowden's leaks show.

Through a sufficiently creative definition of spying, nobody has been spied on in human history. Otherwise, we're forced to contend with the fact that we are being caught in the same dragnets that were advertised to catch the next Osama. (Not advertised to us, of course - we had no serious chance to vote on it.)

Which dragnets? Be specific. The phone metadata dragnet doesn't exist anymore, and the way it was used according to Snowden's documents when it did exist could hardly be called spying on OP.

Here's a detailed writeup. It had been claimed that the phone tracking was reduced, the rest clearly remains:

https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-su...

I understand that some disagree with the other (and past) positions of the ACLU and may be disinclined to trust its website. Fortunately this issue isn't a particularly party-based one. Here's another good source, although it also says a lot about the history of the leaks:

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

If there is any accurate secondary source that is clearly conservative, It'd be welcome for me to see it in a reply. There's no particular reason why we'd have to porkbarel this issue - presumably there would be no party affinity at all.

Edit: I know that there is lots of text behind those links, but the issue is an expansive one. I sincerely invite you to read them!

> If there is any accurate secondary source that is clearly conservative, It'd be welcome for me to see it in a reply.

You can find a lot of this in the things Julian Sanchez has written for Cato.

It makes sense to collect everything possible, then discard what you don't need later, because when conducting an investigation you don't know in advance which data are of interest.

If your communications are intercepted, stored, but then never looked at, and eventually deleted - this is functionally equivalent to having never been collected at all.

We have already had proofs of the LEAs inability to keep TS information safe, expect a worse level of protection for routinely intercepted phone calls, emails, ...

It's very very difficult (some people say impossible) to assure 100 percent that people's data have been safely stored and transmitted for their whole retention lifetime.

That's an argument for ensuring that such data is properly secured, not an argument against collecting it in the first place.

If you ask me, keep one or the other. The inability to maintain the operational reliability of a datastore (including backups), does not inspire confidence.

Assuming this is an incident and not a coverup.

There's one big difference: if your data was never collected, then a breach (internal or external) doesn't endanger it. If it was "collected but never looked at," then it's subject to the integral of every mistake, malicious action or rule change from now until they loose it. One of the major things that Snowden revealed was that random nobodies had huge access to sigint material.

It's the responsibility of the communicating parties to protect themselves against interception if they consider this to be an unacceptable risk. Using end to end encryption for message content secrecy, and obfuscating message routes using e.g. Tor to help mask source and destination pairs.

The US government can break TOR and pretty much everything else when they really want. That’s no protection.

Do you have any evidence of this?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/judge-confirms-w...

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/06/25/can-you-trust-to...

https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/3/5868159/new-report-says-th...

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/0...

If such a person had the credentials to back up their sincerity, then yes. A Chelsea Manning type who has suffered for their beliefs or otherwise demonstrated stalwart commitment to dismantling the security state would get my vote and money. A career politician riding whatever Zeitgeist there may be as a lesser evil would not. Surveillance and securitization may not be a big issue to many people, but it is a very big issue to some of us. At the very least, those representatives who continue to vote for the powers of these agencies (like in this previous 702 spying bill) will never see a primary or general election vote from me or my peers (who I can vouch for) regardless of how much "less worse" you are. I won't hold out hope that this is a popular issue but I would love to see someone take a stand.

Chelsea Manning is actually running for Senate, if you'd like to put your money where your mouth is: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/01/13/chelsea-manning-f...

You do realize this is exactly what made Trump president right? Shout one thing the public wants, shout it hard and repeatedly to mask your incompetence in all the other things that are important to have a prospering nation.

The public will vote for one thing in plain sight and complain about their own choice the day after because all the other things in their life suddenly take a bad spin.

TL;DR; do not vote blindly on a single action point. Do not bewilder others to do so. Instead vote for the complete package and learn others to do so as well.

I've read a lot of criticism of Trump, but that he was a single-issue candidate is a new one. If anything, he was accused of saying everything and its opposite. What was that "one thing" you're saying he shouted?

He wasn't a single-issue candidate. He picked a bunch of issues that mattered to single-issue voters. The presentation is different, the overall effect is the same.

True. Though I would argue immigration was his spearhead, especially with his lack of political correctness on the matter. Banning various trade agreements to further arouse his voters was important but the repeated message on immigration probably dominated his position.

Disclaimer: seen from a foreign standpoint. This is what reached us oversees. For every other article on non-immigration there were 10 on his immigration rants.

Wouldn't it be nice if political canidates were contractually obliged to fulfil what they said they would do?

I think this would backfire. If two large enough groups of legislators both said they would go to Washington and do opposing and mutually exclusive things it would create a deadlock where neither group has the ability to compromise.

Plus it would remove any capability to change stances as new information comes to light.

That's a good point but.. it sucks that politicians can promise 1 thing and do another once elected :)

So in litigation, when one side destroys evidence, you can ask the court to draw an adverse inference about what the evidence would have contained. That seems like it would be appropriate here.

It certainly would, though I think in this case the evidence was destroyed to protect officials from going to prison over surveillance excesses.

Would that work in one those "secret courts" like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

These seem to be kind of outside of the regular legal system.

NSA "oversight" is a complete joke, especially with Senate Intelligence Committee members like Feinstein cheerleading for more surveillance.

How is anyone ever going to rein in on NSA or find out what they're really up to if they come up with excuses like this one and then they're just let off the hook?

Stuff like this is also why I can't take seriously any pro-surveillance argument, because clearly the NSA is very non-serious about it, too.

Direct violation of a court order, and yet another piece of evidence that our police-state overseers are above the law.

The lawmakers are by definition "above the law" since they can retroactively make their actions legal.

Wow, this is probably true yet people are down voting--just look at the retroactive immunity for the telecomms providing data feeds to the government as an example.

The NSA is part of the executive branch. They don‘t make any laws.

If they can't comply with this direct court order how are they going to ensure compliance with the Constitution? The mass surveillance program is too expansive to be responsibly controlled and should be shut down.

Hahaha, the NSA deleted data, of course.

We don't collect that data about Americans.

is_deleted=false

Yes, it was deleted. We can't give it to you.

is_deleted=true

Even if it was actually deleted, it's still in the backups somewhere. Even if it's not in the backups, the NSA SSD firmware copied it off to unused hidden blocks. Even if it didn't, the NSA has tools to recover data, even after multiple passes of file wiping.

Nobody ever deletes data anymore. They didn't physically destroy all devices with a copy? They still have it.

How nice! Usually their malfeasance goes the other way round.

What a surprise.

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