State sanctioned secrecy: NSA's criminality shield
thehill.com
thehill.com
The NSA Act protects those working on the shadow from every being held accountable for potentially illegal acts, therefore the whole nation is slowly losing its freedom.
IIRC, Scalia once said that he would ditch the fruit of the poison tree doctrine to return to old Common Law tort remedies. At Common Law the remedy for an illegal search was typically a claim of trespass, for which the remedy was often a token sum, such as $1, imposed on the officer, not much of an incentive to abstain from illegal searches, but right in line with the effective economic losses of property trespass or invasion of your digital privacy.
So when people talk about "accountability" in the realm of privacy law they seem to be referring to something beyond simple compensation for immediate harms; they seem to want to impose some sort of penalty. But what kind of penalty is appropriate to impose on some government bureaucrat just "doing his job"; and when entire departments of bureaucrats might need to be penalized en masse? Maybe we should penalize the supervisors, but at some point those supervisors are political appointees doing the bidding of elected politicians, who are supposed to be accountable through elections.
We already have doctrines like fruit of the poison tree that are crafted to disincentive illegal government prosecutions. An illegitimate guilty verdict is at least a quantifiable loss of liberty. But if there are no economic damages, no reputational damages, no illegitimate prosecutions, nor similar quantifiable consequences, I'm not sure exactly what we should be doing except electing into office politicians who will ensure our existing laws are honestly applied, and who will rid the statute books of unnecessary exceptions to the letter of the law.
Presumably there was some sort of punishment for ordinary citizens trespassing, and it was much higher than one dollar. So this seems more like a common law way of formalizing state corruption rather than an actual equitable outcome.
Damages aren't limited to purely financial. That's a modern myth to disempower individuals in favor of commercial entities. Take for example, insurance compensation where if you simply pay a company to make something right, they'll come up with copious line items to justify customary costs. But if you DIY to have control over the end result, you'll end up getting screwed with your time being considered "free" rather than compensated at your hourly rate.
Loss of privacy is itself a damage, in the same way loss of limb is with no commensurate loss in earnings. You have a good point that someone who willingly hands over their information to Surveillance Valley has much less of a claim of harm. But surely if I take costly steps to preserve my privacy (eg spending several hours to setup a microg phone), then those steps demonstrate that privacy has value to me. That's to say nothing of the long tail of damages from surveillance databases being leaked to the wider public, or resulting in wrongful arrest or prosecution (both also not generally compensated these days, or per common law).
To me, accountability should look like criminal sanctions for government employees. Just as it's illegal for me to steal from a store, it's illegal for the government to violate my rights - the two should be similarly criminalized. There's leeway for actions carried out with a good faith belief of legality, but that defense vanishes the moment they form conspiracies to insulate themselves with secrecy rather than remaining open and directly accountable to the People.
Not really, tort law is very old, and the idea of "actual damages" is pretty well formed. "Reputational damages" exists in libel.
Privacy in English and Scottish common law is .. developing. e.g. https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/common-law-right-... / https://www.supremecourt.uk/docs/speech_100825.pdf (the huge transformative effect of the human rights act, which does explicitly contain a right to privacy)
Being surveilled is uncomfortable but making a formal legal argument against it in the US context is tricky. The US does too much social change through court decisions, anyway; this would be far better as an explicitly political argument.
Well, here we have the argument of the 'little man'.
If I am wahern, the answer to your question is: probably not much.
If I am Elon Musk, the answer may surprise you. The damages from retaliation by members of the elite NSA club, and their military-industrial cronies, could be HUGE.
Are we willing to live in that sort of society?
This is not a good basis of support for State Secrecy - which has, incidentally, ALWAYS been a corrupting influence in every single society which makes it a keystone policy of conduct.
Secrets are corruption. States, which do not exist unless they are continually perpetuated as open truths, become utterly corrupt the moment they start keeping secrets - while becoming resolute and strong when secrecy is dissuaded.
>qualified immunity and similar doctrines
If what you are doing requires qualified immunity or similar, it is a reactive, failing doctrine, not a productive one. The problem is obviously further upstream, perhaps in the cause for secrecy in the first place.
NSA need to keep secrets, why? Fix that why.
Public money, public code. We need to generate more Commons (like Free Open Source Software). Stop using government funds to give to private corporations for black-box solutions.
- A security worker being told to throw someone of color out of the store because management thinks "those people" cause problems.
- A mob enforcer breaking someone's kneecap because they didn't pay their "bill".
Somewhat on end of extreme, but... if your job has you doing things that are wrong, then you are doing wrong. The fact that someone else said to do it, or said that it's ok, doesn't make it ok.
The entire organization needs to go. The article written by an intelligence agency insider just wants to try and ensure only foreign rights are violated, but that should not be acceptable either.
> it will trample on the freedom of US citizens too.
Abolish the (secret) police.
Explicitly authorising law enforcement and spy agencies to break the law, and limiting redress against them. It appears to be their response to various ongoing accusations of illegality, such as the "Soldier F" case from 1972 that (incredibly) is still unresolved.
That's effectively ending the rule of law in the United Kingdom. There's not even any pretense anymore.
It's interesting but - given recent events - not surprising, that the country which invented the term "rule of law" would now turn their back on it.
At the end of the war in the late 90s the Blair government issued effectively blanket pardons for a lot of crime from both sides.
It also now appears to have been a major collection node, codenamed WAXTITAN, for the NSA's BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program.
They had been accused back as far as 2013 by a former sysadmin for hosting CSA, and as recently as last year the OAG in New Mexico repeatedly asked them to do something about the content [1].
This data center provider was recently outted as part of the #BlueLeaks breach, because all 78 DHS Fusion Center sites were hosted there.
Several engineers in Austin, Texas, including myself, have been interviewed by the FBI. It is clear it was not a covert entrapment program or anything like that.
This all brings us to the question of, if the NSA can work with groups and on servers distributing enormous amounts of videos of child sex, they really can do anything they want can't they?
What's that?
I'm a little lost. Could you spell it out for someone who has no familiarity with any of these operations? (I.e., What exactly was the NSA doing, and what was its relationship to Data Foundry?)
Being familiar with the original #BlueLeaks story is also helpful to understand [2].
[1] - https://cryptome.org/2020/09/dhs-fusion-center.htm
[2] - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/06/blueleaks-exposes-files-...
I must have misunderstood something. I'm not a fan of the NSA but that sounds ridiculous. Even if it were true (which is likely) it has nothing to do with them
There’s CP on usenet? shocking
> It also now appears to have been a major collection node, codenamed WAXTITAN, for the NSA's BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program
You have no idea if this is true, you’re just speculating based on the appearance of a single Data Foundry IP address in a leaked NSA slide which you don’t understand.
Some truths are timeless.
Isn't this the sort of thing that the GAO deals with directly? It appears to be a clear-cut case of fraud, so why isn't this being dealt with through the usual channels for that?
We need an independent prosecutor, cleared for access to secrets, and free to pursue indictments wherever the evidence leads.
If the law does not prescribe a penalty, that leaves the prosecutor and judge a free hand to determine one.
However I think insinuating a lack of oversight or ulterior political motives is wrong. A counter-investigation by Trump's DoJ found that the initial motives for the investigation were solid, but did note a number of errors made in the process. In fact, one FBI lawyer who lied during the investigation has been charged. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_Hurricane_(FBI_inves...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/18/politics/horowitz-hearing-rus...
Actually a lot has happened with this story since 2016, it looks like 34 different people and 3 companies were charged and either plead guilty or were convicted.
I am curious though, what is the news source that lead you to believe otherwise?
The reason why you don't know about any of this is because it doesn't get covered in left-wing media: https://web.ground.news/article/b9a0e58b-3c08-4623-9b93-4786.... At all.