Warrantless "emergency" surveillance by DOJ up 400% | Hacker News Reader

Warrantless "emergency" surveillance by DOJ up 400%

paranoia.dubfire.net

64 pointssorbus10 comments

As such, Congress currently has no idea how many warrantless requests are made to ISPs each year. How can it hope to make sane policy in this area, when it has no useful data?

The Intelligence select committee knows pretty well what's going on. That's why Mark Udall and Ron Wyden were screaming bloody murder last month before the patriot act extension vote [1]. Because they know, and it's bad.

It seems much of the uproar is about the business records portion and how it is being applied to broad requests to telcos for call detail records without suspicion of terrorism. Often that will be all of the target's call detail records, and then the call detail records of everyone he calls, and very possibly even the CDR's of everyone those people called. You don't have to make that many of those requests before you essentially have the entire country's phone records in one great big database.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/us/27patriot.html

... And the lords of the surveillance state said in unison, "Long live the emergency!"

Wow-- this is an increase from 17 in 2008 to 91 in 2009. I would have guessed that both were several orders of magnitude higher.

If you read the link, you'll see that it's a very narrow particular kind of search that is being reported upon, only a tiny subset of all the electronic searches done by law enforcement in the United States, and even in this narrow area, the reports are grossly wrong: when Verizon reports 300 requests were made just to Verizon in a particular year and the report shows less than 20, I'm willing to bet that Verizon's numbers are more accurate.

So frankly even in this very narrow category, the numbers ARE probably two orders of magnitude higher, and if we were were to look at all electronic searches in the USA, it would be several more orders of magnitude higher. (And then if we were to look at the "national security" semi-legal surveillance going on in the U.S., it would be another many orders of magnitude higher.)

This is the problem. The numbers aren't accurate!

You have no idea how many they're issueing, and they'll keep it that way.

Also a single request can contain information for multiple individuals. One request could represent data on 1000 people.

The entire process is fudged. There is no accountability.

Domestic wiretapping is being used on all America citizens 24/7.

The government has way over stepped it's bounds in response to the terrorist threat. I realized it first when I read a New Yorker article on the NSA[0].

In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

...

Even in an age in which computerized feats are commonplace, the N.S.A.’s capabilities are breathtaking. The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress. Three times the size of the C.I.A., and with a third of the U.S.’s entire intelligence budget, the N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices. The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...

when would they announce their co-location (and/or AWS cloud type) services? It can be a nice additional revenue stream (colo/cloud revenue is 5-10x electricity, ie. hundreds of millions per year in this case) that would ease US federal budget problems.

FTA:

  25,000: Number of requests reported by Verizon alone
  300: Number of those that were from federal agencies
  17: Number reported by federal agencies to federal watchdog

I knew it would be like that as soon as I read the headline. 400% increase in anything is very rare, unless the actual incidence is small.

Additionally, 400% is a pretty sensational(ist) number, and any time the headline sounds trumped-up, it usually is.

Here's the thing though - if people aren't going to revolt when the TSA literally gropes their genitals, there is little else they are going to protest, certainly not something far less tangible.

In fact, it's the opposite - we have common people who react by defending the TSA doing this to millions for the single idiot they might catch someday. Now it has spread to bus stations, trains and even roadblocks - and still, no-one protests.

So this will never be defeated, even if the headlines of every newspaper and news program tomorrow was "government saving every email that everyone has ever sent or received".

As long as they can go shopping at the mall or go fishing on the weekends, they have the illusion they are "free" and don't mind all the war and unreasonable intrusions into their privacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com