NSA's Warrantless Wiretaps (2012)
nerdylorrin.net
nerdylorrin.net
If you are surveilling a foreign adversary's submarine cable, OK, you need to actually tap-in to a fiber cable. But for a fraction of the price of one sigint satellite, you could provision "twin" NICs and build/buy backhaul from every backbone node in the US.
They probably do both... beam spliters are nice, for when you don't even want the telco to know.
They are way past bothering to hide what they do. Decades ago they were happy to march right into a telco's headquarters and take over parts of their facility for their own use and then set up splitters.
This is exactly what the USS Jimmy Carter does.
And supposedly it was namesaked to spite carter as he was against spying, but the sub was built to splice and tap sea fiber.
Recall all the lines going down off Libya, Egypt and the like, and there was a brief controversy as the US was being accused of splicing into those lines....
I cant find the article I was thinking of, as apparently these cable cuts are more frequent than I knew...
He considered his time as a nuclear submarine officer so formative that a question to him from the Admiral in charge of Naval Reactors, Hyman Rickover, formed the title of his book "Why Not the Best?" [1]
President Carter was well-aware that the submarine was named after him and why, and stated himself how proud he was to have a submarine named after him. [2] Not just a submarine either; the Seawolf class is still among the most capable ever built by the U.S., and the Jimmy Carter (with her "special projects" upgrades) is the most capable of the entire class.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-not-best-Jimmy-Carter/dp/08054558... [2] https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/04/27/carter.sub/
For anyone curious the blanket term is “port mirroring”. These days there’s little to no distinction between “switch” and “router” ports at this level so the term applies regardless.
It's dumb, it's gross, but sadly it has been normalized -- if the Snowden leaks couldn't get the ball moving to rein them in, what can?
Like Cypher in The Matrix, who wanted his machine masters to reinsert him as a celebrity after his betrayal, Snowden's Russian masters made him into a celebrity after his betrayal.
However, every impression I have of Snowden is that he is patriotic to the USA, and that the sole reason he is in Russia now is genuinely because of the pressure that the government of USA put on every other government to turn him over.
Can be both. NSA contractor sees unethical secret programs, gets disillusioned and considers disclosing them, Russian SVR somehow picks that up and encourages him to do it, maybe promises him support, money, or refuge if he does. Everybody wins, except the US.
https://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-the-justice-system/edw...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/edward-snowden-interview_n_54...
https://www.salon.com/2013/06/23/u_s_revokes_snowdens_passpo...
That's it. End of story. I remember reports that his likely ultimate destination was Venezuela or Guatemala, but these are distant, fuzzy memories, so they may not be correct.
Folks have made a _ton_ of hay out of the fact that Snowden ended up in Russia... but the truth of the matter is that he's there because the State Department stranded him there.
(Only thing there that fits is the recent demonstration of the Russian government acting like half-arsed movie plots are a good idea in real life).
A lot of papers suggested that the war incompetence was because Putin asked for support for his invasion, and the services knew their job was to get him that irrespective of reality. If there was any operation to take advantage of Snowden, it probably wasn't under such pressure, and I imagine the Russian services have some competent people that could pull it off.
* The US State Department revokes Snowden's passport while he is in one or in transit between two foreign countries.
* If the passport is revoked while he is on the ground, Snowden is prevented from exiting the country, and is deported back to the US because the local government refuses to grant him a visa or grant him asylum.
* If the passport is revoked while he is in transit, Snowden is denied entry to his destination and denied transit back to his origin due to the revocation, his destination refuses to grant him asylum, and he is deported back to the US.
This would give them a perpetual character assassination tool, nearly free of charge.
This scenario is more complicated than the "bad timing" one, but it's no more complicated than yours.
You're right, it cuts both ways.
To go back to ben_w's comment though, I don't think we can make any conclusions about what Snowden is or who he's loyal to; he could be a a patriotic American, a Russian agent, just a guy who wanted to disclose unethical government behavior, or a mix of these things. All seem equally plausible to me, since I don't have insider info.
But that's not what he wanted, and that's why he's in Russia, and why he was at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong for multiple days before he finally departed on a plane to Moscow [1]. He's a defector, so he's currently exactly where he wanted to be when he left.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/report-snowden-stayed-a...
Likely nothing.
We'll all likely be ruled by Rehoboam soon, if not already. Surveillance and manipulation of the masses has always been a presence in civilization. It's most effective when the masses don't know or care that it's happening.
So long as the watchers can keep the bread and circuses flowing, nothing will change.
(Of course, that does suggest we're merely an algorithmic breakthrough from something genuinely transformative).
We're basically living the 1984 surveillance nightmare (remember the monitoring devices that lived in everyone's homes that were watching them?). The only difference is we've actually been duped to pay for the devices that spy on us and install them willingly. But it's soOoO convenient to ask Alexa "what's the weather like outside" (because sticking your head out the fucking front door is just, ugh, such a nightmare) or to save you from the unbelievably arduous and thankless task of having to flip a light switch with your finger.
Definitely worth it.
If one of our primary objectives as a liberal, democratic society is to avoid that kind of oppressive totalitarianism (as would be expected of a liberal democracy), then we have a duty to seek and employ the most effective strategy possible in avoiding that outcome.
Two things are required for the type of totalitarian surveillance described in 1984: the technological means and the will of the state to demand such evil acts be committed.
I'd argue that the best strategy to prevent an outcome that requires both means and will is to target the means. If the means exist, the state lacks only the will to utilize those means for evil ends (putting people in Room 101).
If the state lacks the means, then even once the will to do evil does inevitably come along, the state will be rightfully shackled and lack the requisite tools to enforce such tyranny.
The CIA runs a global network of unaccountable torture prisons.
They once grounded (over Austria) and swatted the plane of a head of state flying from Moscow to Bolivia because they thought Snowden might be on it.
They don't use the power very often, but it is there when they want to, at any time.
Again, if the position is that the whole prosecution is unjust, a mockery of the First Amendment, chilling to journalism and free speech, then fine. But saying the US is responsible for the delay in putting him on trial is strange to me.
Start a political party that has enough success to threaten the status quo. Be Assange. Be Snowden. Talk is cheap.
Things happened. Encryption went mainstream, particularly in tech. Some minor but meaningful limits on dragnet surveillance were passed.
Privacy has a problem of political nihilism. I worked on initiatives years ago. Simply getting people to show up to town halls led to endless bullshit about how America is hopelessly corrupt and why should they bother with a meaningless measure. Then the guys pushing a chicken farming bill show up and they all have flags and some are in costumes and they offer to petition and join the phone banks in her next campaign should she back the bill… Is there any reason for an elected to entertain the former?
To our credit, we elected a man who promised to end spying on American citizens, but he ended up going back on is word and making it worse and no other presidential candidate since has spoken out against the NSA like he did.
Everything is encrypted now, even recipe sites.
For a chat program, the first question of even laypeople is whether it's encrypted or not.
I'd say some things did change.
But yeah, would be better to change the laws.
I’ve seen cases thrown out for less
Because of attitudes like this. Political nihilism never won any battles.
I had no idea my attitude could magically make party elites care about this basic constitutional right! Thanks so so much for setting me straight.
> Political nihilism never won any battles.
Refusing to criticize politicians because they wear the tie color you like is the least effective thing you can possibly do.
I say it's nihilism to ignore this fact and vote these same people into office again and again.
It's also possible that once he got elected he was convinced that it was so worthwhile that it was worth violating his campaign promises, but what worries me most is the possibility that Obama honestly believed, and still believes, that it was a unacceptable violation of our constitutional rights and that he only had to be shown a sample of the data collected on him and his family to get him to fall in line and approve whatever the NSA wanted.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The NSA has so much data on us that they could blackmail anyone, and could likely plant incriminating data as well. That power exists for them to use at any time. If they're willing to use it in order to keep that power over anyone they see as an enemy then it's possible that no president or politician will ever be able to do anything to stop America's domestic spying program.
This doesn't really fit anything I understand about Obama or about the world. Much more likely is that upon taking the responsibility of president he learned a lot of new things and received a lot of new advice/opinions and changed his mind.
Thus, Colin Powell famously had no idea he was being played when he persuaded senators to vote for invading Iraq.
He used a couple of secret memos to expand the spying program without needing anything from anyone. https://www.propublica.org/article/new-snowden-documents-rev...
I don't know if that is true other than on paper.
These organizations consume the private details of the lives of every federal judge, every member of the legislature, every prosecutor, every staffer, and their entire families, all of their mistresses, drug dealers, fixers, and bag men.
I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president.
Worse than that, it gives them the ability to identify and eliminate threats to their power before they can even get to the point where they could build a viable campaign for the presidency!
That kind of power, along with access to information on any petty rival, or even just the nudes of the random but sexy person they met in passing the other day, is temptation enough to corrupt anyone. Even if we could assume it hasn't been abused to that extent so far (and we've already learned about many many abuses) there's nothing stopping it from happening in the future.
One my earliest concerns with the NSA collecting all of this data is that with the president at the top of the chain of command I expected every president would abuse this power for themselves. That Bush Jr would use it to target his personal enemies, that Obama would do the same, and I think it's safe to say that Trump wouldn't have been able to show restraint if he had any access to it, but we saw how Trump had to press people in foreign countries to dig up dirt on his enemies.
While I've seen some claims that Trump's access was more limited than it was for other presidents (due to his unstable behavior) I suspect no president has been given access to the massive amounts of data being collected and stored by the NSA, even though (officially) nothing could stop a sitting president from ordering it.
While it could just be true that no president has ever tried, it might also be true that in practice those presidents had less authority over the NSA than the NSA had over them and so the NSA could simply tell them "no".
Trump too made sure to enrich himself on campaign funds:
"On the day of his inauguration, Trump filed paperwork for his reelection, allowing himself to continue raising money from supporters while he served. As other people filled his campaign coffers, Trump sat back and watched, never donating to the reelection effort. Instead, he did the opposite, taking money out of his campaign by charging for things like rent, food, lodging and legal expenses. In doing so, the president managed to shift $2.7 million from his supporters to his businesses between his first day in office in 2017 and Election Day in 2020, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings." (https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2020/12/10/trump-m...)
They can also take money to offset the cost of the contract violation. "I'll give 40,000 in dark money to break the 24,000 contract you have that says you would make poisoning baby food illegal."
Somehow I doubt injecting more money into politics is going to be the solution to our problems.
The world should have taught you a thousand times over that politicians tell lies to get elected. If Obama was being honest, he would be the exception. Obama was a typical politician in a lot of ways. For example, he was bought and paid for by the RIAA and after he was elected he stacked the justice department with their lawyers and as a result his administration was extremely favorable to them. (see https://www.wired.com/2009/03/obama-sides-wit-2). That said, listening to him talk about ending domestic spying, I believed him.
It's worth mentioning that he also campaigned on promises of transparency and said that he supported whistleblowers, but he branded Snowden as a criminal and his ended up being the least transparent administration in history.
It's possible he was shown a lot of things that convinced him, but I can't think of anything that would justify the ongoing violation of our basic constitutional rights. He gave some lip service about improving transparency at the NSA but ultimately did nothing to increase accountability for the misuse of the data being collected. Misuse that we now know was commonplace (thanks to Snowden).
I'd like to think that if he did see some legitimate use that made him believe it was a necessary evil that he would have done something to minimize the number of people with access to that data, but instead he made it easier for that data to be abused and shared with other agencies. In the end Obama gave the NSA more power than they had when he entered office.
You could see he was "their man" because they somehow arranged to get him a Nobel Peace Prize for, apparently, nothing. Recall Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt got them too. (And Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. And Yasser Arafat.)
I have to admit that was weird, but I think a lot of people really thought Obama was going to turn things around for the nation and the rest of planet. Bush Jr. had a whole lot of people all across the globe very concerned about America. Some saw him as an idiot, and/or a literal war criminal, and he had pushed the US in some very dark directions. Suddenly America was doing some very very un-American™ things aggressively and right out in the open. Torture, preemptive war, voter suppression, direct interference with the media, the stripping away of civil liberties, increasingly oppressive/nationalistic rhetoric, he was basically the warm-up act to Trump's administration.
All the worry over the fast decline of America is why Obama's hope/change message went over so well. If Biden had been almost anyone else he probably would have been given awards one for saving the world from more Trump, but I don't think anyone had high expectations for Biden whereas the world was basically begging Obama to bring integrity and stability back to the US.
So, no, the fix was definitely in. "I'll be your President, but I expect a Nobel, and quick."
There are very few truly principled people in Government. By this, I mean people willing to make big changes to hew to some "objectively right" principle even if it raises perceived risk, or causes any sort of new economic harm to some group, regardless of how short-term any of these may be[^]. On the other hand, if there is ongoing harm to some group, that doesn't typically generate enough support for change until you hit some inflection point in the zeitgeist, like what led to the "justice reforms" passed in the last administration.
Big changes that cause any kind of harm or perceived harm to a group need overwhelming levels of support, especially in political circles, to overcome the media seeding and political grandstanding that exact an inevitable toll. Obama was a profound disappointment to anyone hoping for any kind of structural reforms out of him, but the fantasy-driven ferociousness of the political headwinds he faced in office shouldn't be ignored. He was damned if he did or didn't.
Imagine you're in Obama's shoes and some Serious Intel Community Leader swears in classified briefings that if you undo any of what they're currently doing, there's high risk of "the next 9/11". Do you make a principled stand about the sanctity of the 4th Amendment despite their near-assurances that "Americans will likely be harmed on your watch if you do"? Probably not, because in the moment, you feel the ends are so overwhelming they justify the means. In the current Republican-leaning political environment, you don't want to risk feeding the claims that "by weakening the Intelligence Community, Democrats undermined America's safety, as they always do!".
It's easy to talk about principles until you have to pay the costs of being true to them.
[^] If you counterargue this using radical Trump administration actions, most of them cannot be categorized as "principled" or without ultimately fatal-to-the-administration consequences.
Exactly the opposite happened. According to the documents Snowden leaked, Obama had already shut down email metadata collection, and after the Snowden leaks, Obama limited the phone metadata collection. There are no other NSA domestic spying programs that we know of.
according to the documents Snowden leaked: https://www.propublica.org/article/new-snowden-documents-rev...
see also: https://www.zdnet.com/article/days-before-trump-takes-office...
There's also a great timeline here:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/timeline-nsa-do...
After Obama got into office the NSA got retroactive immunity, a massive shiny new data center, and they started collecting data from Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon as well as collecting credit card transaction data.
Your second article is not about domestic surveillance at all but about foreign surveillance that isn't expanded but filtered by different agencies the same way that the NSA filtered it.
Your third article doesn't contain a single example of expanded domestic surveillance.
The fact remains that Obama completely shut down one of the two domestic surveillance programs that Snowden leaked (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-minin...) and limited the other (https://www.lawfareblog.com/nsa-ends-bulk-collection-telepho...).
"In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show...The effort is the latest known expansion of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program"
> Your second article is not about domestic surveillance at all
"the rule changes will make it easier for the government to spot and prevent potential terrorist attacks before they happen, at the expense of the privacy of millions of Americans, whose data may be collected in the surveillance dragnet...a total of 17 government agencies will have access to Americans' data without requiring a warrant"
Seems a whole lot like spying on Americans to me.
> Your third article doesn't contain a single example of expanded domestic surveillance
Except for the whole constant gathering of new types of data from an increasing (one could say "expanding") number of sources since Obama came into office...
For what it's worth while I haven't read every document that leaked I've read many of them. I've so read/seen several interviews and talks with Snowden, and even read his book. He seems pretty okay with what Greenwald came away with.
"The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments."
This is surveiling foreign governments' data in the US only when they are hacking Americans. It is a mighty stretch to call this domestic surveillance when the surveilled are very specifically foreign governments (foreign non-governmental hackers are not included).
> "a total of 17 government agencies will have access to Americans' data without requiring a warrant"
If you actually read the rest of the article, they are required to filter out data of Americans anywhere and data of anybody in the US without a warrant, just like the NSA is required to. There is no expansion of domestic surveillance. The only change is that these other agencies get direct access to the taps, but they are subject to the same laws as the NSA.
> Except for the whole constant gathering of new types of data from an increasing (one could say "expanding") number of sources since Obama came into office...
Every single one of those sources was only allowed to provide data on foreigners living outside the US. This is explicitly not domestic surveillance.
> I've so read/seen several interviews and talks with Snowden, and even read his book. He seems pretty okay with what Greenwald came away with.
Snowden very clearly didn't understand PRISM when he leaked it. According to Gellman, Snowden seemed most intent on exposing PRISM, asking Gellman for a guarantee that all the PRISM slides would be published within 72 hours, believing it to be a domestic surveillance program. It wasn't. A well-intentioned dummy can make rash decisions and end up becoming a Russian stooge. Snowden is the poster-child for the Be Cool, Stay In School program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3FC7qIAGZk&t=2m06s (coming from ex-CIA officer)
The NSA's warrantless wiretapping program is a blatant violation of our privacy rights. The program allows the NSA to collect the communications of Americans without a warrant, and without any suspicion of wrongdoing.
This program is a direct assault on our Fourth Amendment rights, and it must be stopped.
The NSA claims that the program is needed to fight terrorism, but there is no evidence that it has actually done so. In fact, the program has been repeatedly ruled to be illegal by federal courts.
It is time for Congress to step in and put an end to this program. We cannot allow the NSA to continue to violate our constitutional rights.
It's not. In fact, it's a fairly modern invention from the Nixon era created with the expressed purpose of rationalizing a socially conservative agenda.
All of this stuf is, essentially, completely made up. The fact that we have civil asset forfeiture (ie legalized theft) should tell you everything. It quite literally says "unreasonable search and seizures". How is this not a 4th Amendment violation?
I'll tell you how: the goal was to OK civil asset forfeiture so the meaning of words were contorted until a sufficient justification was found. There is no textual interpretation going on anywhere. None.
We see this with the legal justification for NSA warrantless wiretaps too. Metadata isn't a "search". Somehow the government can record who you spoke to, when and for how long but not the content and that's still not a "search" (in the 4th Amendment sense). Why? Because the whole thing is completely made up.
It's not less real or moderns than the "Living Constitution" Theory which dates to the progressive era and was first tested in a case that overturned the government's first attempt at an income tax.
Moreover a proper originalist interpretation of the wiretaps and indeed many technological searches is that they violate the 4th amendment as Scalia found in a GPS related case and Gorsuch dissented in several more recent cases. Scalia was kind of all over the map on police powers and Thomas just makes shit up so I think there's plenty of room to criticism them.
As long as we're willing to pretend the 2nd Amendment doesn't read exactly as it does, what hope do you think there is for the 4th?
The entire Bill of Rights is far more vague then people make it out to be. Hell, the Ninth Amendment is basically "people also have other unmentioned rights the government can't deny."
The outcome of the Nixon era was to rein in the NSA, not expand it more. Read about the Church Committee.
Moreover, the U.S. government has copied telegrams crossing the U.S.'s international borders for nearly as long as overseas telegraphy has been a thing. The NSA themselves are happy to mention that the first U.S. civilian cipher-cracking agency was setup in New York City for easy access to major telegraphy operations, see https://www.nsa.gov/History/Cryptologic-History/Historical-E...
> It quite literally says "unreasonable search and seizures". How is this not a 4th Amendment violation?
'Seizing' is a legal term, where your property is taken and held by the government, as with some of the various oligarchs' yachts seized in the wake of Russia's attack on Ukraine.
That's not to say that a wiretap would have been considered OK by the writers of the Constitution, I just don't think they thought of the possibility of intercepting communications without seizing them.
Even back then there would be a concept of public records about people (think of property deeds, court records, baptismal registries, and so on). Many of those records would have been accessible to the government as a matter of course (e.g. registries maintained by a local church). So there's precedent for 'metadata' about people to be open to government without a warrant (especially if they are open to members of the public anyways). And frankly it wouldn't be until 1967 that any substantive restriction was finally put on government use of electronic communications. It wasn't even illegal for individuals to conduct wiretaps on other individuals until 1934!
Doesn't that perfectly describe civil asset forfeiture? (What the parent was talking about when referring to "seizure", not the wiretap stuff in this case.)
> So there's precedent for 'metadata' about people to be open to government without a warrant (especially if they are open to members of the public anyways)
Phone/messaging records are not open to members of the public, though.
> * And frankly it wouldn't be until 1967 that any substantive restriction was finally put on government use of electronic communications.*
Is that even necessary, though? I mean, we don't need to have a law on the books that says the US President must be 35 years or older; that's in the Constitution. Just like "no unreasonable searches or seizures". Certainly law can help codify and clarify specifically what a search consists of. But I think it's pretty uncontroversial to argue that much of what the US government does vacuuming up electronic data should constitute a "search".