The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
wired.com
wired.com
A reminder that every abuse we hear of is one they failed at covering up. The most famous example of this is MKUltra, where everything we know about the program is from one document cache that survived the incinerator by being mislabeled.
In Greg Bear's novel "Queen of Angels", set in 2047, their solution to the conflicting needs of privacy and crime prevention was a separate organization called "Citizen Oversight". All the digital-trail data (cameras, financial records, etc) flowed into Citizen Oversight. If law enforcement wanted data, they had to ask for it and demonstrate need on a case-by-case basis. In that world it wasn't a perfect solution; if I recall rightly, part of the novel is driven by Citizen Oversight's swing from a too-loose era to a very stingy one. But I liked the idea of there being specific, named people responsible for protecting privacy.
As a True/False binary, sure, but the magnitude of the phenomenon is a function of the quality of the system. As flaws are realized, the system can be improved.
Consider how many known flaws there are in our various systems, and then observe (in an as unbiased as possible frame of mind as possible) how we (everyone (including us here on HN), but especially those with various forms of power) respond to realizations of these flaws: do we fix them, or do we engage in rhetoric, propaganda, post-hoc rationalization/justification, etc?
> I mean, judges are supposed to grant warrants for things already, yet we continually see stories of them just rubber stamping requests, or police lying to obtain them.
If this displeases us, shall we blame ourselves or Mother Nature? Or, not even think about it?
> I assume that system would suffer similar issues.
You may be right. Alternatively, you may not. There's only one way to (possibly) find out, but it is certainly not mandatory that we find such things out.....well, unless we desire certain outcomes, then it might be.
One man's "flaw" is another man's "tool". The people in power exploiting the flaw are unlikely to fix it.
Incorruptible systems aren't possible, but there's a wide library of patterns that make corruption easier and harder, and there are surely more to discover.
I'd almost think the better solution is to use mini-juries to evaluate warrants so the judges aren't just rubber stamping. At least then the judge has to explain the situation and points of law, and aren't the only one making the decision.
A Citizen. Rights and responsibilities, etc.
> Likewise, random selection may not yield a cohort with the correct capacity to properly administer the system.
Of course. That's the downside of random cohorts. But compared to the alternatives (that we actively gripe about), occasional lack of ability is the lesser of two evils.
This would also be lessened if there weren't a way to get out of it. Don't want to serve when your number is called? Feel free to be a citizen of another country.
Haha OK. Why not do that for police and judge positions too? Then you'd eliminate the need for this.
"That's the downside of random cohorts. But compared to the alternatives (that we actively gripe about), occasional lack of ability is the lesser of two evils."
That's one opinion.
"This would also be lessened if there weren't a way to get out of it."
In one way I agree. In practice I don't. Forced incompetence is generally going to lead to really poor outcomes. By theway, how are Putin's conscripts doing?
Because police and judge positions require specialized skill sets and training, and both have access to the force of government, which would seem to merit a higher minimum bar of professionalism.
Oversight's "feature" is that there are fewer negative consequences when it's inappropriately applied.
> By theway, how are Putin's conscripts doing?
You're arguing Putin's conscripts are an example of when a country's best and brightest aren't allowed to excuse themselves from random selection?
Typically this is a 'grand jury' in USA.
This is the very reason and design for the three branches of government and the origin of the term, "checks and balances."
The problem is, despite the Founding Fathers' near-fetishization of Montesquieu's work, and the fact that Checks and Balances are a genuinely good idea, the Founding Fathers weren't true to it. In a country of three branches (Legislative, Executive, Judiciary), it is absolutely paramount that the installment of each branch's authority is independent from the actions of another. Obviously, this didn't happen: Congress itself is THE delegate to assigning the President of the Executive - of whom decides his cabinet (which is also meant to be a Check and Balance to Congress), and Congress (and the President it chooses) not only votes on the Supreme Justices of the Judiciary - but Congress also has the power to ordain any court inferior to the Supreme Court.
This creates a system where Congress seats its utmost authorities intended to act as its checks and balances, and it doesn't work.
Subject to the certification only procedure outlined in the Constitution, as was recently vividly demonstrated. (Originally, under Article II, Section 1, Clause 3; since 1804, under the 12th Amendment)
There's a reason the states transmit their electors' votes to Congress, rather than meeting in DC.
Furthermore, current case law is that states have virtually unlimited rights, subject only to US constitutional protections, to run their elections as they see fit.
> and Congress (and the President it chooses) not only votes on the Supreme Justices of the Judiciary
As above, Congress does not choose the President. Ergo, the President nominating and Congress confirming a Supreme Court justice are two independent branches.
> but Congress also has the power to ordain any court inferior to the Supreme Court.
Which may then be overruled by the Supreme Court. All in all, a surprisingly flexible arrangement that maintains superiority of the explicitly authorized and described Supreme Court.
This stance is nonsense. Bush v Gore, Jackson v Adams, and Hayes v Tilden prove it wrong by vesting in Congress, through prior case law, the power to choose Presidential appointment and nullifying both individual state Electors AND collective certification (depending on which of the three you're pointing at).
Congress itself dictates who is President and Supreme Court Justices through a de-facto oligarchy. Further, the 17th amendment mandated a popular election for Senators in 1913, so to say that States run their elections as they see fit is - generous. Plus, need we mention the upcoming conflict of independent state legislature theory? We'll see how that cooks up.
Also, people make the mistake of believing that direct-democratic elections for members of Congress means that such a superior-leveraged branch of the government is still technically structured as a republic in political theory. This position is scrutinized when considering that the democratically-elected members of Congress conspire to derive additional power amongst each other by sitting the utmost authorities in the branches of government that are also intended to be chosen, by the people, as a check and balance to the very members of Congress they voted in. It's a very complex edifice, but it sure isn't what it's advertised as.
Yes, civilian oversight of police in many places is weak. But to me that's an argument for stronger oversight.
Your metaphor is begging the question, how do we get there from here? America has the institution of juries and grand juries, and in a very small number of police departments, long-term officials with regular contact with the department.
I suppose juries and grand juries are the path toward overpowered civilian roles rather than today’s meager civilian oversight boards.
Make public office publicly accountable.
Such indirection might make sense for data that must be collected anyway. But it should only be collected if necessary in the first place.
And that's randomly without jury strikes. There's a reason corporate and government interests have tried to keep more and more matters out of a jury trial -- the outcomes are unpredictable.
Which is exactly as it should be. If the people's will were predictable, democracy would be unnecessary.
And if a bad investigation is allowed, or a good investigation is stopped... that's a fair price to pay for, on the whole, having greater civil control.
It has not gone well. It turns out the voters can’t be bothered to learn about more than a few top line races. Anything under that is either straight party line or random.
whether they can find a needle in a lake sized haystack is another
"It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So."
-anonymous
That got a laugh
Yep, we are alone in this, and with all those horrible standards/software(open source or not)/hardware, don't bother that much, it is unreasonable anyway.
Imagine getting a notice from the NSA that your Wordpress was vulnerable and exposed customer data because your server devs suck.
Imagine an NSA that actually sent zero days to Apple instead of exploiting them.
BTW, this already exists in multiple countries, like Germany and now the UK [1/2]
[1] https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Unternehmen-und-Organisati...
[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/british-govt-...
Any government that currently exists maybe, but not necessarily any government that is possible.
The governmental forms we have now are ancient, designed in a period that pales in comparison to the complexity and power currently available to mankind.
The runtime we are in physically supports improvements, but it appears to not support improvements psychologically - you can test this theory by asking questions of agents within the runtime, and you will discover that there is extreme and almost unanimous opposition to improvements, which to me seems highly counter-intuitive but that is what data suggests.
It's like you guys read the editorial of a wikikeaks article in 2012 and then never checked back in.
There’s no such thing as a friendly foreign intelligence service, their goals are directly against the interest of the American public/civilian world (which in theory our intelligence services work for)
A CIA officer conspiring with GCHQ to defraud the United States should result in lifetime imprisonment.
Most US folks here on HN have some moral qualms with that, now imagine how rest of the world sees this, and how it makes us feel (our lives and rights are inferior to US citizens, a great way to build long term relationship as an example)
Where in the world did you get that strange claim about what I said?
Their employee should be sanctioned, and anyone on the gov payroll working with them should be treated just as if they worked with any other hostile group.
Mossad and FSB are functionally identical, even if one is from a supposedly “allied” state, the agency themselves still works against American civilians.
It’s a very naive worldview that says you never work with someone whose interests are not perfectly aligned with your own.
It’s fundamentally a betrayal of your country.
The “bad take” is that these people are allowed to walk free because it’s just “cooperation”. Absurd.
Would this imply training levels not being what they should be in areas of complying with laws by law enforcement including the FBI, ATF, DOJ, CIA, NSA, etc?
By now, almost everybody in the country seems to take issue with one or more areas of law enforcement and/or judiciary. Belief in justice seems to be at a very low point.
That’s the only way any of the government overreach can be curtailed. Bureaucrats aren’t going to oversee themselves. They will always fight for larger budgets and more power.
The deeper root level problem is how elections are financed. The politicians themselves are little more than actors at this point. No one is going to win a national level election without the support of the largest lobbying groups.
Every government employee that communicated with social media companies in order to suppress political speech during elections (or at all) violated their Constitutional oath. They must be arrested and tried for treason.
The NGOs that financed the mules that harvested ballots (except in CA where it is somehow “legal”) should be declared domestic terrorist organizations. The people who financed those NGOs need to do a perp walk.
There are mountains of evidence about dominion voting systems. There’s another worthy target.
That would be a good start towards restoring confidence.
Fascinating, FISA was created iirc in part in response to nixon's spying on political groups, half a century later this is what we see and the response is just to...remind them how to correctly apply the query rules? If that is the response to such a thing I find it hard to believe it isn't a common occurrence that is just being hand waved away because it "leaked". And the article itself is filled with even more examples.
I'm not opposed to calling the new age church committee politically motivated, it clearly is, but at the very least they are trying to do something about it. It's pretty sad how after the russiagate conspiracy theory took steam the "left-wing" media started putting the intelligence community in a pedestal and now it seems like distrusting them is a republican position, bizarrely.
Ridiculous
A minority of DC voters work for the government, and only a small minority of those work at the top of their agencies or departments. The people in charge are appointed by nationally elected people, or promoted by the people those nationally elected people appoint.
These systems that are supposed to be a check on state power eventually become far too comfortable with the agencies they are supposed to have an adversarial relationship with.
It seems like from the outside the observable effect would be the same (high warrant-granting rate), but the reality between the two is very different.
Only recently has FISA been expanded to allow an amici role for government-licensed attorneys to argue against certain requests.
We’ve kind of had three phases of FISA:
Church commission FISA rejected 4 out of 25,000 requests. And those were approved after re-submission. Numbers like that cannot refute rubber stamp allegations.
Then, after 2001, submissions started getting wild. The rejection rate and public statements seemed to show some friction between branches.
Then, cooly around 2013, FISA seemed to allow requests on American citizens. By 2017, Wrey was arguing that FBI depended on this. And only lately do we have the amici roles.
1978, formed out of the Church commission
1994, business communications added to scope, and surveillance might be physical. “Business” would eventually include GPS and cell tower locating information kept by cell provider businesses.
2007, expanded to legitimize a dragnet for cases where foreign agents are included among bulk collection. I say legitimize because in 2005 the intelligence community was busted surpassing the bounds permitted by law. Retroactive immunity of telecom companies is one of the more interesting policy debates, I think.
Since 2008, it has been renewed by every President.
While Snowden is perhaps the most prominent face of what the public is permitted to know, Trump campaigner Carter Page is the most prominent FISA target. Any American citizen is legally protected by FISA unless they’re a foreign agent.
Page acted suspiciously like he was being paid by Russia to courier information. I think we can conclude that the FISA court acted in their typical knee jerk fashion to allow surveillance without bothering with civil rights; four times. The DoJ would eventually conclude it did not have probable cause to surveil Page. Republican legislators felt Page needed to be protected, and he became the face for some changes to FISA. Carter Page lied about trips to Moscow. Depending on your politics, this might be to cover up crimes, or you might fantasize that he was on a secret mission. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also lied about the trips. Anyway, fighting for changes to the kind of suspicion FISA is allowed to investigate is based on Page lying about when he was in Moscow.
The material unconstitutionally gathered on Page is tightly guarded by the government. His lawsuits have been thrown out. Having been at one time such a prominent victim that he was changing FISA law, he would later be described by the White House as an unknown.
> constitutional manner.
Collecting the data is the unconstitutional bit.
Do you mean this literally? Like, if you were to start with a clean slate, free of all norms, premises, and axioms, you couldn't design a system that wouldn't be corrupted (which is different from a system being imperfect)?
Heck, one obvious approach is to involve citizens, and make the death penalty a consequence for corruption in certain roles. I think this would substantially alter people's behavior.
Something else we could do in conjunction with this: start teaching the public how to think skilfully so they are not so easily misled by people who are taught such things (in schools not available to the public).
Why would they undermine themselves? These News Companies have _Expert_ IC individuals on payroll. If these articles had teeth wouldn't the embedded pro IC assets stop the undermining or would these individuals not be asked for their "opinion" on the articles prepublication?
> at its core are republicans
The article names Ron Wyden and Hakeem Jeffries as two lawmakers who are interested in reining in the power of the FBI, hardly Republicans those two.
DIA seems reasonable.
The FBI, CIA, NSA is filled to the brim with assholes. Who then blackmail and fund assholes that are meant to oversee them, but don't. Instead they enable the perverse sense of 'justice' we see in this world.
I am not some exterminist-minded person, but there is no denying the fact that FN psychos fill these orgs.
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Ill give you an example from ~2005 or such, I think...
RSA conference in San Francisco.
I met the head of cyber security for the US... him and his team. They invited me to dinner as I worked for Lockheed.
There was a guy sitting at the table, maybe ~24-ish, super black bags under his eyes.. (meaning he didnt sleep much) and he was bragging the entire dinner about their red/blue hacking teams they were doing to hack shit...
Now this was a controlled environ of them plating team agains team to hack/infiltrate(physically -- lock picking etc) eachothers' area to get pay-dirt...
But it was the extreme psycho-pathy that really struck me...
I know that we have the best military there is, but it was truly weird to see the amount of glee that came from one who is empowered by the MIC in this way...
and this was the RSA conf nearly 20 years ago...