Uncle Sam snooping on US folks? Not without a warrant, lawmakers agree | Hacker News Reader

Uncle Sam snooping on US folks? Not without a warrant, lawmakers agree

theregister.com

23 pointsvngzs13 comments

Great, now clean up that clause in HIPAA that exempts protection of your health data from intelligence agencies. They don't even need a warrant. Intelligence agencies just need to ask and any company with your 'protected' health information can hand it over without any penalty and with zero liability. They don't even have to tell you they've done so.

Maybe it's paranoid to worry about such a thing. But then.. why do they need warrantless (and therefore untraceable) access to health information to begin with?

If ANY agent or associated personnel can make these requests, out of band and without a paper trail, how do we know there are no bad actors who may abuse the access?

We don't know. All principles of security say to assume there WILL be bad actors. In that case.. Therapy notes are great for blackmail. Medical conditions are great for assassination or simply sidelining a person temporarily with health issues.

And if a bad actor is caught? Their actions will be relegated to a secret court and never brought to light.

This is what bad clauses in our privacy laws have enabled for decades. A system that can be abused, invisibly, with very little oversight or accountability.

Uncle Sam can’t but your car can, and Uncle Sam is real friendly with those car manufacturers.

This is the real reason for lacklustre data privacy on corporations imo

Oh no good thing this reauthorization doesn't require warrants for purchased data too ffs just read it.

Let me tell you about a little thing called Prism...

Prism operates under Section 702 which is what the article is about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

> The NSA has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic.

> An internal NSA audit from May 2012 identified 2776 incidents i.e. violations of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans and foreign targets in the U.S. in the period from April 2011 through March 2012, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes are not intentional.

> The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do so and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.

"trust me bro"

> A legal opinion declassified on August 21, 2013, revealed that the NSA intercepted for three years as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans not suspected of having links to terrorism, before FISA court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_di...

Hey at least it's covered under Section 702 though! They are policing themselves because the courts are too busy, but that's fine, and all those accidental times they broke the law, won't happen again, trust us! It was only 56,000 times they broke the law anyway!

Why aren’t the people responsible in prison? Surely this is more serious than possession of weed.

Please see my previous comment. Here's the part to pay attention to:

The courts are too busy and are leaving it up to the people doing the crimes to police themselves and report their crimes to the courts, on a "trust" based system.

Nobody is watching the watchers, that's why.

The US President is in charge of the executive branch, isn’t he? So why doesn’t he order the justice department to arrest the criminals? There’s enough evidence to get a warrant surely.

In the U.S., the president isn't the boss of the justice department. This helps prevent the president from ordering the department to lock up a political opponent.

Congress should be scrutinizing the justice department for failing to do so, but I'm sure most of Congress is okay with it.

You’re right, the President isn’t in charge the attorney general is. So Merrick B. Garland is the person allowing this injustice to go unpunished. Can’t he be impeached for violating his oath to the constitution or something like that?

https://www.justice.gov/ag/staff-profile/meet-attorney-gener...

A politician will never arrest himself.

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