Here is a link to how the senators voted[1].
[1]https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
Unfortunately both my senators voted for it. I did call their offices Thursday to no avail.
[1]https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
Unfortunately both my senators voted for it. I did call their offices Thursday to no avail.
A former lover tried to blackmail Wellington. His response was 'Publish and be damned.' It was published to the delight of many. But he still went on to become Prime Minister.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rear-window-when-wellin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
That is inevitable. If there is an easier path to a goal some human will use it. It doesn't matter if the goal is against the people.
These laws work a very specific way and have very specific controls in place to prevent shit like you describe from happening which you could go and read up on if you wanted to but it’s much easier to fear monger amongst one another because it plays to your ego that somebody who is important enough to be under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
And of course this applies not only to the NSA spooks, but all the way up. You shouldn't be any more comfortable letting 'the government' spy on you, than you would be letting me spy on you. If you want another example along the same lines, spooks spying on their love interests is so common that there's a slang term for it - LOVEINT [2]. Basically, don't grant people power over other people unless it's really just completely and absolutely necessary, because it will be abused. So the benefit needs to substantially outweigh the inevitable abuses. And in this case, that obviously doesn't hold.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/us/politics/edward-snowde...
[2] - https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/loveint-how-nsa-spies-s...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/world/middleeast/book-rev...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/20/gchq-targete...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/24...
https://apnews.com/article/b25197d5b11740b2b29681bbc521a45f
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/fbi-misused-fore...
One does not have to be “important enough” if they are conducting mass surveillance and storing it in a database indefinitely.
For what is worth, I'm quite left leaning and fully agree with the parent poster. Information is power, no matter which party or in which country.
https://bja.ojp.gov/program/it/privacy-civil-liberties/autho...
I take issue with this bit: FISA also established the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a special U.S. Federal court that holds nonpublic sessions to consider issuing search warrants under FISA. Proceedings before the FISC are ex parte, meaning the government is the only party present.
When combined by foreign agents including US citizens, it’s troubling.
Maybe don't jump to biases so fast, people within all age groups have different opinions about the same topics.
HN is very opinionated on surveillance, as the comments on this story reinforce
Yes, I am. That is in fact what I want.
> FISA protects Americans
No, it does not. At this time, the greatest threat to me (and other Americans) is in fact the glowies who want to use this sort of law to violate our civil liberties.
FISA is Congress exercising the only authority it has here, which is oversight & regulation. You could argue FISA should be stricter, but it can’t extend the Constitutional reach of the Fourth Amendment, nor can it contract it the way many in this thread believe it’s somehow doing.
Also, free nations should have higher standards than "Not a citizen? Too bad, anything goes."
Congress can regulate the process that must be followed, the documentation that must be made, even require judicial review at the program level to ensure it doesn’t also record traffic that is Constitutionally protected. That’s what FISA is.
But it can’t ban that tapping, nor can it require the executive to get a warrant for a particular otherwise Constitutional intercept from an Article 3 court.
Which part of this do you think is incorrect?
But let's ignore that for a moment and move on to the next point. Your example is still hoovering up communications from citizens who are supposed to be protected by due process of law. En masse. How does this not run afoul of the law?
The problem is compounded by the fact that the internet blurs geographical borders. Wholly domestic communications can and does end up crossing borders. Also, I'd bet a large part of our communications aren't even between people. The majority of the traffic likely are sent to or from computer programs. They happen without most people even realizing it, but contains highly personal information. The simple telegraph analogy doesn't translate well to the internet.
What's more, there's currently no meaningful system in place to prevent abuse. And no, a rubber stamp court authorizing dragnet surveillance isn't it.
The poster was roundly criticized for being correct.
What I keep trying to explain is that this FISA vote can’t address your concerns one way or the other. If you disagree, I wish you’d explain how.
Whether the FISA vote can fix all the problems isn't the point. The problem is that current surveillance practices looks illegal to begin with.
Do you disagree?
https://www.npr.org/2013/06/21/193578367/calling-it-metadata...
That's not correct at all. It would only fall under federal overview if it's commercial (Article 1 section 8 clause 3 of the constitution gives congress the right to regulate commerce with foreign nations).
The Feds don't just get to do anything they want by default. All powers that aren't specifically given to the feds are defaulted to either the states or the people.
I think it would be a lot harder to do that with speech though. Maybe you could argue that the telegraph line itself impacts international copper markets or something, but there are non-tangible based communication methods.
There is some judicial oversight in the FISA court of course. What's the argument for why congress can legislate that, but not a more typical warrant?
The FISA court exists to ensure that the executive is not operating outside his Constitutional authority, not as a gatekeeper for use of that authority at all in any instance.
This is not true. The constitution explicitly reserves the power to declare war or enact treaties to Congress. Neither the military nor federal law enforcement can spend a single dime, or even exist, without Congressional approval. If the budget allocates no money to mass surveillance, no money is available to conduct mass surveillance.
What they can’t do is allow them to spend money on foreign surveillance, but only if an Article 3 court gives them a warrant.
Do you have any case law to cite for this, or it's just your favored argument that you'd hope a court would agree with? You are talking about it like it's settled law. Cites?
Also, note that the cases you are talking about to which the law applies have someone in the USA involved in the wiretapped conversation as well. It wouldn't shock me if the courts -- although probably not the current supreme court, but you never know -- simply said it required a warrant constitutionally at some point in the future. It's certainly not obvious that you can wiretap an American without a warrant as long as they are talking to someone overseas.
Or funding the Department of Justice, but with the proviso that any nominee for Attorney General must be over age 60.
The power of the purse is not unlimited.
You're proposing an alternative where the executive gets to decide how money is spent. As if mass surveillance, which is a waste of money, has to be funded in order to fund ordinary investigations.
The executive is the weakest branch. It has almost no powers of its own, and shouldn't. It's checks and balances. For something to happen, the executive has to want to do it and Congress has to fund it. Not one or the other; both.
Isn't this about the opposite issue, whether Congress can delegate control over funding to the executive? They were trying to get the executive to do the job of Congress and control the CFPB's funding.
Congress can't pass a law violating the Fourth Amendment. They can certainly pass a law constraining the executive from doing something that is otherwise constitutional, if the courts are reading the Fourth Amendment too narrowly.
They could also straightforwardly require the FISA court to publish its opinions, or have the same cases heard in ordinary federal courts with public accountability for the decisions. There is nothing in the constitution requiring secret courts.
But we most certainly WILL abuse individual civil rights my abusing that intel. THAT has been confirmed in history again and again.
Could you explain what you mean by this? On a tangential note, have you considered talking/explaining this with politicians/academics studying this field? Or is it more of something that's already known to those familiar with the field?
So even as damning and revealing as the Zimmerman telegram was, ultimately it was Germany's bold resumption of the torpedoing of US oceangoing traffic that catalyzed US public opinion into ending 3 years of American neutrality and joining the fight in WWI. Thus even when intel is most damning, the role of intel will always be subservient to publicly motivating events like lost lives, as in the much ballyhooed sinking of the Lusitania 2 years before (1915).
Wikipedia has a couple of outstanding articles on the topic:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_entry_into_World_Wa...
> In 1800, the British Levant Company purchases nearly half of all of the opium coming out of Smyrna, Turkey strictly for importation to Europe and the United States.
0: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heroin/etc/hi...
We were fine before, and arguably it would've done little to change the events that caused the reaction that allowed it to be established in the first place.