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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

What the NSA wants, the NSA gets. No legislation is needed when the system is working as intended.

According to the article, the data was being made available to other businesses... From the detail level involved, I imagine the NSA has some sweeter deal with telcos... And they have much richer data.

New lines of business. Another way for them to sell your data. The NSA is quaint. The Valley knows everything about everyone already, and even has their current GPS coordinates.

The NSA buys all of the data available from data brokers. 4A? What 4A? With telcos they have the extra advantage of ordering them around with an NSL.

For those not deeply versed in US federal regulations: Part 4a of Title 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which covers the "Classification, Declassification, and Public Availability of National Security Information" for the National Security Agency (NSA).

<https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-4a?toc...>

Not entirely sure, but I thought they were talking about the 4th amendment, which also is relevant. It prevents the government from spying on Americans without a warrant. The NSA works around it so openly by buying the spy data from third parties, and saying the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply since they didn’t collect the data themselves, so it’s fine. It’s a giant middle finger to the Constitution of the US.

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

Possibly. And on reflection, perhaps more plausibly.

In either regard, unambiguous comments are preferable to ambiguous ones.

The principle function of speech or writing is to accurately convey one's own state of mind to others.

The NSA shouldn’t need the telcos to retain these records, just hand them over to the NSA to retain right?

It's a good business decision to make others do your work.

Government is not a business!

USA government sure looks like a business from several angles.

Which leads me to wonder - were any of the NSA’s own employee, call and SMS records at AT&T part of the comprised data?

(edited for grammar)

Right, if phone records for Congressmen and known (or deduced) DOD were made public would that sway any changes

It's not so much the NSA as various other government agencies. The NSA is hoovering everything up, but if the local cops call them and want access to it, the NSA is going to tell them that they're not even authorized to know whether or not the NSA has that information. Also, something something due process something something American citizens.

Whereas if they can get the telcos to keep it then the cops can get it using the third party doctrine. This is basically an end run around the constitution, which is why they like it.

> What the NSA wants, the NSA gets

The NSA’s power is in being boring and unnoticed. This could be a revenue rider.

Every txt and phone call, every email and letter sent to your address along with every utility bill (list goes on) has been saved since at least 1999/2000 to present day. People like Bernie went to jail because they pushed back and it was all because of this....

Just saying.

... letter?

Anything you receive via post office. Sender/Receiver address is scanned. Post office uses OCR's for sortation and that information is captured.

Ah. The metadata. Inconsequential, then, to a degree.

"We Kill People Based on Metadata", ex-NSA chief General Michael Hayden:

<https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-...>

As Bruce Schneier has noted, metadata equals surveillance, as it's actually far more amenable to analysis and inference than whole-text or audio capture. Though that latter may have shifted significantly with the rise of LLM AI techniques.

<https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/metadata_surv...>

This is probably a reference to US postal or mail covers.

The USPS takes images of most or all postal mail as part of its delivery and postal sorting/routing processes. Those covers are retained for a limited period of time, and actually have, so far as I understand, significant privacy protections associated with them, of the sort notably absent in most electronic communications.

See:

Mail Cover (Wikipedia):

Mail cover is a law enforcement investigative technique in which the United States Postal Service, acting at the request of a law enforcement agency, records information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered and then sends the information to the agency that requested it.[1] The Postal Service grants mail cover surveillance requests for about 30 days and may extend them for up to 120 days.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_cover>

MICT: Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (Wikipedia):

[A]n imaging system employed by the United States Postal Service (USPS) that takes photographs of the exterior of every piece of mail that is processed in the United States.[1] The Postmaster General has stated that the system is primarily used for mail sorting,[2] though it also enables the USPS to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement.[2] It was created in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people..

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...>

39 CFR § 233.3 - Mail covers. <https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/39/233.3>

You can sign up to have them email you a daily summary of your mail deliveries including the associated images they've logged under USPS Informed Delivery.

Right, more info here: <https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm>

(I was ... vaguely aware of this.)

who's Bernie?

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