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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Reminder: this is their #1 most used tool for collecting data. Snowden told us of the existence of this program under the codename PRISM.

This allows them to download the entire contents of your gmail instantly, directly from Google, without a warrant. Or your iCloud Photos and Backups (complete iMessage history) directly from Apple. No warrant required.

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Wait, doesn't the constitution protect people from this?

No.

First, FISA was created in 1978 to protect Americans from the CIA by forcing them to show probably casuse. Section 702 of FISA is about intercepting any foreigners communications for which they need no warrent.

But the CIA incidentally collects data of U.S citizens during these warrentless wire taps, and that would be the 4th amendment challenge, but so far that is going nowhere.

Close but a lot of this, as Sen Wyden points out, turns on how NSA and DoJ lawyers define terms. So you get situations where bulk collection of communications of Americans to Americans into a data center isn't considered interception until a human looks at it. There's so much we don't know because the policies/legal interpretation and the FISA court rulings on them are secret. Sen Wyden tries to warn but he can only hint at the real dangers and policies

An important consideration is that just the graph of who talks to whom can be quite powerful:

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

There's also the game that they play where they spoof BGP announcements that cause routing changes for domestic traffic that makes it flow out and then back into the US, making it fair game for collection. Also, our Five Eyes partners aren't prohibited from collecting on US targets, and we all share.

Doesn't "receiving surveillance data about your citizens that your allies collected for you" also count as spying on your own citizens?

I'm not a lawyer but...

"You spied on me!" -"Relax, sweetheart... Of course I didn't spy on you. I got Mike to spy on you. Hey Mike!"

Unfortunately the lawyers did argue and it's legal. They really dug in to the wording and not the spirit of the law

Oh wow, that's crazy because people from the USA are always saying how unique and powerful the Constitution is and how many freedoms the USA has.

It seems almost like the USA is similar to other countries where the state does whatever they like. I bet that can't be true though surely because the USA has so many freedoms? You must be mistaken

The constitution lost its power long ago, and is now a mere fig leaf of legitimacy. Plenty of things ought to be unconstitutional based on a plain reading of the constitution. Civil forfeiture, unlimited gun rights, qualified immunity, FISA courts, various “emergency” powers, deportation of US citizens, etc, etc. The trouble is that a huge portion of Americans don’t really care about any of this, so long as these violations are used to stick it to liberals, all is forgiven.

I find such framing challenging because you are correct, the Constitution lost its power a long time ago, but I would not limit the cause of that lost power to only a rather recent ideological adversary, those you imagine would say “stick it to liberals”.

Unfortunately for everyone but the parasitic ruling class that is plundering America and the world, the changes and damage done to the Constitution in the name of progress have not only been the primary vehicle of that damage from the start, but they have had compounding and exponentially negative effects that are clearly accelerating the impact.

The problem with “progress”, i.e., changes framed as positive, is that it is easy to hijack the innate nature of young people to want to differentiate themselves from their parents as a natural and instinctual process of development/maturity. It allows for malevolent, usually older people, to whisper in the ears of young people things like “don’t you think what your parents do is silly and should be undone?”, not knowing or realizing what their parents do not only protects and preserves, but is also the foundation that allowed everything we have to have been created. It is generally a form of grooming young people to tear down the protective walls holding the Epstein/Biden/Trump Class style super-predators at bay.

I personally am concerned that we are effectively already locked in the dungeon, but we just don’t know it because it has WiFi and is nicely decorated…for the time being.

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

― Frank Zappa

Americans deep political confusion is really something to behold. How do you both hold the contradictions in your head? Every presidency no matter it's so called political ideology, liberal or conservative, have the same exact policies on mass surveillance? The Patriot act and fisa amendment was bipartisan, Obama voted for the Fisa amendment, Biden voted for the Patriot act.

The young people conservatives fantasize/complain about tend to be left-wing, their ideology has practically zero representation in politics, how do you make those the scapegoats of some confusing grand Jordan Peterson style social psychology argument it makes no sense. And how does republicans tossing civil liberties to "own the libs" mesh with libs slashing the same civil liberties? It's like the spiderman pointing at each other meme.

People don't understand that the way the media makes money is by stoking the "two sides" war.

People are so insanely ideologically charged up, the deepest conviction possible coming right from their lizard brain, all because they are lost in the sauce of an industry that is dependent on showing them random ads as frequently as possible.

It's actually kind of hilarious, and if you're one of these people, take a step back and see what's going on.

Exactly, representatives from both parties need to be forced to add FISA amendments that add privacy protections, most of everybody agrees with that enthusiastically if you explain it to them. Yet people are divided into their respective bullshit partisan trench lines by the two party theater.

> This allows them to download the entire contents of your gmail

Does it though? I believe they did that with PRISM by eavesdropping on the unencrypted data transfers within Google's network itself - without their knowledge. Since that revelation came to light I presume Google have upgraded their security.

No PRISM was the legal sharing of data, that's what op described just downloading all your data from the cloud companies. The thing you are thinking of is codenamed MUSCULAR that is evesdropping on unencrypted communication between yahoo and google data centers outside of the US jurisdiction where PRISM didn't apply (at the time).

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