Room 641A
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
What an overreach of power on the part of Congress. Something goes to court to discuss its legality, and then Congress retroactively declares it to be legal? Yikes.
Bear in mind that the judiciary does not want to be in the business of micro-managing the executive branch, both because it jeopardizes its independence and because its rulings would almost certainly be circumvented on a technicality, thus weakening its actual reach. Among other factors, this is why the courts often decline to hear matters that are political questions (that is to say, questions of policy) and invites plaintiffs to work through Congress instead.
EDIT: well, political derives from polity rather than policy, but given the context, I hope my meaning is clear.
this is not to say it might not be worth filing a lawsuit to draw attention to the issue or to put the Executive branch on record as to what its position is; often change does result from some gestural litigation. But you want to be careful to separate the issue you care about (mass surveillance in the age of technology) from the long and bumpy road of legal procedure; it would be a mistake to express one's understandable frustration with the latter as a malign consequence of the former.
But why does this have to be ensured through the action of the Congress? If the misdoing was the Government's, it is up to the courts of law to absolve the private actor of guilt.
Granting immunity of private actors for government illegalities is a very dangerous precedent. Imagine if the same was to be done if a private security company fires on civilians on behalf of state orders, and is then absolved of responsibility through an act like this one.
When a private authority does something on behalf of state authority, the state effectively gives away some of its responsibility; when it decriminalizes it later, the part of responsibility that it has given away is now vanished. In some cases, of course, the state can still be sued over the initiative, but such a measure ensures that companies are sheltered in case the whole thing goes awry, so there's little incentive in not collaborating.
What does suck about this in terms of ethics is that it's hard to draw a line between when retroactive decriminalization is beneficial and when it isn't. After abolishing slavery, it obviously makes sense to decriminalize slaves' attempted escapes. But does it also make sense to decriminalize racist behaviour?
Edit: just to be sure, I'm arguing over principles here, and all I have to bring is historical arguments, not judiciary ones, since I neither am a lawyer, nor do I reside in the US. If I missed something due to unfamiliarity with the US law, I apologize in advance :-).
On general principle, I agree with you that it's far too easy for government to employ private entities as a cat's paw, but those kinds of compromises are unfortunately a common side-effect of war.
Courts don't absolve anyone of guilt. They merely determine if a law has been broken. It is congress that makes law, so it is up to congress to construe the law such that the private actor has not broken anything.
Edit: What I meant in previous post was that a court of law has the possibility of absolving private actors or responsibility, the same way they do with someone who has committed an illegal action under blackmail: they are still guilty of having broken a law, but there are obvious reasons why they should not suffer the full penalty of it (or any penalty at all), and legal action moves against the blackmailer.
That ship sailed a long time ago, and the Constitution grants a broad power of pardons to the President.
My favorite example of this being used block something being Bush Sr's pardon of everyone involved in the Iran-Contra affair. A matter which seems likely to, if further pursued, lead to wrongdoing by Bush himself. Or possibly worse, if you subscribe to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_the....
My biggest concern is come a week everyone will go back to not caring and I'll go back to pestering people to give a shit.
Even after I found out about this, it freaked me out; especially that it's right in the heart of downtown.
http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds-8/611-folsom-street-nsa.jpg
Is that just very horrid architecture, or some kind of shielding? Perhaps both?
It appears to be have been actually designed for use as a telephone switching center, for which windows actually are mostly useless. Should take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street, another telephone exchange in NYC. It is literally a window-less skyscraper.
My favorite one is in NYC: 33 Thomas Street. It looks like it was designed to be the capitol of a dystopian megalopolis.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/33_Thoma...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/33_Thoma...
Speaking of dystopia... I bet it houses a spy room just like the one in SF!
You honestly couldn't have designed a building that could have stuck out and raised more suspicion than this one.
This building was not created for this, it's just an old Bell building that had some empty space which could be repurposed.
The building wasn't built to be a spy agency or a wire-tapping operation. It's an AT&T switching center. Among other things, it's the terminus of a number of important trans-Pacific fiber cables, and it's been around for longer than the NSA has been rumored to have a room inside of it.
> Why is it all caps? Some other reason? It should be noted in the article somewhere...
And:
> Everyone is losing their minds over this thing, but as far as I can tell, data is only provided with a "legally binding order or subpoena". This isn't the NSA reading through every inbox in the world. Or am I wrong?
Once more:
> The denials by the participating companies are not surprising and may, in fact, be a requirement under the National Security Letters, which the NSA and FBI use to give quasi-legal cover to their signals collection.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PRISM_(surveillance_progra...
> A related program, a big data or data mining system based on cloud computing and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) technology known as "Boundless Informant", was disclosed in top secret documents leaked to the Guardian and reported on June 8, 2013.
(my emphasis)
So, after we've had licenses claim (in one way or another) "do not use this software to wage war", will we see a rise in "do not use this software for secret intelligence gathering or processing" licenses?
Still, both are rather pointless when the entity you're trying to subject to the terms of your license has a standing army and heaps of nukes. Seriously. This is why we can't have nice things.
"There’s a line I’ve seen trotted a few times now that goes, “Ah, we knew all this was happening, you idiots!” We didn’t know. If you knew about PRISM you should have scooped The Guardian and made a name for yourself. The fact is, this story is mammoth and is bringing an incredible amount of attention to a program that’s been operating in total secrecy for a decade. But, yes, you’re smart and get a pat on the head for not being a “sheeple.” "
What of the others programs in the slides? Two even had to be redacted out because of the potential of the fallout against NY-based Guardian US
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillanc...
PRISM concerns limited access to a few massive internet companies.
And to think that they rejected the idea of UN doing the same thing (the ITU debacle last year). It was only so they are the only ones doing it, all along.
Author James Bamford raises the suspicion question of an Israeli backdoor to the Israeli Narus in The Shadow Factory 2008.
I almost wish I watched mainstream news to see how much of this depth is covered or if it's just PRISM and not anything about how bullshit FISA warrants are or how crazy insane National Security Letters are (and how many hundreds of thousands of them are issued)... OR that they regularly wiretap the internet.
Between:
- this (which we've known about)
- the new leaked slide that indicates they do massively, widely wiretap fiber
- PRISM (which I suspect were simply the dates that the companies brought up infrastructure to be able to quickly and easily comply with FISA warrants. Which means "direct access" is true, but it also means that "we were forced to make it easy to give the government what they want as soon as they need it")
They basically have real time access to HTTP data (and HTTPS if a CA is compromised or controlled by them [is it really even that crazy of a theory at this stage]). They also can get organized, categorized access to my data with a FISA warrant (please, read up, they are as rubber-stamp as they're referenced in these articles).
Sigh.