"The program is court-approved but does not require individual warrants."
So does this mean that the number of government requests released by Facebook, Microsoft, etc. within the last few weeks are essentially meaningless in regards to PRISM and most likely other top secret government spying programs?
The reasonable expectation one would have about statistics released by (say) Yahoo pursuant to this process is that they would capture every directive received by the provider, since providers don't get the certifications.
Just a quick reminder: the USG does not need and has never needed and probably will never need a warrant to spy on a foreign entity not on US soil. I'd be interested in hearing about any country that had a signals intelligence capability (Germany, France, Israel, UK, China, Japan, Brazil, &c) in which a warrant was required to conduct foreign intelligence.
The older i get the more these artificial boundaries of nationalism bother me. Nationalism is cultural racism. I'm convinced that people will at one point look back on it the same negative way we perceive genetic racism today.
Yet we need a good protocol for experimenting with different models in order to arrive at a good system.
A balancing act. We certainly need more fluid borders in the world, like between the borders of our states.
Furthermore, Google etc. didn't just provide the number of directives, warrants, etc. served on them (within a range), they also listed the total number of accounts affected (again within a range, of course). The latter numbers were higher, but not 10×+ higher.
> Just a quick reminder: the USG does not need and has never needed and probably will never need a warrant to spy on a foreign entity not on US soil
And again, it's not actually super-obvious to most people that this applies to US cloud data. The USG apparently (IANAL) can't search the empty New York bachelor pad of a Russian oligarch or Saudi oil prince without a warrant - that apparently it can nonetheless turn over their GMail account (basically) at will is therefore pretty surprising.
There's also the matter that US cloud-data firms have been making true-but-misleading statements apparently calculated to give their users the impression that they have the ability (as well as the willingness) to contest demands for individual users' data without a court finding of probable cause or something like it, when for a large majority of the PRISM-company users this is not the case.
Finally, US citizens might like to check out the FISA appeals court's opinion about a foreign-intelligence exception to the Fourth Amendment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5923606
There is going to be a huge market in replacing essentially any/all of these services with ones physically and legally outside of the USA, with companies that vow to never voluntarily cooperate with the American surveillance state.
I agree. Also companies that fully embrace encryption and not having access to your data. I deleted my Dropbox account the first day they were implicated as a "work in progress" or whatever. I've been using BitTorrent Sync and it's working pretty well. There is still some work to be done, though. I've been meaning to take a good look at SpiderOak.
No. This shows the opposite. It shows that we can't place trust in jurisdiction anymore, and it shows that we can't trust companies who "vow" not to be evil.
If there is a "huge market" it is in replacing services with ones that provide cryptographic assurance that my data and communications are secure from any third party, and ideally, from the hosting company itself.
I think the uniformed response from the carriers is a diversion from the NSLs which they cannot speak about for the metadata or specific requests for information they have not obtained via fiber splitting.
I don't think that many people knew about the fiber splitting. Only the telecoms were granted immunity.