19 Groups Sue NSA Over Data Collection
securityweek.com
securityweek.com
It does seem that PRISM is building a list of who people associate with - through email and phone communications, or various chat programs. Through this list of who you associate with, you can certainly start to label people and deny them rights based on their membership in various groups.
Back in the 1950s, the State Department was asking people to promise they weren't communists before granting them a passport so they can travel abroad. The amount of information they can get on people has grown exponentially since then - and that doesn't mean we have to be less careful with it.
First amendment - freedom of assembly - grounds is a brilliant way to argue this.
We do have a disadvantage this time. Prior to the internet era nearly anyone could easily understand exactly what was being done, as wiretapping was the most complex instrument used.
This time, one can attempt to abstract this as far as possible, and bury arguments with technical jargon. "Metadata isn't data", etc.
The argument isn't that metadata isn't data. It's that metadata isn't "yours." It's AT&T's observations and records about your use of their system. That's not "technical jargon." It's a relevant distinction when discussing the scope of a privacy right: whose information is protected? If it's not just information generated by you, but also information relating to you, how closely does it have to relate? Etc.
But compare this with the Supreme Court ruling in 1958 blocking the Alabama government from obtaining the NAACP's membership lists as a condition to doing business in the state. The lists belong to the NAACP and not the individuals on those lists, but the Supreme Court still held that people had a right to "pursue their lawful private interests privately". [1]
"Immunity from state scrutiny of petitioner's membership lists is here so related to the right of petitioner's members to pursue their lawful private interests privately and to associate freely with others in doing so as to come within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment"
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_for_the_Ad...
As a result, these protections exist next to mechanisms that cut in the other direction. One of those mechanisms is the almost unlimited power of common law courts to compel people to furnish information, through subpoenas and warrants. And that power is especially strong when the information is about someone else. So for example, while a court cannot force you to testify against yourself (5th amendment), they can force you to testify against someone else. They can force you to furnish information or copies of documents relevant to an investigation or ongoing litigation. Indeed, in a civil litigation, often one of the lawyers will be able to issue subpoenas forcing parties to turn over documents in the name of the court. In the Anglo-American system, there is really no "right of privacy" as against the right of a court to gather all the evidence necessary in a civil or criminal litigation.
So corporations do have 4th amendment rights. The NSA doesn't come to their offices and take the information. But that doesn't protect them against court orders to furnish information about other people.
A year after Citizens the court ruled unanimously in FCC v ATT that corporations fail to meet the "personal" part of "personal privacy." That decision is fun to read if only for the last paragraph.
So calling it "technical jargon" is pretty accurate - people encounter this confusing word "metadata" and have no idea what it means or how to reason about it.
Ultimately, the citizens can demand laws that state that fact explicitly. There are countries where collection of metadata by authorities in this way is illegal - and not because they didn't try to collect it. They did. It's just that "the people" won the argument, and now they aren't allowed to use the metadata (or at least not in this sweeping way).
http://www.securityweek.com/how-metadata-reveals-more-about-...
There is NO evidence that the NSA et al are using this information to target anything other than the most serious of terrorists. Until we evidence of the contrary I fail to see how these lawsuits will be able to stick.
I just seem to see a lot of conjecture but no actual evidence.
You don't see evidence because these programs are hidden from the populous. Maybe you're right - we don't know.
Given your social network, and training data consisting of the public members of a group you can use a semi-supervised learning algorithm to determine group membership. Since social networks have a small diameter and the public members are typically well connected, you would expect this approach to be fairly accurate. Or rather, accurate enough to act on, if you do not need to provide legal justification for your decision.
What's the required legal justification for putting someone on a no-fly list?
If you want to give some real world basis to the legal distinction you need oversight and transparency. In particular, global analysis of the whole dataset must be illegal, since it pretty much corresponds to total surveillance. Your results might not be completely accurate, but they don't need to be if you can act once you have something like 51% confidence.
Not subtle. No distinction.
I just seem to see a lot of conjecture but no actual evidence.
All data about every one. Including everyone's social network.
Hard to be more clear than that.
There are a number of possible interpretations as to what thety are doing and some interpretation of what we have seen and read regarding the NSA data collection probably exists that would probably make most of us pretty happy.
The problems are: (a) we dont know what they are actually doing and (b) we cannot trust them not to lie to us about what they are doing, one way or another.
The other problem is that the NSA has made it clear that in its opinion collecting metadata on a call is fine at any time, for anyone/everyone.
Metadata on a cell phone clearly includes time and location of cellphone/receiver checkins.
It is absolutely reasonable to assume that, if they want, the NSA can track the location of any person carrying a cellphone; or - given that they are storing this data - reach into the past and know exactly where you were, and when.
that is a remarkable power, IMO.
Hook that data up to a computer display and holy cow, that is a powerful tool.
Frankly, it would be awesome. if it wasn't for the fact that you, specifically and personally, appear on that display.
What we need to build is a website based off of Google Maps which allows us to drill down and wiki style tabulate the social and tech systems that individual nations are pursuing at the expense of citizen's privacy. The key players and enablers of these programs need to be highlighted. Questions need to be asked of our politicians globally exactly when they were thinking of consulting us about this growing global dragnet, this Leviathan as some have called it, Panopticon as others have called it.
I'm just trying to figure out what the end-game is and/or if there is any way to stop something as powerful and uncontrollable as the NSA (government in general?) appears to be.
The government is not uncontrollable. Litigation has stopped many government practices, historically. For example, originally the Bush administration tried to hold Yaser Hamdi (a U.S. citizen who had left the U.S. as a child and had been captured in 2001 in Afghanistan) as an enemy combatant. The Bush administration tried to claim that enemy combatants did not have habeas corpus rights. The Supreme Court disagreed. Hamdi was released and deported to Saudi Arabia on condition of renouncing his U.S. citizenship. Since then, dozens of detainees have won their habeas petitions and been released: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-habeas-results-t....
Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though? It seems like after the banking industry was pretty much caught red-handed breaking all kinds of laws and/or causing all kinds of programs to end or start, none of them ended up behind bars. I have to think the NSA would be better at avoiding jailtime than bankers...
Maybe I'm just pessimistic but it seems more like the best this could hope for is the NSA stopping Prism and then finding out 5-10 years later (or never) that they started Diamond or some other program that does the same thing except doesn't record the first 5 seconds of phone calls, or something else that "obeys the new rules"...
Imagine, the NSA for "free" (kinda) has created "Dropbox++"- all your online content indexed & backed up