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Comment by northwest | Hacker News Reader

“I was back out at NSA just last week, spent a couple hours out there with high and low level NSA officials,” Chambliss said. “And what I have been assured of is that there is no capability at NSA for anyone without a court order to listen to any telephone conversation or to monitor any e-mail.”

How _dumb_ must one be to continue to trust these agencies for just about anything, now? After they blatantly lie in Congress and then dare to "apologize" for lying in Congress, how much more do these "politicians" really need to start thinking for themselves?

Have they already been lobotomized? Are they lizards? Or what else exactly is going on?

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Errr, given how easy it appears to be to get a "court order" (note, that's not as high a bar as a "search warrant"), I don't have as much difficultly believing that's the case.

The case today, that is; tomorrow....

(Technical note: right now I gather the NSA et. al. are making a distinction between Hoovering up "everything", like all of Verizon Business's call records in that blanket warrant we've seen, and actually looking at them. Infamously, "collection" only referrers to the latter act. Just like how inside a decrease from an automatically increased baseline, even an increase after inflation, is called a "cut".)

> How _dumb_ must one be to continue to trust these agencies

Taking a deep breath for a moment, if you look at TFA it contains two contradicting allegations, from sources that appear to me to be roughly similarly credible.

On what evidentiary basis have you decided one source is more reliable than the other? And why are the people who believe the other source "lobotomized"?

I am not really sure what is going on here, but I do not feel that this article alone presents a sufficient basis for a reasonable person to form an opinion.

     On what evidentiary basis have you decided one source is more reliable than the other?

When one of those sources is caught in multiple lies, the prudent will tend to discount that source as untrustworthy.

We could also suspect that the giant spying apparatus has compromised our government officials with intelligence gathered on anyone in a position to oppose it.

It's all in the language they use. They are scooping up all the phone calls, emails, etc. they possibly can. They then go get a warrant to process that information or so they can use it in court and what have you. And like you said, getting a warrant is a joke. Especially through the FISA court.

But Greenwald is claiming that there is nothing technical stopping low level analysts from snooping on anyone without any form of authorization. This directly counters the line put forth by the national security establishment and its apologists since the revelations began.

What Chambliss said in that quote does not contradict Greenwald's claim. When Chambliss uses the word "capability" he means legal capability. Greenwald is arguing that the enforcement of that requirement is trivial - equivalent to a checkbox that says "Do you have a warrant Yes/No?"

I am entirely willing to believe that Chambliss is simply technologically naive enough that he doesn't even know how to ask the NSA if the enforcement is meaningful. He's also probably quite happy to take them at their word, despite all their history of using their own dictionary to define their words.

I think you're right, which of course makes the entire statement a tautology. "The NSA has assured me it's not legal to do anything that's not legal." Thanks for sharing.

Never mind that it's not legal to read emails, except with a single court order saying that it's legal to read EVERYONE'S emails. Which I believe they have.

The main problem is the "business records" clause in PATRIOT must be found unconstitutional. If it is somehow constitutional, then there is no privacy.

> I think you're right, which of course makes the entire statement a tautology. "The NSA has assured me it's not legal to do anything that's not legal." Thanks for sharing.

That's true for the vast majority of law enforcement though.

The police have the technical ability to pepper spray you, or arrest you, or shoot you. It is compliance with policy and legal requirements that (generally...) prevent them from not shooting you, not a technical safeguard. It's policy/legal safeguards that prevent the local health inspector from arbitrarily shutting down your restaurant. NSA analysts get held to policy as well; there have been analysts caught looking up information on ex-wives, for example, and fired for cause, so while an analyst may have the technical ability to task PRISM inappropriately, it's not an unlimited ability.

Do I think that PRISM should have better technical safeguards on it? Absolutely, if only because it's easy enough to do, and the system is way more powerful than what a random county sheriff might have available to them. But I wouldn't read any more sinister connotation into the current level of safeguards; even nuclear weapons can be disabled by only 2 compromised missile techs, so this level of protection seems pretty ordinary for government work.

> That's true for the vast majority of law enforcement though.

I think you've completely missed the point. The impression that a layman will take from Chambliss's statement is that it is technically impossible for the NSA to collect emails.

This situation is not the same as your examples like pepper spray because everyone understands that a cop with a can of pepper spray is able to use it or misuse it and no amount of legal mumbo jumbo will stop him in the moment. The naive - and intended - interpretation of Chambliss's statement is the equivalent of saying the cops don't have any pepper spray to begin with.

Another possibility is that Chambliss is either lying, or acting as a PR functionary for the NSA.

Actually I would suspect a third possibility. It's the same problem that happens when a general visits a military base and makes rounds. Everything that is dirty will be swept under the carpet ahead of his visit so that he only sees what those on the base want him to see.

This is such a common social phenomena that it should be obvious to everyone, especially those in positions of power and administration.

If he showed up unannounced at the NSA, with a bunch of pointed questions and could talk to any NSA employee at will one on one, then he would be much more likely to learn the truth. But to show up announced, meeting with specific people on a predetermined schedule with a previously announced goal, he will only be told what they want him to know.

credit: Hanlon's Razor.

Certainly. And I'm sure Chambliss was not fooled.

Or he sees only what he wants to see. "You don't do any of X, do you, because if you did that'd be embarrassing?". "No sir, of course not. Not right this instant".

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