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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I really don't think the "pre-filter collection" question can be as non-ambiguously answered as you claim.

If the gov't had a guy at the post office collecting specific people's mail, would the fact that he's looking at the address on all the mail be considered a search?

Even if on a technical level at one point all traffic is on RAM on some machine of the NSA, if they're not actually keeping it or looking at it in any real sense (beyond specific meta-data stuff that isn't stored), then I find it hard to consider that equivalent to actually storing the trafic.

The argument that they could easily switch it to do wholesale collection is pretty irrelevant in the courts.

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THere were a lot of 'if' statements in your post :) The problem is:

(1) We do not know what the NSA is doing (2) We cannot trust what they say they are doing, because they are perfectly willing to lie about it.

This is moving the goalpost. The question laid in front of the courts is "Is the system being described legal or constitutional?", not "is this what they're actually doing."

This is where Congress is supposed to kick in (and Congress does spend a lot of time creating legislation when the judicial system doesn't have the tools to do what's "right"), either through FOIA-style legislation or legislating a restructuring of the NSA or whatever.

And this sort of "well we can't trust the gov't to follow any of the rules anyways" discussion is pointless, counterproductive, and false. Courts have countlessly told the "government" (which is really just the executive) to do things it didn't want to do. The system is working, and this is part of the process.

I'm sorry, I need further description of what you mean by the moving goalposts analogy. It would seem to me the "is this what they're actually doing?" part is directly relevant to the "is the system being described legal or constitutional?" part. I can describe a process of removing money from the bank that looks legal because I say I'm withdrawing my own funds, but turns out to be totally illegal because what I'm really doing is robbing the bank.

It is true that in some cases the courts do, in fact, tell the government they can or cannot do this or that. But I think the problem being referred to is when the "government" does things within a veil of secrecy so that the courts aren't even aware of the problem. Never mind the fact that the government creates a "court" to validate their procedures that itself is kept secret as part of the overall secrecy. In those cases I wouldn't say the discussion is pointless, counterproductive, and false.

What do you mean it isn't stored? How do we know that?

Sorry, I might not have been clear.

I don't know if its being stored, I agree that it shouldn't be.

But so many people in this thread seem to imply it is impossible to filter a stream of information without storing the entire stream. This is very disingenuous, and is about as true as saying that it's impossible to have cops camping out for a guy with a specific license plate because they'll have to look at every car, and so they'll have to memorise all of them.

This obviously depends on the selectors, but we're talking about online filtering here, guys. Its possible to imagine a situation where not every single piece of data is stored.

Well, at the very least the data resides in memory and the CPU cache. We could discuss whether that constitutes "storage" but I do think it's significantly different than the personal memory of a police officer. A more appropriate analogy might be a traffic camera looking for the specific license plate.

EDIT: Note that the purported benefits of these collections programs (according to many of the slides) is that the selectors can be determined after the fact. So they must be keeping data somewhere.

Well, I see it as a more potential problem if the cops don't know the license plate number they need up front so they record every single one they see. Then this data is stored until someone can go looking through them to find the plate they actually need. The question is what happens to the complete list at this point?

Which, interestingly enough, the process of recording and storing license plate numbers for various uses is already in play. Both by private and public agencies.

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