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Comment by appleflaxen | Hacker News Reader

Targeted surveillance... like a search warrant?

Somehow we have been doing fine under the constitution for 200 years. Now a dozen men kamikaze a building, and we have to take away everyone's freedom in order to protect them?

F that. Police and the executive branch are just being lazy. Get off your ass, do some human intelligence, investigate leads, and get a warrant if you have probable cause. Otherwise, get the hell out of my email.

When the chances of being killed by police are 55x higher than being killed by a terrorist (or whatever the recent number was) and we want to give the State more power, we are fools.

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I remember when they busted Ulbricht thinking, "if they were able to catch someone who seemed by most accounts to be fairly careful (used encryption, Tor, etc.), how come we need dragnet surveillance?" I'd be curious to hear if dragnetting is even effective and if so, what the cost/benefit analysis is when you factor in both financial and ethical costs.

The USA has never needed a search warrant to conduct foreign intelligence. A search warrant requirement is a 4th amendment protection afforded to US citizens. Foreign intelligence does not require courts unless you're trying to get foreign information from US companies (like the PRISM program and the FISA courts).

The FBI (who is responsible for all intelligence conducted in the USA, against foreigners or Americans) is absolutely required to get a search warrant.

The iPhone is one of the most popular phones in the world. Is it that crazy that the CIA is interested in them for intelligence gathering purposes?

I'm fine with the legality foreign intelligence (even if I'm not sure it's the best policy). But what does that have to do with anything? The Snowden disclosures show that they're doing far, far, more: essentially indiscriminant eavesdropping of every possible form of domestic communication.

My point is that you were arguing against targeted collection. Going after individual devices is a scoped and precision form of intelligence collection. You were saying that this type of intelligence isn't targeted and was instead insisting they should have to get a warrant.

The point the original commentor was trying to make is that this type of work is much more preferable to the mass collection that you're referring to from the Snowden documents.

I don't know if inserting backdoors on apps in the development process, before they go out to everyone, counts as targeted collection.

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