Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

The actual judgment: http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/NSA_ca2_20150507.pdf

From the ruling:

> Because we find that the program exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized, we vacate the decision below dismissing the complaint without reaching appellants’ constitutional arguments.

It appears that the government is starting to lose the ability to always dismiss constitutional rights abused on "state secrets" grounds. Which is great! Finally, we can actually start to hear the real legal justifications for these mass surveillance programs and watch them start to crumble when they are put forward in a adversarial court. However, organizations like the ACLU and the EFF need funding to be able to dismantle these illegal programs. I recommend signing up for a monthly recurring donation of $19.84.

https://www.aclu.org/donate/

Also, this will give significant weight to the Fight 215 coalition (https://fight215.org), which this ruling is directly related to.

the government is starting to lose the ability to always dismiss constitutional rights abused on "state secrets" grounds

I don't think the decision says that. It looks to me like the decision is fairly limited. All it says is that "you're saying that USAPATRIOT lets you capture bulk metadata, but it doesn't; the government's own reading of the legislation is wrong". That doesn't go as far as saying that the gov't cannot hide behind state secrets in other cases.

Further, it's now imperative that section 215 not be renewed. The foundation of this decision is that the mass surveillance can't be considered to have been approved by Congress, because many of them (not to mention all of us) weren't aware of the program. But now that Congress is aware of it, any renewal would imply that they condone the program, and thus that they believe it should be allowed to continue.

Under those conditions, this decision would no longer be applicable, and we'd have to get a SCOTUS decision on the overall constitutionality, which is going to be much more difficult (although I think that in the big picture, that's the right answer).

It's important to stress the usefulness of monthly donations, as opposed to single donations, even large ones. Monthly donations let organizations like the ACLU and the EFF plan for the future based on a reliable source of income, instead of individual donations which can be peaky.

What are the laws governing endowments? Could an organization fund itself indefinitely based on interest on an endowment assembled from millions of small one-time donations, or are there taxes or other rules that would eat away the endowment?

> It appears that the government is starting to lose the ability to always dismiss constitutional rights ...

The text you quoted said dismissing the complaint without reaching appellants' constitutional arguments.

> organizations like the ACLU and the EFF need funding

Serious question: Do the ACLU and EFF profile their donors by collecting information from and reporting it to third parties? It's my understanding that the practice is widespread in the fund-raising business, and I read many years ago that the ACLU participated.

EDIT: I want to clarify, because some people are responding regarding web trackers. Those are a concern, but I'm talking about something else: Obtaining, from third-party data aggregators, profiles of donors: How much they make, their mortgage, what they read -- all the data that's collected about private citizens -- and using it to target their fundraising.

EFF uses extensive technical and policy measures to protect member privacy. They also require the similar measures when they partner with other orgs on campaigns.

https://www.eff.org/policy

Metadata collection is only bad when it's the Government doing it!

FWIW: I've not received anything but EFF-related spam from EFF to the email address I used to donate to them back in the day.

Not sure about ACLU.

Of course, collecting metadata -- especially via centralized services like Google Analytics -- means you're creating a very tempting trove of information for both the government and private entities that may make use of it to your users' disadvantage.

Governments can use force on those they track. Corporations can't yet (they're working on that).

At the same time, the government has little reason to hassle people who aren't fringe minorities. Private companies have strong incentives to use data collection against the masses.

I don't buy either side of that statement. Government does hassle the masses, and I'm not sure what incentives private companies have to use data collection on the masses. My argument for the latter is probably a little weak, but certainly in the former, history is clear.

> I'm not sure what incentives private companies have to use data collection on the masses.

Have you met FaceBook?

Which government, and during what time period?

Ghostery reports Omniture(Adobe Analytics) on the ACLU homepage, and additionally Adobe Test and Target on their donate page. On EFF, Ghostery only reports Piwik Analytics on their home and donate pages. For comparison, the NYTimes homepage shows 35 trackers.

Personally, I don't have a problem with this. I am concerned about overreach in government policy, not nonprofits trying to learn a bit more about their supporters.

This is fairly off topic, but in case you cared, Ghostery's business model is to sell your browsing habits and blocked ads and blocked trackers data back to the people their extension blocks. They claim it's anonymized, and I'd venture to say it probably is, but it's still data about you.

I almost bought their enterprise solution last year, and we didn't talk about individuals' data at all. What they pitched me on is basically an aggregated version what the browser plugin does--tell me what trackers are running where on my sites.

This is surprisingly difficult for enterprises to keep track of. Different divisions might have different websites, or different campaigns running, and be placing things like tracking pixels or tags all over the place without telling anyone.

And embedded content can come with trackers of their own. For example if you embed a Storify feed in your site, you get 4 trackers with it. Surprise!

They'll host a page for the enterprise that lists out all the trackers, and gives visitors opt-out links for each one. Again--a total pain for most companies to try to do themselves.

It's all powered by people running the plugin, but the plugin data not what's for sale. At least, they never pitched me on it, and it's not part of their service description on their website.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate

How do you explain this from a few days ago: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/one-of-the-biggest-privacy-... ?

There was no state secrets assertion in that case and the court decided it on constitutional grounds (under which the government won) rather than statutory grounds (like here, under which the government lost).

Davis: there's no fourth amendment obstacle to the government getting cellphone location data (of particular people)

Clapper: the government's interpretation of part of the Patriot Act's supposedly allowing it to easily get everyone's phone calling records is mistaken

I guess the fact that Davis undermines our privacy rights and Clapper protects them might seem incongruous if you expect a nationwide trend of all Federal courts either protecting or failing to protect privacy. But these were two different courts in different parts of the country applying different legal theories to different legal questions, not just something like "is privacy good?" or "is government surveillance out of control/sketchy/terrifying?".

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