I think the most depressing aspect of the NSA/phone spying issue is that I haven’t read anyone say it was illegal. It looks like they are relying on questionable interpretations of the Patriot Act, and they got a judge to sign off on it, so while I hate it, it looks legal.
Remember, IANAL, but has anyone alleged that what is being done is illegal?
burnspbesq
Well, there are some non-trivial arguments that could be made about the constitutionality of FISA and the Patriot Act, but in terms of your narrow question about whether what was done is authorized by the statutes, it does look like the Gubmint dotted all its i’s and crossed all its t’s.
askew
It was legal, it’s routine and it’s been done since 2006. The only reason it is news now is that someone leaked classified information again. I’d bet money it is a Republican on one of the Intelligence Committees or their staff. The GOP feigning outrage over this are absurd. They’ve known about it for years.
Roger Moore
And, for all the hand wringing, this still isn’t as bad as Bush. These are call records- who talked to whom- while the NSA under Bush was actually wiretapping. Doesn’t make it right, but it ought to kill the “Obama is worse than Bush” claims.
Butch
IANALE (E for “either”), but everything I’m reading seems to indicate that the action stretches the law’s intent but wasn’t actually illegal. Whether it’s right is a separate question from whether it’s legal.
ranchandsyrup
Need to make some distinctions. “Data” was deemed constitutional but was limited by Congress with 215 so that it has to tie to security interest. Content of calls will need warrant no matter no matter what you can tie it to.
sb
I’ve been looking all morning while my students are taking final exams. Near as I can tell, it’s legal. Two of my students, fascinated by the story, are researching it and one of the questions they asked is about legality. I gave them the teacher shrug that essentially says, “Hell if I know” and they’ve been looking all morning as well.
So far as we can tell, it’s legal.
No One of Consequence
Check out RudePundit today. I think he has the ‘right’ of it. YMMV, of course.
Interestingly enough, in 1991 or 1992, I took a Philosophy of Technology class at college. It was interesting in that the professor posited that the Hacker was the freedom fighter of the future, and the only one equipped and capable enough to save us all.
Fairly prescient, I think in hindsight.
Though the physics/tech story from today about a time cloak is interesting in its ramifications for secure communications.
“…safe in our persons and our papers…”, indeed.
– NOoC
cathyx
Just because something is not illegal, doesn’t make it right or OK to do.
cleek
it’s legal, it’s old news, and it kindof sucks. and Congress can end this any time it wants to.
counting on the goodness of this President or of future Presidents to not use everything Congress allows, when it comes to “national security”, is dumb. the only way this ends is if Congress or the court stops it. in fact, the FISA court could end it in July, if it wanted to.
burnspbesq
The irony is that in the majority opinion in Amnesty International v. Clapper, in which the Supremes ruled that plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge an alleged program of warrantless electronic surveillance because they couldn’t show that they were actually targeted, Justice Alito scoffed at the very idea that the Gubmint would ever do what we’re now finding out that it has been doing.
Punchy
If the GOP is standing up for it (and they are), you KNOW it cant be illegal.
Jon
IAAL. What most people mean by “legal” might or might not fit here, but I’m not sure the pop definition matters. For me, only if there is some kind of post hoc challenge to the Patriot Act or the FISA statute might it be called “illegal.” Remember, the 4th amendment doesn’t give you an absolute right to privacy, it gives you the protection of having a judge issue a warrant. If that’s been done, especially if it’s not eventually used in a criminal prosecution, their might be some kind of civil action for invasion of privacy, but even that would be on unsolid footing.
The Friendly Libertarian
Remember, folks, in the end the difference between Obama and Bush is the difference between ☭ and 卐 . Really the same ball of wax in the end. It’s the Feds vs. the rest of us.
Trollhattan
Yup, legal. Yet to be known (if ever) what’s the reason, although speculation is Boston bombing investigation.
Know what else is legal? Killing a hired escort in Texas if she doesn’t put out. WTF, Texas?
That’ll teach her.
mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Jury-acquits-escort-shooter-4581027.php#ixzz2VSmbZ1km
piratedan
@askew: IOKIYAR in it’s essence…. how dare a DEMOCRAT continue to use the office just like a REPUBLICAN!@!@!@!!
Barry
@burnspbesq: “Justice Alito scoffed at the very idea that the Gubmint would ever do what we’re now finding out that it has been doing.”
And there’s no way that he (or any of the others) didn’t know that beyond a reasonable doubt that government was doing it; he was making sure that it’d stay hidden, to the best of his abilities.
Mnemosyne
I’m still confused. Is this about the warrant they got to investigate phone records for the Tsarnaev case or is there also a separate, generalized data mining operation going on? I keep seeing things that seem to conflate the two, but I’m not sure what the problem is with getting a warrant to investigate a specific crime.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
And, unfortunately, discovering that somebody used a nonsensical argument to support their position isn’t grounds for relitigating the case.
Trollhattan
@The Friendly Libertarian:
Huh, interesting theory. You have a newsletter I might subscribe to?
Forum Transmitted Disease
Immoral, yes. Unconstitutional? Absolutely, but the Supreme Court disagrees so we’re fucked there. Illegal? No.
Congress can stop this any time they want to.
Elections have consequences. Hope that Nader vote felt good.
Omnes Omnibus
@cathyx: That wasn’t the question that was asked. It is important to distinguish the two things if one is opposed to a policy. Saying it is bad policy is one thing. Saying it is illegal is another. Saying it is illegal because it is bad policy is yet another and it is a bad argument. It is god to have clarity about the argument.
As far as legality goes, probably it is. I have some concerns about the Constitutionality of the FISA warrants, but that is another issue.
Ted & Hellen
It’s not that Barack is necessarily “worse” than the Bush Boy, it’s that he is no better on so many issues. And that’s a reasonably low bar.
Also too, it is racist to question the NSA data mining and spying…I’m sure Michelle signed off on it so it’s fine.
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
IT’s not just the government they are giving cell phone information to. And it isn’t just Verizon doing it. “BIG DATA IS IN UR CELL TRACKING UR MANS”
pamelabrown53
This is a conversation that has been needed since 9/12. Mega-important.
Still, I have to wonder if we’re being a bit reactionary when Google “tells” Target, et.al, that you’re pregnant before you’ve informed your spouse. My partner gets on her smart phone daily and knows exactly where her brother is, via GPS (in a different state).
My point is this: if the Government is collecting the megadata is it somehow worse? Especially IF/ the collection provides patterns that disrupt a broader terrorist attack (Boston Maraton)?
SatanicPanic
@The Friendly Libertarian: You type this ☭ like it’s a bad thing.
MikeJ
@pamelabrown53:
Google doesn’t tell Target. Target has their own data mining operation, and they can tell that you’re preggers from what you buy,.
Cassidy
I still think this is an interesting aspect of American exceptionalism. We’ve been doing this shit and more to foriegn nationals for years. All of a sudden, it’s “ZOMG! THEY’RE LISTENING TO MY PHONE CONVERSATIONS!!!!!”, which isn’t even what’s *happenning.
*But probably is happenning anyway because JSOC gives a fuck what you think.
? Martin
I’ve yet to have anyone explain how this violates their privacy. I’m not trolling with the question, but the assumption seems to be that there is information in this data that isn’t actually in this data.
cathyx
@Omnes Omnibus: I wasn’t trying to answer the question. There are many incidences of something being legal but not right to do. We shouldn’t just hold our elected officials to what is legal, but what is the right thing to do or not do in this case.
cleek
@Mnemosyne:
yes
gnomedad
I will make it legal.
Cassidy
@MikeJ: Google knows first because you looked it up.
Hill Dweller
@Ted & Hellen: The only racism is reverse racism, amirite?
JWL
Even if laws were broken, Congress will just pass another law granting people immunity (and remember, ..”corporations are people, my friend”).
Chyron HR
@Ted & Hellen:
If you hate “Moochelle” so much, why don’t you just
summarily executeStand Your Ground against her? I’m sure the jury will understand when you explain that she was sending threatening text messages.MikeJ
@Cassidy: But they ain’t telling Target about it, and Target doesn’t need to ask Google.
Emma
@The Friendly Libertarian: Jackass.
burnspbesq
Over at Volokh’s Nest of Libertarian Vipers, Orin Kerr provides some useful context.
volokh.com/2013/06/05/is-verizon-turning-over-records-of-every-domestic-call-to-the-nsa/
Keith
Sensenbrenner is now saying it’s illegal.
BTW: This does bring to mind the assertion by an AT&T employee back around ’06 who claimed that the NSA had their own room the hooked right into the AT&T network switchboard.
? Martin
I would also add that you are being tracked in other ways. Some (not many) municipalities can track individual vehicle movements through either (and often a combination of) traffic monitoring cameras and induction loop sensors. This is not difficult as vehicles have limited options in where to go from a given sensor and have an upper bound on how quickly they can move, so a given signal only needs to be searched for in a very limited radius. From the camera and loop sensor information they can determine make/model/color of the vehicle through software. They use this information to measure traffic patterns, but they could use it for broad tracking. They can likely estimate where that vehicle owner lives and works. Where they shop. How long they spend at each location. Whether they exceed the speed limit. Adding red light cameras would get license plate detection, occupancy detection and the ability to link the information back to the person individually.
White Trash Liberal
This has likely impacted over 100 upstanding white citizens. Therefore, the ethical scale leans BAD.
So long as national security remains the Achilles Heel of a democratic executive, that executive will exercise all manner of power afforded to the office to prevent or capture terrorists.
What is needed is a Congress with sanity, a media that encourages sanity, and a robust sane public discussion about how one catastrophic terrorist attack has created three trillion dollars in wars and police state overreach… And the wisdom of our trajectory.
In other words, sanity. Not what we will be seeing in the public discourse where it will be limited to the character of the administration and whose team to which we belong.
danielx
Land of the free and home of the brave, indeed….land of the spied-upon and home of the terrified-by-9/11, more like. And most people seem to be just fine with all this. Does nobody read history any more?
Once government has a given power it will be used, and as time goes on that use will expand.
Citizen_X
@askew: If it takes a combination of hypocritical Republicans and hypocritical Dems to rein in the national security state, I’m fine with that.
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
There are now some indications that this is a routine reauthorization of an ongoing program.
politico.com/story/2013/06/report-nsa-verizon-call-records-92315.html?hp=t1_3
Mandalay
@Chyron HR: That is a very uncool post, and there is no need to ever go down that path.
White Trash Liberal
And does the timing of this leak have anything to do with Susan Rice being nominated as National Security Advisor?
Irresponsible… Speculate…
Mnemosyne
@cleek:
@burnspbesq:
Okay, thanks. The original story that Anne Laurie posted was really unclear about whether this was a specific criminal investigation or a general data-mining operation. Given the massive freakout here over the investigation of the Associated Press, it could have been either one.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
Google tracks people much more extensively. If you check (or possibly fail to uncheck; I don’t remember which) a specific box on your Android phone, Google will track your location. If you leave the GPS on, it will have your location with quite high accuracy. They appear to use this for legitimate purposes- the most interesting of which is generating real-time traffic reports- but it could obviously be used for evil.
MikeJ
@White Trash Liberal: You say that as if there is anybody Obama could nominate that wouldn’t make Republicans throw a shit fit.
Citizen_X
@The Friendly Libertarian:
I’m pretty sure that the Koch brothers aren’t part of “us,” and they don’t think they are, either.
? Martin
@MikeJ:
They are, but in other ways. I’ll get targeted ads from Amazon based on my searches. Even if Amazon created an ad page for every possible product and Google is handling the matching without telling Amazon, Amazon still knows that I loaded that ad, therefore Google transferred that information (albeit indirectly) to Amazon. The end result is the same. It doesn’t work if you don’t have enormous granularity in the ad content, but at least in the case of Amazon they appear to have a very high level of granularity.
NickT
@The Friendly Libertarian:
And yet your mob always ends up defending white privilege and voting for the GOP. Why is that?
Suffern ACE
@White Trash Liberal: No. The NSA Director is not the National Security Advisor.The NSA is part of the Defense Department.
askew
@Citizen_X:
No one is going to do a damn thing about this. The hypocritical Republicans and Democrats are just using this as another excuse to attack Obama. It’s a silly waste of time to get upset about. It’s legal and it’s been going on for years and no on is going to stop it.
MikeJ
@? Martin: The “Target knows you’re pregnant” story comes from info Target gleaned from their own systems. They figured out that women who buy cribs and diapers buy lots of unscented lotion a few months before that. They’re able to pretty accurately guess a due date based on what combination of products you buy.
It’s really just an extension of the refrigerator that knows when you need to buy milk, but on a larger scale.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@White Trash Liberal: @MikeJ:
I don’t think that it’s about Rice in particular, but I do sense a well-timed monkey-wrenching .
Alex
It’s legal. It’s been challenged in Court, but nothing has come from that (usually thrown out on standing).
It’s been in place since 2001. Post-2006 (after it was revealed) the main change is getting a judge to sign off on it every three months.
ranchandsyrup
I WANT TO BE KEPT PERFECTLY SAFE BUT AM NOT WILLING TO SACRIFICE ONE IOTA OF ANY PERCEIVED PERSONAL FREEDOM. OK GUBMINT? BEN FRANKLIN SAID SO!!
liberal
IIRC some antiestablishment guy got in a big spat with GG. The former said “WTF you making a big deal about this for? The NSA routinely monitors all traffic [content not just metadata]; they circumvent the law by mining it at points overseas, or by exchanges with foreign govts.”
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Keith: Well, when President Blacksnake Hussein does it, of course it is.
Sensenbrenner should have read the legislation allowing this, you know, the legislation he “wrote”. And voted for multiple times. That is, assuming he can read. Evidence does not support that assertion, sadly.
White Trash Liberal
@Suffern ACE: I know the difference. I threw the comment in as chum.
liberal
@Citizen_X:
/begin{standard libertarian trope about how private agents can never oppress anyone, only public ones can}/end
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Suffern ACE:
Tell that to Andrew Napolitano’s key viewing demos.
Legalize
It’s probably “legal”. This doesn’t mean it was “lawful”.
liberal
@Mnemosyne:
The latest gossip I saw over at LawyersGunsandMoney is that it involved handing over all metadata records, but not for Verizon, but rather “Verizon Business Services”.
Tractarian
@Roger Moore:
This. I have to believe that many people are simply refusing to accept this extremely important fact.
BUSH WIRETAPPED = ILLEGAL
OBAMA GOT PHONE RECORDS = LEGAL
? Martin
Still haven’t heard anyone explain how this violates their privacy.
John O
I think the whole issue is well-described here. Apologies to those for whom His Rudeness offends.
It’s too late.
SatanicPanic
@ranchandsyrup: That’s why he wrote it into the Constitution- “We hold these truths to be self-evident. Life, liberty and happiness”
Roger Moore
@Tractarian:
Also, this stuff apparently goes back 7 years, so even if you accept that this is somehow worse than warrantless wiretapping, the most you can claim is that Obama is exactly as bad as Bush.
LGRooney
@askew: IOW, trying to divide the other side and separate the major poutragers from the major mealymouthers?
Howlin Wolfe
IAAL. My personal opinion is that it’s unconstitutional regardless of statutory interpretation. Until a court of competent jurisdiction, seasoned by completion of the appeals process, agrees with me, it’s anybody’s guess. So, JC, in my world it’s unconstitutional, therefore, “illegal”.
A court could find the statutory interpretation faulty for some reason, too. But I have no opinion on that at this time.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@? Martin:
Huh? The government has no business acquiring millions of users’ call records, even if (ha!) they didn’t also get the content. Investigating a specific crime or threatened crime with a warrant “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized” is one thing, dragnetting is something else entirely: it’s a general search.
Tom_B
@Trollhattan: ” It became theft when she refused to have sex with him or give the money back, they said. Gilbert testified earlier Tuesday that he had found Frago’s escort ad on Craigslist and believed sex was included in her $150 fee”. If he didn’t believe his life was in imminent danger, it is hard to argue self-defense, and if it’s theft, that’s a police matter, not a justification for deadly forcer, though, as a would-be John, I can see why he’d be reluctant to bring them in. Under the rule of double jeopardy, they probably can’t retry the idiot unless some kind of mistrial is declared, but the victim’s family, if she has one, can certainly sue in civil court for every last penny the guy has.
ranchandsyrup
@SatanicPanic: Man, I hear that one all the time…….and when I point out where that language comes from the response is “Constitution, Declaration, same difference”.
John O
If only Americans were as invested in #4, my personal favorite, as they are #2.
Emma
@? Martin: And you ain’t going to get one. I am sitting here trying to figure it out and I can’t. This is metadata collection, which is done routinely. For example. I often get targeted ads on this blog — the day after I searched for something. The ads are different if the original search was done at home or at work. I don’t like it — the ability of the government to know who I’m calling kinda squicks me out. But they’re not getting the substance.
I figure this is part of a major brute-force data analysis project.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Roger Moore:
Oh yeah, that’s exactly what it will do.
That’s the first reaction I can imagine people having: “Gosh, I had my doubts before, but this news about the Administration ordering phone companies to hand over all call records makes me realize that Obama is not like Bush at all!”
I mean, even if your parsing about legality is correct, it’s complete fantasy to imagine it having that effect, sorry.
piratedan
OT: but from I understand, the GOP just essentially pissed on the DREAM Act revoking the previous changes. So in their eyes, if you’re a child who was brought over or married a serviceman, you’re a criminal in the eyes of the GOP. Methinks that the myth of a rebranded GOP that reaches out to minorities will still be perpetuated by the media this Sunday. Looks very promising for Rubio’s Immigration Bill now too don’t it?
replicnt6
@? Martin: Here’s how it violates my privacy: seeing that I make 10 phone calls per day to my local gun store lets them put me on the list for when they come for our guns.
Howlin Wolfe
@Ted & Hellen: No, it’s racist to make a lame joke about Michelle (“She’s Black, you know! HAHAHAHA!) to somehow deflect any criticism that you mignt be racist.
You may be a cracker if you can’t let go of the fact of somebody’s race when race is irrelevent.
kindness
The FISA Court signed off on it. It’s legal.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@The Friendly Libertarian: Ummm… fuck you, the Federal government has been fighting for MY human rights (off and on) since 1860.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@danielx:
You’re new to this site, aren’t you? The zeitgeist here is that any form and degree of spying is justified because (1) they’re only trying to protect us; (2) there never was any right against it; (3) the spying isn’t violating that nonexistent right; (4) the government is already spying on us in other ways; (5) Google is already spying on us; (6) Our cell phone are already spying on us; and (of course) (7) If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear / Shut up you libtard.
Churchlady320
As long as they got a FISA warrant and as long as they are looking at ‘metadata’ I am not so worried.
As one who got a very bizarre phone call in 2003 from someone who knew the entire CONTENT of an entirely internal email discussion by my organization’s Board concerning protesting FBI over-reach against Muslim sermons (demanding they read them before they were delivered), I think I’m pretty clear on the differences. This person was on a major fishing expedition demanding the names and addresses of all the Board members. I refused. Clearly we’d been hacked by some government agency, and I’m feeling even now pretty clear there was no warrant.
Like the Patriot Act or not, this is legal. Like the Patriot Act or not, the care shown to deal with patterns of calls NOT individuals and NOT the content gives me some measure of peace. The 2003 call was proof of the government’s desire to do whatever the hell it wanted. This shows restraint, concern for civil liberties and privacy, and does not, I think, rise to any 4th Amendment issue.
Your content is private, but your call record – given freely by each of us to a for-profit company – may not be. In any case the FISA warrant is important since Bush’s outrageous actions were done without any warrants at all. There IS a difference here. A big one.
Cassidy
@Tonal (visible) Crow: Don’t worry. The NSA doesn’t care about all your calls to the goat blowing hotline(s).
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@replicnt6: Jesus, and I thought I was paranoid.
Suffern ACE
The “Investigating the Marathon Bombers” doesn’t make much sense. The Justice Department knows who they are and knows how to reach them and would know how to find out who they were calling or where they were surfing and what they were eating by now.
I’m still not certain what the NSA gets from all this data. Yeah, yeah, they can mine and map and all I can think of is that some bald guy in a wheelchair sits in a giant spherical room and all the potential terrorists, lefty radicals and spies appear as red lines. Or so he thinks. And then what?
? Martin
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
But the records don’t identify YOU. That’s not part of the warrant. All they know is that a call was made. They don’t know that YOU made the call or even who owns the account.
Privacy involves identity. Its why you post under Tonal Crow – to protect your privacy. I have no idea who you actually are. I can correlate a lot of data about Tonal Crow, about the positions he (or she) holds, who he interacts with, where he probably lives baed on the times that he posts. But for all I know you could be my neighbor or one of my relatives. I have no idea. Your privacy is quite well protected by anonymizing your identity. The call records are comparably anonymized.
If they want to know who actually placed that call, they have to get yet another warrant for that specific phone number to learn the identity of the person who owns that account. Now, we don’t know the standards for that warrant, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for being suspicious of those standards, but that step isn’t part of this program.
mb
I have no idea of the legality, though I kinda think that end was covered by O&Co, but I don’t really see how the development of the database itself is an Evil. Sure could be misused, but I also can see ways for it to be a real asset. Particularly, contra Atrios, if it had remained more or less secret.
IF, if, if, if and I repeat, if, all you’re doing is establishing a database of so-called meta-data to use as a historical reference once you have identified a terrorist and his/her phone number, that seems like an almost unalloyed Good to me.
Can it be used evilly? Yeah, but I’m really tired of spending my life at the top of slippery slopes. Paranoia is wearing.
burnspbesq
@Howlin Wolfe:
Based on what? Let’s have this conversation.
I assume you think that there is a Fourth Amendment problem here. Tell us which cases support your view (or, alternatively, tell us which cases you think were wrongly decided, and why).
Cassidy
@Suffern ACE: A lot of miltary intel/ intel is based on pattern recognition. My gues is that as we gather HUMINT/ ELINT from overseas, if it involves any kind of connection here in the states, the informatuion is already collated and processed for faster identification, warrants, etc.
Tractarian
@Legalize:
In this context, “legal” is synonymous with “lawful”
Mandalay
@? Martin:
And I haven’t heard my government explain why this is necessary.
I bet I have to wait longer than you.
pseudonymous in nc
Is it legal? Yeah, more or less. Should it be? Well, that’s up to the population to decide.
@? Martin:
That’s disingenuous. We’re talking about the uncanny valley of data-crunching here, where time sequences and clusters and contexts are much more revealing than the data points themselves. Google already talks about the “creepy line”, and what that tells us is that it can mine things from data that it chooses not to share because it makes the company look [even more] like a stalker than it does now.
Comrade Dread
Yes, this was all perfectly legal.
The government has done exactly that which it was empowered to do by Congress through various statues, the most recent being the Patriot Act. So for Congress to act shocked (Shocked!) that the thing they made legal is being done is the height of hypocrisy.
If the GOP hacks were that concerned about it, they’d be proposing a bill to make it illegal. But the odds of that happening are zero.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@? Martin: Are you seriously arguing that phone numbers do not closely identify the participants in a phone call? Because the numbers are included in this spying program, which covers:
Also included are
Again, are you seriously arguing that this information does not closely identify the parties to a phone call?
John O
@? Martin:
I must be being blindly stupid here, but how does mining calls not de facto IDing the callers? Phone numbers and people is a very 1-1 relationship.
Help a brother out.
replicnt6
@? Martin: Wait, are you comparing my phone number to my nym in terms of privacy? You’re kidding, right? You’re trolling, right? You need a warrant to get my name from my number? Holy shit, don’t tell anyone about bigyellow.com (do they even exist any more?).
Cassidy
@John O: Not exactly. I have 3 lines on my cell plan all identified under me, but I only use one.
I think the idea is that they have information that can be easily used to identify the actual caller, but it requires a warrant to get a name and the contents of the conversation.
Suffern ACE
@Cassidy: Yeah. And then what? So say I’m a Pakistani and I call my mom every Sunday. Then my Uncle gets sick so I start calling my mom and a bunch of other people twice a day to check on his status for a week or two. The NSA picks that up and what? Decides to look into my other records? Uses that to as a pretext to examine the contents of my calls or my emails? Sends an agent to my house to follow me around to see that I’m just the same run of the mill accountant I was last week? What does this stuff tell them and lead them to do?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Suffern ACE:
Did you see that first link provided by burns?
Could there be abuses here? Maybe. But it could be that Greenwald got played like the reporters who ran with those poorly sourced Benghazi e-mails not too long ago.
John O
@Cassidy:
Thank you for the explanation.
I still think it’s totally and criminally bogus.
pokeyblow
Asking whether this is legal sounds suspiciously like looking backward to me.
We’re only supposed to look forward.
Emma
@John O: Yes. However, let’s say the NSA computer notices that your cell phone has been calling a number in Afghanistan every Wednesday at 10 am and that right after that there’s been incidents which is classified as terrorism in the same area code as that phone. They now want to actually hear what you said and to whom. At this point, they have to go get a warrant to be able to access your actual calls.It’s probably more sophisticated than that, but I think that’s what they’re doing.
They’re looking for patterns. I think they will be less successful than they think they will be, but that’s mostly guesswork
Culture of Truth
It’s legal in the sesne that it follows written statutes, which have been upheld by several high courts, and was signed off on by a neutral judge. So thats’ pretty legal. If this is an ongoing program, then what is probably going on is that all phone companies turn over all call information every 90 days, and the NSA stores it until they need it later for a terror investigation, then they get another warrant to access specific call information from the big stockpile.
Culture of Truth
Forget whether it’s legal, let’s assume it is. Should it be? What do we want the policy to be?
ranchandsyrup
@pokeyblow: There’s the RW talking point you’ve been itchin to throw out there. Oh well. I’ll enjoy your pie related comments going forward.
burnspbesq
@Mandalay:
The Politico piece I linked to in comment 44 gives you the explanaation you’re seeking. You may not like it, but that’s not the same thing as not having it.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@replicnt6:
Yessiree, it is that obvious.
Cassidy
@Suffern ACE: Well, you’re coming at from the wrong end. So hypothetically, they have the vast database of calls from specific phone numebr to another. During their intel gathering they get a phone number of a suspicious person, compare it to the database and your numebr is one that calls it on a regular basis. At that point, and I’m guessing, I’d assume an analysis is done on the length of the calls and frequency, more investigation done on the suspicious number and then, if enough suspicion warrants it, get a warrant to look at the conversations you’ve been having.
This particular data storage allows for the connection to be made faster, which under the pretense of national security, does make some sense in tha the idea is looking to make connections as fast as possible to prevent acts of terrorism. I’m not exactly agreeing with it, but I can see the justification.
SatanicPanic
@ranchandsyrup: Law of the land, revolutionary manifestos, you say potato I say potahto.
patroclus
I think the best way to look at it is that it is presumptively legal in that it complies with the applicable statutes and there has arisen no case or controversy as yet in which a court has opined that it is not legal. As others have already pointed out, this is not the Bush administration NSA eavesdropping; which didn’t comply with the statutes until Comey and others made their stand – this is data mining for call records without the necessary identification and the listening in to the substance of the calls. Hence, while it is clearly violative of privacy, it isn’t the complete loss that the warrantless eavesdropping entailed.
Congress authorized it in FISA, the Patriot Act and in the most recent FISA amendments and all Presidents since have taken advantage of that, including Obama. The libertarians are right that there isn’t much difference on this issue between Dems and Reps other than the Cheney/Gonzalez attempt to go even further. Congress could change it but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
different-church-lady
@The Friendly Libertarian:
Yup. Honestly, could genocide and gulag be more than a year away?
pillsy
@Culture of Truth:
Have many people in Congress expressed outrage? So far I’ve just seen a bunch of Senators (Rs included) saying that they’re totally behind the Administration doing all this stuff Congress wanted them to do. The main exceptions are Wyden and Udall, who we knew hated it beforehand.
It would be nice if Congress were being more hypocritical about this.
ranchandsyrup
@SatanicPanic: Take that King George!
I’d like to see someone sue the gubmint for violating their right to pursue happiness under teh declaration.
? Martin
@pseudonymous in nc: No, I get that. I do a lot of data mining, and part of my job is to make sure that individuals cannot be identified by statistical data. Part of what you want to do when mining data is to build affinities that allow you to draw conclusions for that generic individual by taking patterns in some other context and statistically inferring what they will do in the context your interested in.
But here’s the rub – narrowing patterns down to individuals gets exponentially harder as the dataset gets larger. You have to build new affinities at a terrific rate to compensate for that. You get some for free due to the nature of the data (location, time), but the intelligence agencies would need a ton of data from other sources to really be able to break that privacy barrier. That’s why they still use warrants – they can’t actually solve the problem.
Jewish Steel
By replying to this comment you consent to be treated by google and target as a pregnant Jew.
replicnt6
@different-church-lady:
I think the next six months will be decisive.
different-church-lady
Why do we hate it?
replicnt6
@? Martin:
Don’t you have that backwards? It seems that narrowing patterns down to individuals gets logarithmically harder as the dataset gets larger. In the abstract, spherical cow world, if each attribute split the dataset in two, you’d need approximately log_2 attributes to identify individuals.
sherparick
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Yep, another case of “IKOIYR,” while if the Kenyan Socialist Usurper does it, well, that is just “Tyranny, I tell you, Tyranny.” Also, if the order goes back 7 years, then Sensenbrenner should have know about it. I remember him just riding rough shod and making snide remarks about John Conyers being concerned with “Terrorist” rights. That MSM and Politico let him get away with this hypocrisy is really sickening.
The good thing about this story is that suddenly the pendulum is starting to turn, despite the Boston Marathon attack, and perhaps we can now get some of the laws Sennsenbrenner was so instrumental in passing repealed or restrictively amended.
Culture of Truth
A frew congresscritters have expressed support, as far as I know. I want to know more before I decide. Like Cole, instinctively, I’m opposed. And I don’t like the idea of massive ongoing search / database creation to be used for endless creative fishing expeditions. But if this a limited search for people in contact with the Tsarnaevs, for example, or if all information is stored in a virtual lockbox, with extra limits on access, I might be okay with it. Or maybe not.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Culture of Truth: That would be a great set of questions to be asking. We, theoretically, and for a short time did, have a group of people, no two groups of people who should be asking those questions for us: Congress and the press (that short period of time was from the late 60s to the early 70s).
What do we have now? “The president did something legal but wrong.” Once your brain parses that sentence, you give up.
different-church-lady
@replicnt6:
A Friedman!
A Friedman!
I love ya!
A Friedman!
It’s always… six months a-waaaaaay!
John O
@different-church-lady:
Because it’s a clear overreach of the very tightly constructed 4th Amendment. There is no probable cause. It’s just a giant exercise in creating probable cause.
Culture of Truth
Can you imagine if we ever had a modern President with wiretapping powers name George, how much mileage critics would get out of calling him “King George”? LOL
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@? Martin:
That’s some Hari Seldon psychohistory shit you’re talking there.
different-church-lady
@John O: So, Verizon’s 4th amendment rights are being violated?
Davis X. Machina
I figure this is part of a major brute-force data analysis project.
Pretty soon, traffic analysis might be all the intel and law-enforcement people have left.
Their ability to read content without non-trivial expenditure of money and hardware seems to be coming to an end, or they wouldn’t be hammering away at the need for new backdoors quite so hard.
? Martin
@John O: But it’s just a number. It could be any random number. Until it maps back to your billing data, it doesn’t identify YOU. It just identifies a generic individual that without a warrant they cannot identify as you. They don’t have your name, or your address, or any personal data about you other than what they can glean from the call records. They need to go to the court to specifically request that information about you, presumably under a higher standard. High enough standard? Probably not, but we don’t know. The standard for any search warrant is pretty opaque to us.
And it’s not entirely 1-1. I have two phones at home (land, mobile) and one at work. Connecting those three is somewhat difficult, and connecting all 3 to me is damn hard. That adds a surprising amount of noise to the data. And that excludes times when I borrow someone else’s phone (which is surprisingly often) which also adds a lot of noise.
jl
@? Martin: Hello fellow data miner! Another point is that you need to test your estimated model on a large set of data that was not used for estimation to test how well your model holds up when you use it on new data.
Unless you have that, it is very hard to tell whether you have uncovered real patterns for just chance patterns.
I think having that kind of large data set to validate what you think you have found with the data mining is almost impossible in the criminal investigation and spy business. That is why I think alot of talk about the use of data mining in anti-terrorism is BS, or a cover. I don’t see how it can be a reliable tool for actually finding individuals or groups in real time. Maybe good to narrow the number of leads down to something manageable, but pretty soon you have to get warrants to look at phone logs or listen in on calls.
I remember reading an article about some data mining program that was run under Bush II, and it seems to have been used by people who did not understand the limitations of data mining. The article said the program just produced thousands of leads that turned out to be nothing.
Comrade Misfit
On the 69th Anniversary of D-Day, it’s interesting to recall that that war was fought to defeat the forces of tyranny and to secure the blessings of freedom and liberty.
Seems kind of quaint, now.
replicnt6
@different-church-lady: Does that have a tune? Sound like it must, and I just don’t know enough music.
pokeyblow
@ranchandsyrup: Very odd to me that my fixation on war-crimes punishment for Bush-admin officials is continuously construed as right-wing. One has to ask: Do you have some kind of head injury?
ranchandsyrup
@Culture of Truth: In my fantasies, there is only one prezident named George.
Tonal (visible) Crow
Government does not need a warrant to search the White Pages or its many online relatives. They are public information.
cleek
@replicnt6:
anyone can walk into a store and buy a prepaid disposable cell. your name won’t be attached to it. there’s no way to find your name from it.
and remember, this is Verizon, a cell phone carrier. there is no public reverse-lookup for cell phone #s.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@different-church-lady: I’m going to tie it back into the earlier discussion of collecting DNA evidence. You shouldn’t be able to say “I think someone is guilty of something so give me all this data.” You should have a specific reason. I don’t know their reason and what they used to convince the judge, so I can’t speculate on that.
John O
@? Martin:
You have WAY more confidence in your government’s inability and willingness to pry than I do.
They can and will do whatever they want with the data, IMHO.
replicnt6
@cleek:
a) Have you bought a burner recently? A ways back, I wanted to checkout T-Mobile coverage in my area before switching. I couldn’t activate the sim without identifying myself. But it’s true that cell-to-name lookup is harder, but I’m remain skeptical that it actually requires a warrant.
b) Remember, Verizon is not just a cell phone carrier. Indeed, I happen to have Verizon land-line service.
patroclus
@different-church-lady: We hate it because it is another step along the slippery slope towards a complete loss of all privacy. All electronic communication is essentially monitored these days – data is mined for virtually everything we do on our phones and computers. It used to be that this was never done; then it was done for only overseas communications, now it is collected on a routine ongoing basis. There is a trade-off between security and privacy and the movement in recent decades has consistently been towards security rather than privacy.
As to today’s news, we also hate it because it was apparently a leak of a 3 month approval process that was supposed to be routine and classified. But the trade-off there is that there are leaks all the time and we live in a democratic republic where virtually everything is debated.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Comrade Misfit: Yep, when blacks came back to America, they were full fledged citizens.
I normally hate to sound like this, but “Seems kind of quaint, now” is one of the stupidest lines ever.
different-church-lady
@replicnt6:
Oh, so you’re the other one.
MikeJ
@Comrade Misfit: And the 38th anniversary of a different act by some brave men.
It was the dark of the moon, on the 6th of June in a Kenworth pullin logs
Cabover Pete with a reefer on and a Jimmie haulin’ hogs….
Never forget!
SatanicPanic
@ranchandsyrup: I’m surprised some enterprising wingnut state legislatures haven’t passed bills based on it yet. That I’ve heard of.
D58826
The federal judge who signed off on the Verizon wiretap is the same judge who two years ago said Obamacare is a gross violation of the rights of the people and therefore unconstitutional.
We have reached the point that the leaders of a two bit tinhorn banana republic would be embarrassed to be seen in our company.
Mandalay
@burnspbesq:
Thanks, but that article does not include any explanation from the government on why this policy is necessary. In particular, I was surprised that
That’s very strange, since he wasn’t remotely interested in national debate prior to the leak.
If the government wants to do this stuff it is not enough for it to be legal/lawful. It needs to be open about doing it. Amorphous bluster about “national security” and “terrorist threats” just doesn’t cut it.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@cleek:
True (assuming you don’t use a credit/debit card to buy it), but mostly irrelevant because most people who have cell phones (and everyone who has a land line) has submitted their identity to the phone carrier.
Searching for the relevant terms turns up many websites claiming to provide this service.
ranchandsyrup
@SatanicPanic: Yet…..
Also, speaking of D-Day, this is just awesome from The Onion. theonion.com/articles/shaven-cologned-grandpa-heads-into-town-to-rake-in,32713/?utm_source=Facebook&…
Suffern ACE
@patroclus: Yeah. My guess is that it was leaked and published overseas in the Guardian to goad the leak busters in the administration into another scandal.
? Martin
@replicnt6: That’s true if you can directly connect those two attributes, but usually you can’t. How many things can you directly connect to a phone number? You might see that this person called a Volvo dealership, but that doesn’t mean they own a Volvo. Maybe they’re shopping for a new car and they own a Honda. Typically you have weak statistical connections, and that doesn’t narrow your set down very quickly.
Todd
Today in conservatism.
gawker.com/now-thats-the-libertarian-dream-in-action-that-man-pai-511645314
Second Amendment Solutions.
Suffern ACE
@Mandalay: I was kind of thinking this morning that if this is routine and everyone knows about, perhaps it is time that at the very least NSA stops using the secret FISA court to obtain this information. This is a matter of “Lets keep that NYT article classified so that no one knows that the CIA reads the New York Times” kind of foolishness. If it is routine, and everyone knows about it now, then what’s the point?
Tractarian
@different-church-lady:
Win.
Hey, someone’s gotta stand up for the rights of Big Telecom, why not Glenn Greenwald?
SatanicPanic
@ranchandsyrup: Ballin!
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Misfit:
And as part of fighting that war, we imprisoned over 100,000 American citizen men, women, and children solely on the basis of their race.
So, unfortunately, it’s always been “freedom and liberty for me, but not for thee.”
Higgs Boson's Mate
Although it may be a sign of my advanced age I can’t help but discern a bit of Phillip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” in this. The gov isn’t gathering all of this data just for the hell of it. I ‘d guess that it will follow up on some of it with the goal of discerning actionable patterns in cell phone calls with the longer term goal of finding actionable patterns in the rhythm of our cell phone calls, emails, and our CC/ATM card purchases. The people behind this will get granular in some thoroughly unpublicized instances but they’ll do so at first only to test their pattern detection algorithms.
We’ve moved beyond whether or not this is legal. In a confluence of fear and politics the gov shat out novel but foreseeable methods to justify its actions and they stood. It will continue to do so.
different-church-lady
@patroclus: But surely the objection in this case must go beyond mere monitoring of phone logs. If the fear were that “someone” could see the data, then the objection ought to be that the data exists at all. If the data itself were the issue, then we would be objecting to the idea that Verizon (or any other phone company) even keeps records that can be turned over to the government.
In this case the objection does not seem to be regarding the existence of the data. It’s instead about the fact that the government gets to look at it. There seems to be an implication that the only problem here is that the government gets the data. Other than that, the data is benign.
JPL
@Mandalay: Actually he said that he wanted the program to be more transparent during one of his speeches, the State of the Union, I think. I’d like to know the cost of the program.
Todd
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
And every damn one of them is bullshit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve longed for a real service like that – it comes up all the damn time.
Mnemosyne
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
The internet claims a lot of things. Are you willing to pay the fee required by those sites to find out how accurate they are?
ranchandsyrup
@SatanicPanic: Grandpa deserves it!
BTW, gonna try to make it down to N. Park tomorrow night.
Mandalay
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
This.
It’s depressing that the thread focuses on the details of issues such as Bush vs. Obama, and lawful vs. legal, rather than the larger issue that the government was engaged in a humongous ongoing secret fishing expedition.
replicnt6
@? Martin:
a) My primary objection is your use sloppy of “exponentially” harder. It’s just not. Even if the ties are only statistical, each attribute, in fact, provides exponentially more precision, even if the base of the exponentiation not that much more than 1. Making the relationship between quantity of individuals and number of attributes required to identify with a given confidence logarithmic.
b) guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/jun/05/data-protection-eu-anonymous
nastybrutishntall
@The Friendly Libertarian: Actually, Obama needs to advocate a little more for the ☭ and less for the $.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
In another thread about this, someone mentioned that there’s a difference between European law and US law with data stuff. IIRC, in Europe they restrict what data is allowed to be collected and/or used, and in the US, we restrict who is allowed to see the data, but not what’s collected or used as long as the “right” person saw it.
People have been saying for years that the Europeans have the better privacy model, and I think those people are probably right.
Tractarian
@Mandalay:
Revised for clarity.
Tractarian
@replicnt6:
I think I read this same thing on @horse_ebooks last week.
? Martin
@jl:
No, I agree. At best I imagine you’re looking for outlying patterns to try to support some hypothesis. If you had a flurry of call activity around the Boston bombing location to Chechnya around the time of the bombing that you don’t see in the hours preceding, that might give you a direction to look at who might be responsible.
My guess is they’re using changes over time in reference to specific events (here, overseas, based on other information gathering tools) to look for those outlying patterns. But the other approach they have is that they likely have an extensive database of calling numbers that are attached to individual names and location that they are surveilling – individuals that they have gotten warrants for, and are looking for anyone contacting any of them in a specific time/location region. They can then request warrants for those contacting numbers.
But in terms of a general dragnet, yeah, I’m really struggling to see how that mass of data is able to reveal anything of use about any individual, even when paired up with other data that is available on the open market.
Todd
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Mine is super easy.
Money turns into stuff, stuff turns into clutter, clutter turns into junk, junk turns into trash.
Chyron HR
@Mnemosyne:
Oh, next you Obots will probably try to convince us that True Progressive icon LBJ did something un-progressive in southeast Asia.
? Martin
@replicnt6:
Fair enough. It was sloppy.
SatanicPanic
@Todd:
What? At that point, why bother with police? And what is special about nightime?
patroclus
@Suffern ACE: Agreed – it is both an immediate embarassment for the Obama administration (he’s data mining!; he’s just like Bush!) and a possible spur for another leak investigation (he’s cracking down on journalists!; he’s worse than Bush!) and fits the current Republican strategy of scandal-mongering at every turn. On the other hand, it’s a legitimate issue that deserves debate.
@different-church-lady: I agree. There isn’t anything really new in these disclosures and it has been debated. The data is the data and we’ve known about this for at least 7 years and probably more. But we still hate the slippery slope and today’s news merely rehashes that.
replicnt6
@Todd: 10/10. Would LOL again!
Mandalay
@JPL:
OK, but he’s been running things for over four years. If he had really wanted transparency it would have happened by now. And we are to believe that now it’s all in the open he’s truly interested in a national debate?
I suspect that is chump change in the scheme of things. I’d like to know the justification. The Politico article had a spokesperson bragging that the program had resulted in identifying one plot. Well (if true)that suggests to me that they have identified exactly one, and no more. Pretty slim pickings.
Suffern ACE
@Mandalay: But are they fishing? I mean when Justice needed to get the phone records for the AP leaker investigation, it didn’t exactly go over to the NSA and ask “hey, since you already have these things, could you save me the trouble and let me take a peak?” It needed its own warrant.
So are they monitoring this stuff to pull out communications from spies and criminals and handing that information to the FBI for counterterrism investigations? Are they monitoring it to try to “Keep us Safe from Future attacks?”. Or is it some kind of database like a mugshot book that they open up after an incident has occured?
ljdramone
@? Martin: Google “National Capital Area License Plate Recognition Program.” I haven’t looked for them in DC lately, but there are definitely LPR cameras located at most major intersections in Baltimore and Annapolis. They’re usually mounted on traffic light standards, but some installations are on streetlights or other structures with a view of the intersection.
I think it’s safe to assume that everybody’s license plate number is being recorded as they drive anywhere within the Baltimore-Washington area. How long the data is retained and what it might be used for is left as an exercise for the reader.
Davis X. Machina
@SatanicPanic: Theft, etc. at night was distinguished from various daytime things way back in the common-law days, before codification of statutes. Sounds like a survival.
? Martin
@SatanicPanic:
Ah, you are now beginning to understand Texas.
Central Planning
@Suffern ACE:
No, the NSA already knows your mom is sick by mining the hospital admissions. They already know your relatives, so this isn’t surprising to them.
Suffern ACE
@Todd: Well, at least your money turns into stuff. Mine just seems to evaporate into thin air five days after payday.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Tonal (visible) Crow: Given the right resources, which the government probably has, it probably isn’t that hard to figure out who owns a cell phone. Remember a few years ago when google released information on some searches by people, but had replaced their name with an ID? Within a day, people had started figuring out who the actual searchers were.
replicnt6
@ljdramone:
This is still a little different from phone records: courts have held than when you’re in public, you have no expectation of privacy, so it’s all good.
Omnes Omnibus
My question and my concern on these warrants is what was the probable cause? I suspect that it would be very easy for FISA court warrants to become “nudge nudge wink wink” things.
Todd
@SatanicPanic:
That’s when your average married Christianist teatard Texan male is shitfaced. Anything can happen (sometimes, with a hooker bobbing facedown in his lap), sometimes judgment calls must be made, and there needs to be some latitude for errors.
Stand your ground, man!
replicnt6
@Omnes Omnibus:
My vague recollection from discussion of the illegal wiretapping was that the FISA court has, in its history, rejected something like 6 requests. I may be off by an order of magnitude, but it is vanishingly small. They have approved over 99% and probably more like 99.9% or 99.99% of requests. So I think the nudge nudge wink wink was baked in from the start.
Mandalay
@Suffern ACE:
Well I am assuming that is necessary to make it legal. But I take your point – now that everything (?) is out in the open let’s cut the crap and create new legislation that allows the government to routinely monitor all phone calls.
I am sure that Congress will wholeheartedly embrace the opportunity to be seen enacting legislation that allows the government to constantly monitor the citizens who voted them into office!
Todd
@Suffern ACE:
Oh, plenty does evaporate. You should see the sort of stuff it morphs into, however. Tea candles. Useless tablecloths. Floormats.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mandalay: Considering that “plots” are a very rare occurrence, one is probably pretty good. And, while I would love to have a real national debate over how much of the constitution should be rewritten to accommodate everyone’s need to feel safe, all presidents are going to err on the side of using as much law enforcement as possible to protect people. They are the executive. They are tasked with defending the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
jl
” …it is both an immediate embarassment for the Obama administration (he’s data mining!; he’s just like Bush!) and a possible spur for another leak investigation (he’s cracking down on journalists!; he’s worse than Bush!) and fits the current Republican strategy of scandal-mongering at every turn. On the other hand, it’s a legitimate issue that deserves debate. ”
I agree its a legitimate issue. But 90 percent of the hoo haa over it from the wingnuts and the press is BS. Already, maybe half a dozen Senators, both Democratic and GOP, including Boehner, have said what was made public has been more or less standard operating procedure for seven years. Udall came out and said this was what he foresaw and was warning about years ago, but couldn’t go into details.
Yeah, this is a very important issue. But all the nonsense about a new scandal, or you need to be outraged to validate your non-Obot credentials, or ‘worse than Bush II’ is just nonsense.
This stuff started with Bush, continued with Obama, and Congress is fine with it, at least they aren’t going to change the law. This will continue after Obama is out of office.
The scandalmongering is garbage, and I’m not even going to pay any more attention to it.
Suffern ACE
@Mandalay: I don’t know. I’m sure some of that DoD propaganda budget and be used to create an astro-turf group to start holding petitions demanding more surveillance. Some kind of Million Spooks March.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne: Did I mention the nice day trip the wife and I made this past weekend: Whitney Portal and Manzanar.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Omnes Omnibus:
The probable cause probably was that someone (possibly a purported enemy combatant) was found with a Verizon-enabled cell phone somewhere in Pakistan, so the FISC gave the NSA authority to troll much of Verizon’s traffic metadata. Make sense — if you completely ignore the 4th Amendment’s particularity clause.
ranchandsyrup
@SatanicPanic: The Brothel Doctrine. Just like the Castle Doctrine but it applies anywhere and allows you to steal back your cash like it is Grand Theft Auto.
Omnes Omnibus
@replicnt6: And there is the problem. It has all the trappings of legality, all of the pro forma hoops have been jumped through, but unless a real determination by judge that there is probable cause for warrant to issue has been made, the 4th Amendment has been violated.
FWIW I strongly disagree with the SupCt’s take on third party standing – I know, that and $4.50 will get me a latte.
JPL
@Mandalay: Just to clear, I didn’t like the law when Bush enacted it.
If a terrorist overseas is caught with a cell phone, that identifies an American number, I think they should get a warrant and monitor that number. The only thing collecting numbers does is to allow them to see who else was contacted.
Years ago, the NYTimes had an article about the FBI complaining that they were chasing pizza delivery men.
Kristin
@Mandalay: I find it depressing that now we apparently have to prove our privacy is being violated before we’re allowed to express discomfort with the the government having a huge dragnet collection of our communication records. The 4th amendment is not just about avoiding being convicted based on wrongfully obtained evidence.
YellowJournalism
OT: Jake Tapper asked Canadian George Stroumboulopoulos what a “hoser” is. I really wish George had said, “You.”
Bruce S
Ezra Klein’s “Wonkblog” had a completely idiotic headline – “All You Need To Know About the NSA Scandal.”
While I certainly want this kind of surveillance program subject to vigorous debate and oversight, the notion that there is a “scandal” here is nonsensical. It’s crap journalism that exploits an already insanely over-heated media and wingnut environment that is not simply looking for scandals under Obama’s bed, but putting them there if they can’t find them (see Jonathan Karl’s faked “emails”, the trumped-up charges against Susan Rice and the notion that Tea Party groups are being “persecuted” for their fraudulent efforts to use the tax exemption of social welfare groups as cover for political operations that are excluded.) Very disappointing to see this kind of lazy sensationalizing.
JPL
When I read the article today, my first thought was someone wants to continue the summer of non-scandals.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Kristin:
When I hear about things like this, it always makes me feel better to kick a few more dollars over to the ACLU.
Bruce S
@The Friendly Libertarian:
I also have heard the Federal Reserve and Treasury are printing money that isn’t backed by Gold! Terrifying stuff. I think it’s time to order a few thousand additional rounds of ammunition.
Kristin
@Tonal (visible) Crow: Great point. I will do so, as well.
Heliopause
What’s all this nonsense about legality? Presidents hire battalions of lawyers to tell them that what they do is legal. Everything the Bush Admin did was legal (one small exception), otherwise they’d have been prosecuted for doing illegal things, right? Holder says everything they’re doing is legal so it is. Why do you ask silly questions?
SiubhanDuinne
@No One of Consequence:
“Fairly prescient in hindsight” needs to become a rotating tag. (And YAY! for the return of rotating tags.)
Bruce S
@Ted & Hellen:
“I’m sure Michelle signed off on it so it’s fine.”
Why don’t you buy a ticket to the next fundraiser she appears at and try confronting her about it?
mai naem
@Central Planning: He’s talking about his Pakistani mother in Pakistan. I doubt the NSA knows the hospital admissions in Pakistan.
I’m sure this is legal but I think it’s stupid. I have had different different cell phone carriers over the years. Yes, the people do ask for your I.D. even when you get a disposable phone. But, to me, if you really intend to do some terrahrist act and have half a brain, you can do several things about getting an ID: 1/physically steal an ID(not that difficult if you are really determined to do it 2/ ID info theft where you use the info to get prepaid credit cards and get stuff online 3/Manufacture a fake ID. From the little stores I’ve gone to, they’re run by people who really don’t give a crap about terrahrists, they’re just trying to hook your phone up and make their money 4/Buy a phone on craigslist with some time left on it so that it’s not disconnected and keep on paying for it(I bought a T-mobile phone from a friend and kept on paying the amount – the phone was still under his name – Tmobile didn’t give a crap as long as I kept on paying)5/Go to the extreme and set up one of those cheapie kiosks/online cellphone stores and steal a customers info. I don’t think anything I’m saying hasn’t been thought up of by terrahrists. I just think that if you’re going to keep info on so many people, it’s going to be harder to pick out the true red flags.
srv
This debate is so 2005.
Person of Choler
@Roger Moore: I take a look here once in a while to be sure that the lefties are giving the Yabbut Bush the loving horticultural care they always have before. I see that it is well fertilized, watered, and receives the right amount of sunlight.
Carry on.
Hal
@Bruce S:
Very disappointing to see this kind of lazy sensationalizing.
Everything is a scandal. Regular news just won’t do it. It’s like the repeal the “Monsanto Protection Act” you see all over the Internet. Saying repeal the Farmer Assurance Provision in bill HR 933 just isn’t all that interesting.
Mandalay
@Bruce S:
You’re dead right – it is an idiotic headline – but I suspect that Kein had no control over that.
Actually the headline is doubly idiotic since his article doesn’t label it as a “scandal”, and is actually a pretty evenhanded summary of the situation and the issues raised.
Corner Stone
“But was it legal?”
I love you, John Cole.
Omnes Omnibus
@Heliopause: Actually, if the Admin followed the law as it currently exists, sought and received a warrant from the correct court, and used the information it received only in ways authorized by the law, the Admin’s actions were legal. If the warrant was, as I believe, defective because the judge issued it without probable cause, it is on the judge. If FISA or the Patriot Act are found unconstitutional, the Admin was still justified in presuming a duly enacted piece of legislation is constitutional until such time as a court holds that it is not.
Bruce S
@Mandalay:
Glad you pointed that out. Okay – I don’t hate Ezra but I sure as hell hate the WaPo!
belieber
There goes wr0ng way Cole spewing his annoying Greenwald bullshit again.
So easily trolled by Greewald ever single time. Must be some sort of man crush or crush crush.
Tom Q
@jl: I’d actually argue that the reason we’re getting this story now — and at such a fever pitch of coverage — is the press is full-on into its “Obama sucks” mood-swing, and determined to stay in it no matter how many dry holes it turns up. Outrage isn’t the by-product; it’s the goal.
Tangentially related: Jon Stewart has become a full-on part of this, and virtually unwatchable. I’m starting to wonder if he’s too much buddies with Brian Williams, and has absorbed the DC media’s attitude toward Barack (Colbert, thankfully, remains far more skeptical). I’ll be glad when John Oliver takes over for the summer.
SiubhanDuinne
@Roger Moore:
Yes. Yet another example of “the technology itself is neutral, it’s the use to which it is put that is good or evil, moral or im- , licit or il- .”
Cf. atomic energy.
Suffern ACE
So are the student loan interest rates going up on all existing loans or only the ones that students are taking out going forward?
Mandalay
@Tractarian:
No, your revision obscured, because Congress cravenly authorized doing all this shit behind closed doors in secret.
I want everyone in Congress to be open and accountable about authorizing new legislation that allows the government to routinely monitor its citizens/voters, without any need for secrecy.
If there is a legitimate “national security” need the legislation will surely pass, and if it nothing more than an ongoing fishing expedition it will fail. As things stand our government wants to monitor us with zero accountability.
SatanicPanic
@ranchandsyrup: Rad! Hope you can! It should be a great show
Ken Adler
@askew: The GOP isn’t even feigning outrage. Go to NR (if you haven’t eaten yet), the first story is basically defending this. But no self respecting neo-con has any problem with the government spying on you.
Baud
The Supreme Court decided in 1979 that phone data was completely unprotected by the Fourth Amendment. I don’t see how anyone has a constitutional claim here.
joes527
@Tom Q:
So you are saying that GG sat on a story that reflected poorly on Obama because the timing wasn’t right? You need to have your reality meter checked, because you seem to have slipped into a different dimension.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Mandalay:
Someone should write a play about how the Roman Senate allowed Caesar to become emperor because they were tired of the responsibility of governing and just wanted the rewards instead. I suspect Shakespeare would have written something like this had he been living in the 19th century.
Tom Q
@joes527: No — I’d say the reason the story was leaked to Greenwald now was because the press was already in full-throated Obama pursuit, and this was guaranteed to be thrown onto the pile without much search for context.
But thanks for your concern about my reality, dipshit.
Robert Sneddon
As a non-American I find it a little puzzling that private corporate data (the calling records database) is somehow regarded as personal information with an expectation of personal privacy under the Fourth Amendment. The content of the call could well be regarded as a private communication although having it pass through a third party unencoded and trivially recordable seems to negate the idea of a private conversation in the way a letter sealed in an envelope would be.
Mandalay
@Baud:
Our government is now collecting GPS location data for cell phones. The technology did not exist in 1979.
IANAL, but I am sure that some kindhearted lawyer is willing to raise that as a point of issue (for a small fee of course).
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Robert Sneddon: When the 4th Amendment was framed, letters and in-person conversations were the primary means of communication, and were at least theoretically covered by its protections under many circumstances [1]. We now live in a world in which we cannot readily live without using modern means of communications. The interpretation of the 4th Amendment must thereby evolve to give us a qualitatively similar degree of privacy, much as the interpretation of the 1st Amendment has evolved to protect Twitting and texting.
I have had quite enough of the “you gave it to a 3rd party so you have no expectation of privacy” excuse for government trolling our personal information.
[1] I say “theoretically” because it was many decades between the time the Bill of Rights was ratified and the time that the Supreme Court held that its constituent Amendments gave us enforceable rights.
Heliopause
@Tom Q:
Somebody with access to Top Secret FISA court orders risked getting prosecuted for a major federal crime just to score a few political points on Obama? Ballsy.
Corner Stone
@Robert Sneddon: I need to send every communique by post now? I have to hide from my govt when and where I make a phone call, and to whom, because they’re fishing for it all?
Corner Stone
It’s something else to me watching all the people say essentially that Bush started it and Congress approved it so…meh.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: It’s true, man: the government wants to keep a record of every nasty thing you say on the internet. Better work on some rotating handle tech.
Corner Stone
@different-church-lady:
That sounds really dirty.
Baud
@Mandalay:
The theory of the prior case was that phone data in the hands of the phone company is not private. Same could be said about GPS data.
Not saying you’re wrong. Courts revisit stuff all the time and might do so here.
David
The same Ronald Reagan appointed judge that struck down the individual mandate.
? Martin
@Suffern ACE: Only on new loans issued after July 1, 2013.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@different-church-lady: Ha ha ha. The government has no business dragnetting communications, period. It has a carefully-circumscribed power to investigate crimes and acts that seem likely to become crimes. We’ve let it go far beyond that, but some people refuse to see the danger — at least until a partisan they dislike assumes power.
Chyron HR
@Corner Stone:
Well, at least when your grandchildren ask you what you did to oppose the crushing fascism of Obummer, you can proudly say, “I made snide comments at the Obots in the comments section of Balloon Juice.”
Mandalay
@Baud:
Ha – you are right! It looks like that is exactly what our government is arguing…..Feds Say Mobile-Phone Location Data Not ‘Constitutionally Protected’
This isn’t even for a terrorism case. This country is so messed up.
Baud
@Mandalay:
Not surprising. We may not like it, but that’s IMHO the better view of the current state of constitutional law as it currently stands. But like I said, the courts revisit things all the time, and might do so here given the advancement of technology.
Redshirt
@gnomedad:
Thank you for this. If I were here for first post, this would have been my post.
TPM rules!
Mandalay
@Chyron HR
That’s way better than what you did: making a sicko comment about killing FLOTUS…..
@Chyron HR:
You are really creepy.
taylormattd
@Ted & Hellen: no, it’s just you and your ilk that are racist
WereBear
@Trollhattan: Holy crap. So it’s official: in Texas, property means more than someone’s life.
Just think of the ramifications: I buy some cheap gadget at WalMart, it breaks, and I can shoot the clerk if they don’t give me my money back.
Logically, I could hunt down one of the Waltons, and shoot them, if they don’t pony up right away. Whoo-yeah. Frontier justice.
Keith G
@Mandalay:
Last night, I typed about “teamism”. It’s evident in some posts here.
As happened in 1974-75, there needs to be a national discussion about the appropriateness of these types of activities. The President needs to lead.
Corner Stone
@Chyron HR: It’s interesting. At least to me.
I wish I were a chiropractor or MD specializing in spinal injuries. Because the contortions done or attempted on this blog to condone things that would otherwise be blood boiling rage.
I’d be a wealthy lady at this point.
tybee
@Davis X. Machina:
that’s pretty cool stuff.
Corner Stone
@WereBear:
It’s been that way for some time. If you try to steal my property I have the right to use lethal force to stop you. I have no duty to retreat.
Now, if you don’t like that too bad. Because it’s been the legal law since Bush so there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it and if you complain about it you’re clearly some kind of fucking douchebag.
Because if something is legal,…well…then it’s all good.
Heliopause
Hey guess what, Greenwald with others at the Guardian just published another scoop.
El Cid
Wouldn’t it be quicker & simpler now to outine what would not be legal for surveillance?
FlipYrWhig
The significant question isn’t “was it legal?” The answer to that is, pretty clearly, yes. The question is “given that it’s legal but bad, how do we make it illegal?” And the answer to that is, get Congress off its ass to make some laws that will stand, and then shame Obama into signing them. Maybe it’s a good cause celebre for the vaunted left/right civil liberties coalition the blogosphere has been waiting for.
Mandalay
@El Cid:
Easy peasy:
– All phone and internet use by members of Congress and the Administration is strictly off-limits.
– Everything else is fair game without a warrant.
Ted & Hellen
Everything everyone says is racist. So nothing is racist. So we’re all good.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@FlipYrWhig: Time to light up the phones in Congress and the White House, and to kick some more bucks over to the ACLU.
Heliopause
@Heliopause:
Correction: this may not be a “scoop” as other outlets seem to be reporting it.
Ted & Hellen
Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle are such a refreshing and completely different change from George W Bush and Laura.
Oh wait…
different-church-lady
@Ted & Hellen:
No, the two of you still stink.
Robert Sneddon
@El Cid: In this case it’s not “surveillance”, it’s abstracting records already made by the phone company, presumably for analysis in aid of determining criminal intent or action. Surveillance is a cop car at the side of the road looking for speeders or a target criminal operation team monitoring the comings and goings at a suspect’s home, active and specific data collection.
I fully accept any search I make through Google on my browser to be logged and stored, analysed and monetised by the “do no evil” billionaires at Google. I have no expectation of any sort of privacy in that situation. Why phone company records would be recognised as different in kind from someone’s Google search history I’m not sure.
Keith G
@Heliopause: Another log on the fire, as it were.
I do wonder if sometime in the future will President Obama be seen as just one of the many willing foot soldiers of the burgeoning security/surveillance state?
FlipYrWhig
@Tonal (visible) Crow: Anyone who cares about drones/targeted assassinations and pretty much the whole suite of executive power and surveillance issues has a great opportunity to parlay this news into actual action, it seems to me. Obama just got through making a speech about how wartime presidential powers should be rolled back, and the authorization for use of military force should be ended. Push this into that context and maybe something could actually happen. But don’t let it just get thrown onto the pile of Why Obama Sucks And Is Riddled With Many Bad Scandals, because the more people see it as that, the more the people who like Obama will completely tune it out. Point out instead that Obama ought to be happy to sign a law that synchronizes with the views he claims to hold, and “Obots” will be on your side too. And that’s when shit will get real.
Ted & Hellen
@Keith G:
Ummm…that ship’s already sailed….several years ago. Please don’t confront Michelle about it. She doesn’t like the little people to speak directly TO her.
Mandalay
@Robert Sneddon:
Because there is a qualitative difference between your two examples:
– You are using google, and google is (re)using your google data.
– You are using a phone, and the government is getting your phone data from the phone company without telling you.
You really don’t see any difference?
AnonPhenom
@Alex:
Ok IANAL, but I need this explained to me:
“It’s legal. It’s been challenged in Court, but nothing has come from that (usually thrown out on standing).”
If it’s been thrown out because the plaintiff has no standing to bring a case, how can you say the court has ruled on the issue, much less declare that “It’s legal”?
Ted & Hellen
@FlipYrWhig:
Not in a zillion years would the BJ Bots sign on to this. Tis to laugh.
daverave
This is why I carry a burner phone like the mid-level dealers on The Wire and dispose of it every few months. Paranoid, moi?
AnonPhenom
@AnonPhenom:
I mean that’s the issue, no?
The government has kept the practice secret so that no one has “standing” to bring a case and challenge the program in court. So much for court oversight.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: Do people tend to view Kennedy as a stringent anti-communist Cold Warrior?
? Martin
@WereBear:
Don’t exaggerate. You can only do that at night.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
What?
Omnes Omnibus
@AnonPhenom: The courts have not ruled on it because of the standing issues. There is, however, a legal presumption that a law passed by Congress and signed by a president is constitutional until a court rules that it is not.
Corner Stone
@? Martin:
Yeah. And it’s legal. Don’t like it? Too fucking bad. It’s the law.
“But is it legal?” Is now the ultimate standard for all discerning people of quality here.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig:
Indeed. I would say most do, as Kennedy’s team evidenced a passion for anti communist action. Just as Obama’s team shows a passion for surveillance, it seems.
FlipYrWhig
@Ted & Hellen: I defend Obama a lot. In all honesty, I’m not a civil libertarian and this kind of thing doesn’t make me all that upset personally, but I understand why it works that way on other people whose views I respect. But tactically speaking, if the goal is not just to point and laugh at how corporate tool Obama fucked up again as usual but instead to actually change the status quo, it’s worth something to point out that Obama _himself_ JUST SAID he wanted to change the status quo. That way changing the status quo in a civil-libertarian direction becomes a goal of both Obama and Obama’s civil-libertarian critics, like Glenn Greenwald. Fuse that concern with those lately voiced by ambitious Rand Paul-style libertarians and maybe there’s a critical mass to roll back executive power — not just another food fight.
? Martin
@Mandalay:
Google is getting your data off of every page that loads a google ad without telling you. Search isn’t where their best data comes from. The connection between what ad gets served and what page you were on when it was served is their best data.
Google is getting your data thanks to John Cole without anyone telling you.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: Uh, no. Almost no one remembers that about Kennedy. Not because it wasn’t true, but because he’s remembered for other things instead.
Baud
@FlipYrWhig:
You have more hope than I do.
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin: Is google planning to use it to prosecute me for something? Or, fuck it, let’s just give up on the Fourth Amendment, right?
Heliopause
@Keith G:
A more immediate question might be, will Justice abuse the Post and Guardian writers who co-broke this? We don’t need to worry about Obama’s legacy, at the rate it’s going the NSA will simply scrub all the history books of reference to these episodes.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: Is that a “what” of incomprehension or disbelief? Because I don’t think it’s that incomprehensible. If Obama himself thinks that the kinds of executive powers a president has, legally, in wartime should end when it is no longer wartime — he just made a speech taking that as an explicit premise — then there should be no discord between what Obama wants and what civil libertarians a la Greenwald want. If so, “Obots” who reflexively line up behind the president would end up on the same side as civil libertarians, which would be a very important development in terms of the chances of making a change in laws and practices that actually stuck. And if that’s too pollyanna-ish, if nothing else it’d be a great rhetorical trump card: civil libertarians should latch onto the Obama speech about the end of the “war on terror” and use that to bash away at this story.
danielx
All the commentary about legal if not moral, authorized under the Patriot Act, nothing to worry about because it’s only records, not content, etc etc etc….all this presupposes that you take as completely true what the government says, or let’s say the organs of the permanent national security state. And it’s always justified on the basis of “if you only knew what we know, but we can’t tell you because our enemies will find out”, and so on and so forth. So of course they say they’re not harvesting the content of such communications; what else would they say? Ignore that man behind the curtain, and ignore that NSA data center they’re building out in the Utah desert, too.
Call me crazy, but after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Iran-Contra, non-existent weapons of mass destruction – the hits just keep on coming – anyone who takes as gospel everything the government says in the national security arena is naive at best and willfully self-deceptive at worst.
Ted & Hellen
@FlipYrWhig:
What a load of horse shit.
Barack Obama is president of the United States. He can roll back abuse of executive power by, uh, not abusing it and maybe, perhaps…rolling it back himself.
Are you for real?
pseudonymous in nc
@Mnemosyne:
That’s about right, which is why American tech companies whine all the time about EU data protection law, and the US government carves out exceptions to it (banking, flight manifests) by making threats.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Robert Sneddon: How was your time in the Bush Jr. White House? Was Rove really as vulgar as the scuttlebutt says? I ask because you’ve given us exactly the same anti-Liberty line we got from Bush Jr. and his drones when some patriot outed his warrantless wiretapping program.
As I noted earlier, the 4th Amendment’s protections need to track advances in technology, so that the qualitative level of protection against government spying (yeah, I used a naughty word) is similar to what was provided by the 4th when it was framed.
If the 4th is interpreted as applying mostly to communications methods that are impractical for people to use, then its protections are largely meaningless. But then, that’s exactly what the anti-Liberty lobby wants.
FlipYrWhig
@Baud: I don’t have a lot of hope that it will happen, but it seems like a potent strategy — because it makes use of Obama’s _very recent_ words about terrorism and executive power, not Li’l Darrel Issa’s One Stop Scandal Shop.
Baud
@pseudonymous in nc:
I’ve read that Europe has better privacy protections vis-a-vis corporations, but I haven’t heard anything about their national security laws. For example, I was under the impression that UK, at least, had pretty lax privacy laws with respect to governmental surveillance.
FlipYrWhig
@Ted & Hellen: I should know better than this, but, again, in case there’s anything unclear in what I actually wrote, as opposed to someone just wanting to be contrary…
A LAW that forbids certain uses of executive power is a lot more lasting than a choice not to use it. Remember DADT repeal and that whole discussion about how an executive order can be easily changed back, but a law less so?
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig: Well he was fucking Marilyn, but as I recall, wasn’t his greatest claim to presidential fame his steely eyed face down of Khrushchev during a certain near end of the world experience?
I mean jeez Flip, his domestic program was shit and he blew off the Blacks as long as he could.
No, his PR was that he was a stone cold Cold War warrior. So much so that he could get the Russians to the table to conclude the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in Aug. 1963.
Corner Stone
@Baud: I’m not sure about the overall governmental state apparatus, but I can tell you that trying to get data out of Germany is like Atlas shrugging. I’m not going to define how that process happened but it went through 3 countries and 5 official sign offs before it got to me.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@? Martin:
True. Adblock Plus is great for neutering that bull. I’ve added rules to block scripts from all the Google sites I know of. Occasionally I need to unblock some script on a specific site to make it work, but I’ve drastically reduced the amount of stuff Google learns about me. A few malfunctioning sites is a small price to pay for that.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Disbelief.
It’s unbelievable to me that any adult with a certain comprehension level, of which I believe you possess even though you’re amazingly dense sometimes, could say the thing you just said.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: I think you’ll find that Kennedy is better remembered for supporting civil rights (a rep that outruns the facts) and a nebulous sense of glamor, hope, youth, and optimism. This is a sidetrack, but my point is that it’s futile to presume that Obama will be remembered for stuff having to do with the excessive growth of executive power. If the Kennedy example was lousy, substitute for it Reagan, disarmament, and tax increases–all of which he did, but his rep is not based on those.
Corner Stone
This is kind of the whole point. Google, AT&T, Verizon, etc can’t prosecute me. They can’t threaten my essential well being.
When the govt takes their data in a big undefined fishing net then what are we to make of it?
I’m just supposed to shrug and say bygones? Bush had it so why am I bitching now? Teddy Roosevelt would’ve used it at San Juan if he could’ve?
This is a continuation of the normalization of really nasty shit.
Sorry if your apples get bruised when the cart gets knocked over.
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone:
Honestly, I don’t see how people are overlooking that point.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: Well, at any rate, the card I would play if I were an activist civil libertarian would be Obama’s recently stated views about presidential power.
It’s the drones debate all over again: I don’t think that many people say that DRONES R TEH AWSUM — what they usually say instead is that drones and other counterterror strategies should be more tightly regulated: the president has those powers and uses them legally, but he shouldn’t have that kind of carte blanche, and taking it all away would be a good idea. All of that applies here.
Ted & Hellen
@FlipYrWhig:
God, you bots.
Obama can scale back abuse of executive power NOW by scaling back his abuse of executive power NOW.
Sure, it would be great for him to then push for laws that scale back executive power in the future. He’d have a lot more credibility in that push if meanwhile he wasn’t abusing executive power NOW.
For instance, the reason I haven’t murdered plegmnospleen is not that it is unlawful, but that I actually do not believe it would be right to do so. If the law allowed me to murder her, as justified as I might be, I still would NOT murder her. Do you get it?
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
No, what they usually say here is that if Obama is doing it then it must be kosher. And just peachy with them. And anyone who disagrees should look at Bush or wants US troops to die or is objectively pro-terrorist or is racist or is a firebagger or is etc etc etc.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig: Though, I would like to posit that what Obama will be remembered for depends on where his choices take us – and I am worried about his choices in this area. He is using a path, used by others to be sure, which has been seen to be fraught with predictable trouble.
FlipYrWhig
@Ted & Hellen: I don’t give a shit about “credibility.” I care what happens next. If someone with no “credibility” makes something better happen, bring it on. From my standpoint, Rand Paul has no credibility and Glenn Greenwald’s track record shows him to be a preening, tendentious git (though this story feels rather more sound than most of his opinion-based work, and I haven’t picked at it). But if Paul, Udall, Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU team up to create a right-left civil liberties coalition that pressures Obama into signing a law negating the kinds of expansive executive powers that both Bush and Obama have claimed since 2001, pop the champagne.
Corner Stone
“But was it legal?”
Is this 1970’s again?
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: Eh, those are all things that people say to _you_ when you piss them off, but I don’t think they’re the coin of the Obot realm when it comes to anyone’s actual views.
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: Is it legal is a reasonable question to ask if one thinks it is a bad idea. If legal, one must change the laws. If illegal, well then….
ETA: It should help one decide where to direct the outrage.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Forget it. It’s full-on Tourette Syndrome time with some folks.
Mandalay
@? Martin:
Nobody is arguing otherwise, and you are hairsplitting and being disingenuous. As the original poster noted, there is a general expectation/assumption that google is monitoring what you are doing. That is common public knowledge, and google themselves are open about it. Furthermore, I can simply choose to stop using google if I don’t like it.
It is not common knowledge that the government tracks all your phone calls. It is not common knowledge that the phone companies are giving your phone data to the government without telling you. The phone companies and the government go out of their way to avoid publicizing this. Are you going to suggest that I can stop using a phone if I don’t like being monitored by the government?
I do not understand why you are defending the indefensible on this thread.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m sorry you misunderstand.
The question is not being asked to determine what to do next. It’s being framed as a way to shape what we can say about this issue.
Corner Stone
@Baud: Normally I’d respond in some certain way here. But you’re just a sad little thing.
Thanks
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: I really didn’t take Cole’s question that way.
Baud
@Corner Stone:
I appreciate your restraint.
Thymezone
has anyone alleged that what is being done is illegal
Don’t know, but since when does something like matter to the hyena brigades? The fact is that in the world of electronic communication, there’s no reason to have an expectation of privacy and anyone who thinks otherwise is naive and a damned fool. We said this ten years ago when the Patronize Act was new and the phone surveys were all the outrage, and it was true then and true now. Besides, who gives a rat’s ass? If you want to have a conversation of any kind that is really private, then have it in a place and in a way that looks essentially like the confessional down at your local child molestation center … er, Catholic Church, and not on the phone or the fucking internet, and stop whining like a bunch of pussies.
? Martin
@Mandalay:
Now, this is a point I fully agree with. I’m not actually arguing in favor of what’s being done here, rather just arguing that what’s being done isn’t nearly so actually harmful to anyone as they are suggesting.
I don’t fully understand the point of this program other than collecting data for the sake of collecting data, which is a HUGE temptation for anyone who does this sort of thing and has the money to acquire it all. The utility of the data really only opens up once you connect numbers to identities, which they can’t do in most cases. So, I’m not worried that my privacy has been violated. But I don’t see any reason why the government can’t at least acknowledge that it does this and the scale of it. Surely that isn’t going to undermine any efforts here. If they told us how many endpoints they were tracking, and told us how many specific individuals they were tracking, that would at least let us be informed about the program and determine how to tell Congress how to act.
But the argument that this is illegal when all 3 branches of government signed off on it is silly. And the argument that your privacy is in any way violated is silly. Worries of government overreach are a different matter, and worries that government doesn’t feel it needs to hold itself accountable to the public are perfectly valid in my view – and I share those. I don’t like this program. But I don’t think it’s some huge civil rights violation. I think it’s more of a breach of public accountability, so I don’t feel compelled to freak out about it.
And this PRISM revelation is very suspicious to me. We have several prominent companies going out of their way, going on the record to say they’ve never heard of such a thing. That’s odd. That’s not a defensive statement, it’s not the usual platitudes of ‘we take everyones privacy seriously and are in full compliance with the law’. That’s actually a statement on offense because it gives them no deniability if it’s revealed that they did know about it. I’m more inclined at this stage to think that it’s a honey pot to catch the person leaking this information.
If you look at the bottom of this slide: theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/prism-slide-41.jpg
It says “Complete list of details on Prism web page go PRISMFAA. PRISMFAA is this page here: dot.gov/individuals/privacy/pia-prism:
Churchlady320
@Mandalay: @Suffern ACE: They look for patterns of contact. If they find them, they investigate more. I don’t see the problem.
Thymezone
@FlipYrWhig:
So the same demagogues that said my ACLU card made me a traitorous communist will now ally with the ACLU to pressure Obama into negating his power to use the government to protect murricans?
Call me when that actually produces any measurable result. I just don’t see it happening.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: C’mon now. Let’s not kid ourselves. I’m called many things but the reaction I describe is not limited to just me.
Corner Stone
“But was it legal?”
That’s some good shit right there.
sbjules
I agree….so 2005.
Jebediah
@Jewish Steel:
Are you expecting?
Jackie
Just because a single judge says its legal, doesn’t make it legal.
The Fourth Amendment is pretty clear about unlawful search and seizure. And, the FISA courts have always required some type of evidence, no matter how weak. No evidence was required here because we are all being surveilled.
For those who think this is not worse than Bush, how so? These are broad, sweeping searches of a scope never before seen. This is all of us being treated as potential terrorists.
Read the WP today. They are reading keystrokes that we erase before we press send.
This is truly fascistic. To say otherwise is to ignore the truth. They have records from Facebook, Google, all the major phone companies, Apple. For god sake, they have your Skype videos. It’s huge, it’s totalitarian and if you aren’t really outraged, you truly aren’t paying attention.
The Post reports that the slides from the training by the NSA said that these reports make up the bulk of the president’s briefings. Your information is being gathered. They know it belongs to you.
It is true that there is an enormous amount of information available to all kinds of data mining systems. However, that information was mostly controlled by us. Did you think the government had all of your phone records? That they had all of your e-mails, all of your texts, all of your Skype videos? Do you want to have to guard what you say because the government might be listening or reading some stupid thing you might say? Are you willing to give up your right to choose what you make available to the public or the government given that you are a private citizen of a country that wrote your right to unlawful search and seizure into our primary document?
DavidTC
@Trollhattan:
During closing arguments Tuesday, Gilbert’s defense team conceded the shooting did occur but said the intent wasn’t to kill. Gilbert’s actions were justified, they argued, because he was trying to retrieve stolen property: the $150 he paid Frago. It became theft when she refused to have sex with him or give the money back, they said.
Texas: The stupid state.
This decision is nonsense. If you _willingly_ give someone money for a service, and they fail to provide it, the money they possess is not ‘stolen’. It is _fraud_ to fail to provide services after payment, not theft.
Yes, there is the crime of ‘theft by deception’, but that crime is actually about forging payments, and most of the time that specifically says ‘Deception as to a person’s intention to perform a promise shall not be inferred from the fact alone that he did not subsequently perform the promise.’
Apparently, you can fucking shoot people in Texas who you assert have defrauded you. Instead of suing them, like normal people.
And, of course, that now works both ways. It’s now entirely legal to shoot people who can’t pay for their dinner.
What’s more, you can shoot people who have defrauded you, _in your mind_, over a _verbal agreement_, one which you can literally produce no evidence of. (Because you shot the other party to it.)
Seriously, if I were the DA, I’d say ‘Can you produce _any_ evidence that this person agreed to have sex with you for that money?’