You don’t have anything to hide, amirite:
A senior aide to the U.S.’ top intelligence official has admitted that unspecified recent government surveillance efforts “sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law.”
In a very rare public concession, Kathleen Turner, the Capitol Hill liaison for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, not only admitted a federal sidestep of a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden acquired by Danger Room (.pdf), she acknowledged that on “at least one occasion” the court overseeing such intelligence collection “reached this same conclusion.”
That section — known as Section 702 and passed in 2008 — sought to legalize the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance efforts. The 2008 law permitted intelligence officials to conduct surveillance on the communications of “non-U.S. persons,” when at least one party on a call, text or email is “reasonably believed” to be outside of the United States. Government officials conducting such surveillance no longer have to acquire a warrant from the so-called FISA Court specifying the name of an individual under surveillance. And only a “significant purpose” of the surveillance has to be the acquisition of “foreign intelligence,” a weaker standard than before 2008.
“It is also true,” Turner wrote, that the court “on at least one occasion” found that some of “minimization procedures” used by the government while it was collecting intelligence were “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” Minimization refers to how long the government may retain the surveillance data it collects. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is supposed to guarantee our rights against unreasonable searches.
Turner does not specify how extensive this “unreasonable” surveillance was; when it occurred; or how many Americans were affected by it.
Between the war on terror and the drug war, I’m shocked the government doesn’t have a camera on everyone of us all day every day.
Southern Beale
But you know, collateral damage, blah blah. So if one or two people had their e-mails read by the government, if a privacy breach occurred, well, we’re so sorry but it’s all in the interest of keeping the rest of us safe so, SUCK IT UP!
But put a teeny tiny weeny restriction on gun sales? OMG NO FUCKING WAY! Freedom! CONSTITUTION! FOUNDING FATHERS! Argle Bargle Blargh!
Amiright?
BGinCHI
Finally Kathleen Turner gets a decent part.
mrami
Umm, Facebook. Why bother buying the cameras when we do the work ourselves for free?
mclaren
What planet are you living on? They already do.
The government has a dossier of every single american citizen filld with every email you’ve ever sent, transcripts of everyphone call you’ve ever made, every bank deposit and withdrawal and credit card and internet transaction you’ve ever made, and every website you’ve ever visited. There’s also an interactive GPS map showing your daily movements minute-by-minute courtesy of cellphone GPS tracking.
As for cameras, ha! Do you have any idea how many cameras record you every ssingle day? Every time you walk down the sstreet, you’r recorded by dozens of cameras. Every time you step into a hotel lobby or any ppublic building, you’re recorded on half a dozen different cameras simultaneously.
Not to mention that huge portfolio of every picture you’ve ever taken with your cellphone or smartphone and sent to anyone — those are all in your dossier too, courtesy of the NSA, who is building the world’s largest data center in Nevada filled chock-a-block with hundreds of thousands of terabyte hard drives and tens of thousands of servers, all to store the massive amounts of data the government has collected on you.
Bruce S
My position is that I’ve already given all the information that you people need to know.
Bruce S
“I’m shocked the government doesn’t have a camera on everyone of us all day every day.”
They have the next best thing if you use a tracking device…I mean a cell phone.
xochi
“Circumventing the
spirit of thelaw”Fixed.
mcd410x
The government does have a camera on us every second of the day. It just lost the keys to the control room.
kansi
We are all “persons of interest.”
burnspbesq
@mclaren:
Prove this or GFY. You’re fucking delusional. Or you’re lying and you know you’re lying. Which is it?
burnspbesq
Been to the UK recently?
The Moar You Know
@mrami: This. Forget the government, Americans are willing to turn over every detail of their private lives to anyone who asks.
Steeplejack
@kansi:
Really great show, by the way. Picked up steam after a slow first few episodes. It’s filling the (slightly cheese-encrusted) hole in my heart left by Human Target.
waynski
Nice title, JC. I wonder if it will ever be applied to Romney’s tax returns.
jwb
@burnspbesq: The funny thing is you can’t prove or disprove this. When my wife recently wrote to various agencies to find out what was in her files, they sent her back a nice little form letter saying that they can’t confirm or deny whether she even has a file much less what’s in it.
The Moar You Know
@burnspbesq: That’s a bit of an over-the-top reaction to something which you claim to believe to be nonsense.
He’s probably wrong about most of the specific details, and probably dead-to-rights correct about the big picture he presents. There’s no reason not to assume, given what little we do know about government data collection efforts, that most net traffic is tapped and examined and that most of what is examined is kept; the TCP/IP protocol was designed from the ground up for just such monitoring, and to do so to the entire internet would be, from a technical standpoint, pretty trivial.
WereBear
@Bruce S: You made me grin.
On that note, everyone should check out:
Old Fart Rants
Great stuff!
dead existentialist
@mclaren: OMG! The call, it’s coming from INSIDE the house!
ericblair
@mclaren:
Not me! (Taps head).
Reynolds Wrap. Ask for it by name. But for God’s sake pay cash. (Not with $1 bills; the eyes on the pyramid can see you.)
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: I still have the last 3 episodes of Human Target on Tivo. As long as I haven’t watched them yet, it’s not over. Right?
Mino
Mission creep doesn’t just apply to the military.
Bago
By 2020 the entire concept of privacy will be reduced to ACL policies being enforced. Just gathering the data is inevitable. The fourth amendment doesn’t apply to Facebook.
Bago
@ericblair: Math works.
gizmodo.com/5395095/the-nsa-to-store-a-yottabyte-of-your-phone-calls-emails-and-other-big-brothery-s…
Welcome to the year 2012.
Palolo Lolo
Don’t forget the camera on your computer,watching you at all times whilst webbing the ‘tubes
James E. Powell
Between the war on terror and the drug war, I’m shocked the government doesn’t have a camera on everyone of us all day every day.
The government doesn’t have to watch everybody, just the trouble-making bloggers and their anti-American commenting communities.
El Cid
There are people who want to kill us, so, SHUT UP.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
Right. I’ve actually been tempted to buy the DVD (which I rarely do) just to have it for later. Not the greatest TV drama of all time, but a good, solid show. I was sorry to see it canceled.
Tonal Crow
@The Moar You Know:
I agree. We already know, for example, that the NSA has been examining all the traffic running through some telco trunk stations. (See, e.g., eff.org/issues/nsa-spying ).
Very likely. From their viewpoint, there’s every reason to keep it and little reason not to do so.
No. TCP/IP was designed for ease of use, efficiency, and expandability. When designed (1974), it was a technical curiosity. It did not come into wide public use until the Internet took off in the early 1990s. It’s true that TCP/IP is a successor to the protocol used on the original ARPANET (a military project), but the original idea was to facilitate government communications, not to put something into the public sphere that would be easy to spy upon. Also, because TCP/IP is a routed point-to-point protocol, it’s more difficult to spy upon than, for example, star protocols.
Not really. There’s a huge amount of data flowing through multiple paths. That said, the government has enormous resources, and many incentives to spy on that traffic.
Svensker
@Mino:
No! It also includes that weird guy who hangs out at Van Ness and 18th.
low-tech cyclist
Exactly how many amendments were in the Bill of Rights?
Let’s see: Amendments 1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10…I swear there used to be a 4 in there somewhere…
Tonal Crow
@low-tech cyclist:
I swear there used to be a 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 in there somewhere. 3 hasn’t been much tested, yet. 1 is always being trimmed back (see, e.g., mandatory “protest zones” at political conventions; the crime of “material support of terrorism” via providing legal advice to a member of a designated terrorist group, etc.) except for the very rich (see, e.g. Citizens United).
Omnes Omnibus
Governments always push these boundaries. Local cops push the limits of the 4th Amendment all the time. The FBI does it. Are we surprised that spooks are doing it? We shouldn’t be. It also sounds like the court overseeing the spooks is actually providing some oversight. Enough? I don’t know.
mclaren
@burnspbesq:
HOPE 9: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen
Source: http://www.networkworld.com, 15 July 2012.
Binney is one of the senior cryptographers at the NSA who designed the current telephonic/email/internet surveillance system the NSA currently uses.
And the shit-for-brains ignorant incompetent lawyer scores again. A 100% perfect score of being wrong for burnspbesq.
Tell us again, genius, how you’ll eat your tie and buy DougJ a steak dinner if the Supreme Court ACA decision isn’t decided 7-2 in favor.
General Stuck
LOL. You and Anne Laurie keep blogging for freedom, to keep big brother in his box. Meanwhile, I see Greenwald is moving his little shop of horrors to the Guardian. Which will add a twist of irony when he blogs about the American Surveillance State from a newspaper in a country where you can’t sling a dead cat without hitting a gooberment spy camera.
General Stuck
@Omnes Omnibus:
It is always special when people blog about secret government spying from information provided to the public by that same government.
mainmati
@Southern Beale: Yep, the same ones who are all about freedom(!) are all about depriving people of their lives at any moment or time for any reason.
mclaren
No one else seems to want to, so I’ll just come out and say it. Ban guns. Get rid of ’em.
You know how many bullets the entire German police force fired last year?
85.
Get rid of guns. Eliminate ’em. Strip American police of handguns and rifles and shotguns and M-16s. Make it a life-in-prison-without-parole crime to own a gun of any kind.
2nd amendment?
Bullshit. The 2nd amendment talks about “A well-regulated militia…” Are you a member of a national militia? No? Well, alrighty then! No guns for you!
eemom
@General Stuck:
A sense of irony has never been what you’d call a forte of teh ‘zilla.
At least, with him and Naomi Wolf both on board over there, we’ve extracted a measure of revenge on the Brits for dumping Sullivan on us.
El Cid
@General Stuck: Is he moving to the UK, or is the Guardian just the new host of his blog, as Salon was before?
And if not, is there any agreement on Greenwald’s part not to write about (against) the massive surveillance camera operations there?
General Stuck
@El Cid:
Irrelevant on where he lives. And we will just have to wait and see if he writes about a real surveillance state that is Great Britain. If he doesn’t, well then that will speak for itself. imo.
General Stuck
@eemom:
Hey eemom. good to hear from ya.
NotMax
@El Cid
Maybe he will, but that isn’t his beat and he wasn’t hired as a columnist to focus on what the British Guardian might. As he stated in his announcement of the change of employer,
eemom
@General Stuck:
Always a delight to cherish some good clean Greenwald-bashing with you, mon General. : )
El Cid
@General Stuck: Okay, so there isn’t any hypocrisy yet, but there is a forthcoming test (else why raise the point as you did) based upon a connection between his writing for the UK Guardian-connected US version of the Guardian and his opposition to the widespread video surveillance practiced in so many UK cities.
So that is the challenge, right? It’s not that he’s done something wrong yet regarding the specific topic about which you’re complaining in this specific complaint — or is it that by agreeing to have his blog hosted by this particular publications with its national connections to Britain this in itself is hypocritical in objecting to surveillance?
If it’s the latter, I don’t see that as any reasonable complaint.
If it’s the former, then I think there is an empirical test about to be staged.
General Stuck
@El Cid:
I said it would add a ‘twist of irony’ his taking a job with a British Newspaper, not that it would be “hypocrisy” in and of itself. That was brought up by you, and I acknowledged that this could happen if he just wrote about American surveillance. There is nothing more to be read into my comments on this thread. Other than good riddance for Mr. Greenwald, giving up his slot with a US national news site as is Salon. And do you really think The Guardian hired GG to write about British life for whatever topic?
NotMax
No more so than his being hosted at Salon and its national connections to the U.S. (i.e., bring located there).
The Guardian isn’t a government publication or vehicle. Neither is Salon.
He blogs primarily about the U.S. The Guardian‘s U.S. publication arm is designed for and marketed to Americans, but is also available to its British audience as an adjunct to its main publication unit.
Put the shoe on the other foot. Should a U.S. publication refrain from hiring someone British whose expertise in U.S. affairs is not their claimed forte to blog about the British government within their U.S.-centric pages?
mclaren
@eemom:
This illustrates the level to which the Democratic party has sunk in 2012. Instead of going after the real sociopaths like Romney and Karl Rove and Chief Justice John Roberts, the so-called “liberals” on this forum prefer to bash…the only two public commentators currently warning about America’s precipitous slide into a lawless police state: Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Wolf.
General Stuck
@NotMax:
I said nothing on whether any paper should, or should not ‘refrain’ from hiring anyone they want. I just noted for me there was a “twist of irony” that he is moving to a British paper. That is all. And it is always fascinating the response to saying anything ill whatsoever on the topic of Glenn Greenwald, for his defenders. Even to the point of building strawmen out of nothing much.
General Stuck
Notmax
balloon-juice.com/2012/07/20/if-you-havent-done-anything-wrong-6/#comment-3472696
Sorry, I think I misread your comment. Am kind of tired.