Why am I not surprised?
Congress guts law to restrict NSA spying, civil liberty groups appalled
Civil liberties groups have reacted angrily after Congress changed key provisions in the USA FREEDOM Act before submitting it to a full vote by the House of Representatives, scheduled for Thursday. "This legislation was designed to prohibit bulk collection, but has been made so weak that it fails to adequately protect against …
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 01:14 GMT veti
"I am shocked, shocked...
... to learn that the sweeping powers I wrote for spooks to use are being used by spooks."
"Well, we could always repeal the USA PATRIOT act?"
"Whoa now, let's not go nuts here. That would make it look like we made a mistake. Let's write a new law to look like we're trying to control 'abuse' of PATRIOT."
"What do you mean, 'abuse'? It's being used exactly the way we meant it to be."
"Yeah, but we can't admit that. If we write a new law, we can announce it to great fanfare up-front, get some good coverage, and then revise the crap out of it later. And only a few law geeks will pay attention to the later revisions, because have you seen the public's attention spans nowadays?"
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The Law of Inverse Relevance tells us that "the less you intend to do about something, the more you have to talk about it". The mere fact that the word "FREEDOM" is right there in the title, in honking BLOCK CAPITALS, should have told us all up-front what this bill was never meant to do.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 13:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
More than politics
The kind of surveillance NSA is doing goes way beyond the mere monitoring of people's political beliefs, although as the aspect most directly violative of the Bill of Rights it's the one that (rightly) gets the most attention. They're also watching everyone's economic, financial activity. That gives their "customers" in Congress a significant advantage when it comes time to make personal investment decisions. It also provides the government (and those same "customers") with leverage over big business when it comes time to decide when and where plants will be built, when nepotism rules will be ignored, which Chinese firms will be partnered with, etc. Most importantly it guarantees that their golden para-sail will have a nice cozy place to land when they've left office. Did you see all the mahogany in former CIA/NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden's new private office during his interviews on "United States of Secrets" this week? If people like that care so much about the country they should be teaching at one of the service academies, not cashing in on their "investment" in government service by squatting in some penthouse office suite.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 21:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: More than politics
> If people like that care so much about the country they should be teaching at one of the service academies, not cashing in on their "investment" in government service by squatting in some penthouse office suite.
Or guarantee they can return to their former job before they went into office, plus present them with a Merc for their troubles. Cf. Lech Wałęsa.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 02:07 GMT cordwainer 1
Obviously time to turn the tables, then...
i.e., start bulk gathering of every bit of information about every member of Congress, then publish it publicly and redundantly worldwide. Strip away their privacy completely, and assuming they aren't all in jail as a result, they'll definitely vote for genuine restraints on the NSA and other mass surveillance.
Of course, it's no longer about serving the people, but about their own interests and comfort. Why is it, when elected representatives repeatedly violate their oath of office, they are not charged with treason?
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 05:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Obviously time to turn the tables, then...
"i.e., start bulk gathering of every bit of information about every member of Congress, then publish it publicly and redundantly worldwide. Strip away their privacy completely, and assuming they aren't all in jail as a result, they'll definitely vote for genuine restraints on the NSA and other mass surveillance."
I utterly sympathise with the sentiment, but if acted upon I'd lay odds it would be you in jail or worse as a result, because, 'National Security'. After all, you don't get to be a Congressman or Senator by letting the peasants get uppity - the first thing the 'representatives' who survived the outcome of that intelligence gathering effort would do (in conjunction with the replacement newcomers whose future gravy trains might face derailment) would be to vote to ensure that it never happens again.
Nothing motivates a vote for 'emergency powers' (including an expanded budget for the three-letter agencies to fight those 'domestic terrorists who attacked congress') more than unified self-interest...
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 13:08 GMT Tom 13
Re: vote to ensure that it never happens again.
Neither you nor Cord have been paying attention. No need for that, they already did it. See the hoopla surrounding Linda Tripp when she played the tapes of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky when Bill Clinton was trying to suborn perjury from Tripp.
Beyond that, you can't pass any law that will put a Congress critter in prison. It's forbidden by the US Constitution while Congress is in session. These days, it's ALWAYS in session.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 07:16 GMT tom dial
Re: Obviously time to turn the tables, then...
Where is the symmetry in this suggestion? You propose to gather and publish as much as possible. The NSA, while evidently collecting and possibly analyzing a great deal of data that could be linked to individuals, seems to have published little or none of it. This activity may be creepy, and certainly stirred up a lot of hate and discontent, but does not seem to have done much observable harm.
Indeed, the most compelling argument against the large scale metadata collection may be that it costs a lot of money and has produced little in the way of useful intelligence. The government, of course claims otherwise, but they cite only a few dozen cases, out of which I seem to recall that most involved foreigners acting (or conspiring) outside the US and many or most of the rest could have been handled with more targeted collection.
It is worth recalling that the USA PATRIOT act, which many of us thought ill-advised when it was passed, was meant partly to allow the government to collect and analyze more data and to share more of it sooner among the agencies with antiterrorism responsibilities. This unfortunate act was passed hastily by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress based on a belief widely shared in the population at large that the attack could have been prevented with the help of better intelligence and increased cooperation among intelligence agencies. It was enacted with too little public discussion and analysis at a time of widespread concern that other similar attacks were being planned, a concern that the later bombings in London and Madrid shows was warranted.
Well, now we think it went too far, don't much like it, and the Congress is considering legislation, in the form of the USA FREEDOM act to scale back data collection, for "US persons" at least. This is being done with as much haste and as little public discussion and analysis as the PATRIOT act. That didn't work out well then and probably won't now; following the next successful major terrorist attack on the US restraints on data collection will be quickly relaxed if it appears that there were unnoticed hints that, by hindsight, seem predictive of the event. The Congress and Executive branch need to take the time to do it right this time. Enough is known publicly now about some of these intelligence programs to allow much of that to be done publicly, and it should be to the extent possible.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 13:03 GMT Tom 13
Re: Obviously time to turn the tables, then...
If we can't put Charlie Rangel in jail for tax fraud when the non-NSA agencies have gathered (through the appropriate legal mechanisms) more information about his fraud than they gathered for Nixon on Watergate, there's no chance any of them are going anywhere except where they are right now.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 07:39 GMT Otto is a bear.
Again, I ask the question
How do you expect any countries security services to do their jobs, if they can't monitor electronic chatter, and then focus in on people who are up to no good.
You can't rely on the people, because the people want the Police, or Security services to follow evidence, that they as individuals don't always want to give. To actually do it totally by human intel would be impossible, you would probably need the kind of informant network and security apparatus operated by the old Soviet block, which is unaffordable, and really unacceptable, humans are far more easily corrupted than monitoring systems.
You need the systems to gather large amounts of data over time, to allow you to look at prior communication. You don't want to go after war gaming groups, only real threats.
Security services have always monitored communications, and they always will, it really isn't them you need to worry about. Worry more about entrenched political structures, and in any democratic society you have the right to start a new one, it's always difficult, but not impossible, and you really don't need that much money. Look at it another way, if you don't vote, you don't really have a reason to complain about the people others elect. If you do, join the party, be active for your view, if there is no party with your view start one.
The vast majority of people don't understand how government works or what it does.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 11:00 GMT Sir Runcible Spoon
Re: Again, I ask the question
I'd also like to add that I want there to be a fuck-sight more oversight and less of the secret courts and secret orders to law abiding citizens and companies and gagging orders and all the other tools of oppression.
If they [the security services] have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear right?
Well, the truth is that they are up to their necks in quasi-legal shite and they'll do anything to stop anyone talking about it or stopping them.
We only want to stop them because we strongly suspect it is being abused.
More oversight = more confidence = permission
Less oversight = less confidence = opposition
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 16:02 GMT tom dial
Re: Again, I ask the question
It is fairly clear from the documents released that the the USNSA is subject to extensive and detailed oversight from its own internal controls, supervised by its legal staff and IG; from the Department of Justice, supervised by an assistant Attorney General; and from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, consisting of Federal judges assigned to the FISC in addition to their regular duties; and by committees and subcommittees of the Senate and House of Representatives. It is not obvious what additional oversight would be useful. You may mean that you think oversight is not public enough. Reasonable people may disagree about that, but it also is not obvious how to provide it more publicly without compromising the programs.
All in all there has been far too much rant and far too little careful analysis in the discussion of what all of the intelligence agencies do. This is egged on by sensationalistic and often biased reporting on documents that mostly were never intended to describe the programs they mention. Often the documents have been published only in part or worse, the news reports are based on documents "that have been seen" but are not made available for a reader to evaluate. The resulting moral panic is unlikely to have a good outcome in legislation or improvement of public trust of the government, despite the lack of evidence that the intelligence agencies are out of control and acting against the citizens.
For myself, I have some concern about the intelligence agencies, but more about inadequately supervised local and regional police departments' acquisition of heavy duty military equipment for SWAT use.
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Monday 26th May 2014 12:26 GMT James Micallef
Re: Again, I ask the question - @tom dial
"It is fairly clear from the documents released that the the USNSA is subject to extensive and detailed oversight from its own internal controls, supervised by its legal staff and IG; from the Department of Justice, supervised by an assistant Attorney General; and from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, consisting of Federal judges assigned to the FISC in addition to their regular duties; and by committees and subcommittees of the Senate and House of Representatives. It is not obvious what additional oversight would be useful. You may mean that you think oversight is not public enough"
What is fairly clear from the documents released is that (among many many other things) the NSA is spying on and collecting 'en masse' data of/about US citizens, which is completely out of it's remit and against both the spirit and letter of it's governing laws. The problem isn't that no-one has oversight over them, it's that the overseers aren't doing their job properly. That's why the oversight needs to be more transparent.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 13:19 GMT Tom 13
Re: not with data mining.
But we all know data mining is far more effective at both targeting the bad guys and ignoring the salacious but irrelevant data that human interaction might detour towards.
The problem isn't with the method. The problem, assuming there is one, is with oversight of the people coding the search algorithms. And so far there isn't any proof the information has been misused, only speculation and the assumption that it has because the processes have been hidden from us. This is a Stalinist tactic from the Cold War years: allege the secret process is corrupt and demand it take place in public. Then when salacious but irrelevant details that were ignored by the secret courts are revealed, demand the whole program be scrapped.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 16:29 GMT Tom 38
Re: not with data mining.
But we all know data mining is far more effective at both targeting the bad guys and ignoring the salacious but irrelevant data that human interaction might detour towards.
We do? When did we find that out?
I thought we had established that mass data collection has stopped no attacks in the past 13 years, and that human intelligence and target surveillance has stopped many.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 12:35 GMT James Micallef
Re: Again, I ask the question
" if you don't vote, you don't really have a reason to complain about the people others elect. If you do, join the party, be active for your view, if there is no party with your view start one."
Very simple - parties and individual candidates can only get into power with huge financial backing of the type that is only available from entrenched parties with vested interests in never changing teh status quo.
(a) does not matter who I, you or anyone else votes for, since whoever gets elected has a primary loyalty to their financial backers above teh interests of their voters
(b) anyone joining an existing party trying to change it will either be assimilated or rejected
(c) any completely new party based on radical change to the status quo will never garner enough financial backing to be elected
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 13:23 GMT Tom 13
Re: parties and individual candidates can only get into power with huge financial backing
Bullshit.
The parties are run on precinct levels. A precinct is an area that on average contains 2000 people. Each precinct has a captain. Each precinct captain votes on the party platform. About 2/3 of the positions for precinct captains are empty at any given time. Which means any reasonable populist cause can if it so wishes assume control of the party any time it wants to. The only things stopping it from happening are a lack of will and the misconception that getting involved will necessarily corrupt your soul so its best to stay out.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 09:48 GMT TopOnePercent
Re: Bring on the crypto-anarchy
If legal reform isn't going to win, then change the rules of the game. Even the NSA can't break well-implemented cryptography, so let us put it everywhere, and make is so easy to use as to be transparent.
The only small snag with that is the people you do want to monitor are now protected too, No, really, you do want to monitor some people. Simplistic platitudes regards freedom & safety aren't a useful counter argument.
There needs to be a real debate about how we monitor terroists & criminal scum, while impinging on decent folks freedom as little as possible. Some intrusion is inevitable in order to determine which group you belong too.
Once the debate has been had, hopefully change can be implemented. At the moment what you have is the agencies in their trenches more or less saying "We need it all", and the tinfoil hatters in theirs ranting that the agencies "don't need any widespread electronic surveillance", each pointing at the other as the problem.
For as long as nothing changes, and be under no illusions, nothing *IS* changing, then the alphabet soup agencies will carry on as they are.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 10:41 GMT Nuno trancoso
Re: Bring on the crypto-anarchy
"The only small snag with that is the people you do want to monitor are now protected too"
I'm pretty sure said "people" will have a far better grasp on the need to secure their comms than your Avg Joe does. Which would mean many are ALREADY doing it. Which would mean a said agency is getting even less out of them than before.
10000000:1 the spooks have more info on those politicians than they'd ever tell you, and said class being said class, probably far more than enough to coerce them into NOT doing anything that might change the status quo.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 12:08 GMT TopOnePercent
Re: Bring on the crypto-anarchy
I'm pretty sure said "people" will have a far better grasp on the need to secure their comms than your Avg Joe does.
You'd think so, sure. But then you'd be wrong:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/ba_jihadist_trial_sentencing/
Excel look up tables and a substitution cypher FFS. They're mostly derranged idiots.
Criminals have known about finger prints for > 100 years, but its amazing how many are caught because they don't think to wear gloves when committing crime.
If you were to plan to commit a crime (a proper one, not speeding), it'd probably be such a rare occurrance for you that you'd plan well and execute effectively. For those whom this is part of their normal day; they get sloppy, they make mistakes, or they just plain don't bother all the time.
Making strong encryption seamless, prevalent, and difficult or impossible to break really will protect these people, from themselves as much as from the agencies who do need to get into their comms.
10000000:1 the spooks have more info on those politicians than they'd ever tell you, and said class being said class, probably far more than enough to coerce them into NOT doing anything that might change the status quo.
I completely agree, which is why the only way to force change is to ensure widespread public demand for it that politicians can't ignore. To achieve that, the debate has to move beyond the current all or nothing trench warfare, which is neither pragmatic or effective.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 16:14 GMT tom dial
Re: Bring on the crypto-anarchy
While the NSA and similar agencies will have great difficulty breaking properly implemented cryptographic systems, the metadata is not encrypted and would retain considerable value. TOR can help there, but recent events related to drug trading and bitcoins used for that establish that it also is not perfect. The difficulty posed by cryptography also explains why a number of countries prohibit its use or require licensing or restrict it to approved cryptographic systems. A reasonably current list is available from Wikipedia.
The cryptography problem for intelligence agencies is, of course, the primary reason that the NSA and similar agencies devotes a good deal of effort to planting spyware or devices in targets' equipment, to researching weaknesses in cryptographic systems and their implementations.
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Sunday 25th May 2014 20:36 GMT Intractable Potsherd
Re: Bring on the crypto-anarchy @ TopOnePercent
The "terrorists and criminal scum" that you seem to be referring to are such a small number, doing such a tiny amount of damage to the common citizenry that the surveillance is totally disproportionate. Intelligence gathering on the state level makes sense, as does surveilling the shit out of big companies, which, in most cases, are run by people almost indistinguishable from real terrorists and criminal scum. Pissing about at the micro-level is a waste of time - the six dead people in California this weekend proves that only too clearly.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 13:00 GMT Tom 13
This article is even more badly flawed than the Congress critters considering the law.
It contains no actual facts, only opinions about opinions. And when you're posting only opinions as news it is normally considered appropriate to quote from both sides. And no, links to press statements are insufficient. So let's look at the clause seems to be at the root of the ruckus:
(2) Specific selection term.—The term ‘specific selection term’ means a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the Government to limit the scope of the information or tangible things sought pursuant to the statute authorizing the provision of such information or tangible things to the Government.
Adding "address" and "device" seems entirely appropriate. Either are terms any of us would use to identify a system in our daily work. In any other context we would regard the phrase "such as" as entirely necessary because of the speed at which IT changes. Therefore it is also appropriate in this context.
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Thursday 22nd May 2014 20:26 GMT henrydddd
Funny
Its funny how the tea types in the House of Representatives think that Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Social Security are examples of government that is too big, yet these right wing extremists think that this massive spying on US citizens is not big government. I get it boils down to who is paying the Congressmen's salaries, the government or the billionaires
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
