Technology, Not Law, Limits Mass Surveillance 191
holy_calamity writes "U.S. citizens have historically been protected from government surveillance by technical limits, not legal ones, writes independent security researcher Ashkan Soltani at MIT Tech Review. He claims that recent leaks show that technical limits are loosening, fast, with data storage and analysis cheap and large Internet services taking care of data collection for free. 'Spying no longer requires following people or planting bugs, but rather filling out forms to demand access to an existing trove of information,' writes Soltani."
U.S. Citizens have historically... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:U.S. Citizens have historically... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're correct, but it's gotten way, way worse in the past decade.
The truly Orwellian thing about this nightmare isn't even so much the surveillance, but the wholesale redefinition of language. Plain English no longer means what plain English means, and we have traded rule of law for rule of lawyer.
It's not torture, it's "extraordinary rendition for enhanced interrogation techniques."
And of course you still have due process, it's "a process that is due, but not necessarily judicial."
And you're not being jailed without trial. You're being "indefinitely detained."
I would say we need a Constitutional Amendment that Congress shall make no law infringing upon your right to privacy, but without another amendment that says "no really, plain English means plain English" it wouldn't matter much. And they'd just twist that to mean "plain English in the context of this amendment means English which, plainly, means what we want it to mean."
Re:I don't know... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fourth amendment seems pretty clear to me.
Unfortunately it's not when it comes to electronic communications.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A phone call isn't clearly covered, and SCOTUS explicitly decided it wasn't in 1928, then reversed itself in 1967. That's also when they came up with the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test, which I always thought was reasonable. Of course 1967 was an era when the court thought its job was to defend the Bill of Rights, rather than play nitpicking legal games to create as many loopholes as possible.
Don't bother trying to convince me that email, etc, should be covered by the 4th, as you'll be preaching to the choir. I don't give a damn what kind of legal games they play about you not owning the servers or storage medium. That's like saying that the 4th doesn't apply if you rent rather than own your home. My only point was that SCOTUS is free to play lots of games. My favorite is their recent Catch-22 nonsense, that you can't sue the government for a secret program violating your rights because you can't be sure they've been violated (of course not, it's a secret!). Maybe Snowden will release info on who has unlawfully been a surveillance target so they can sue.
Keeping records is an "attractive nuisance" (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like a swimming pool, keeping records that someone else might want is an attractive nuisance: people you don't want will go snooping around in them. And just like a swimming pool, it you that's liable when someone uses them without your permission.
At the moment, it's ISPs that find themselves having to cough up DHCP records to courts: give the criminals a week or two and they'll be writing exploits to get at Facebook, Google+ and your local video store, just like they've been doing for people who have lists of credit-card numbers.
--dave
Re:U.S. Citizens have historically... (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are dictators already, they are the corporations who are rewriting US laws and circumventing the constitution in their favour.
Stop apologizing for the politicians.
Corporations do not write or rewrite law, politicians do. Politicians sell the service of lawmaking to corporations.
Clearly you dont care.
Re:If they're monitoring our every move... (Score:5, Insightful)
In any of the cases, we don't actually have anything to worry about.
Quite the opposite really; it means the ONLY thing this apparatus is effective at is selectively abusing people.
In other words it won't stop any crimes, but will be used to perpetrate them.
Re:I don't know... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if you could sue the feds for spying on you, and use the lawsuit to get a subpoena against the federal agency in question. When the subpoena is inevitably challenged on grounds of national security, rebut that with the fact that your constitutional rights are provided by the constitution which supercedes any laws that make the information secret in the first place (supremacy clause).
Of course, this is doomed to failure since the feds have shown they'll do whatever the hell they want to anyway.
Re:Reality is stranger than humour (Score:4, Insightful)
The Onion has a disturbing way of doing this.
It seems that advanced enough cynicism is indistinguishable from clairvoyance.
Re:U.S. Citizens have historically... (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd never call it "Patriot talk." Remember, "Patriots" are the brave men and women who spy on everything you do to keep this great nation and its people safe.
Other awful problem of the state of the language: we've pre-Godwined ourselves. We're so ingrained with the idea that comparing something to nazi germany means that you have lost perspective and your argument has devolved into flinging hyperbolic insults, and you have therefore lost. People do not understand the literal definition of Fascism [wikipedia.org] anymore, and as Orwell said in Politics and the English Language [newrepublic.com] (relinked from a response to my original post by a fine poster), "The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'"
In fact, "Italian Fascism promotes a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in corporative associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy."
Doesn't that sound like someplace we know? Where through "regulatory capture" (a fancy way of saying "industry writes government regulation to their benefit"), and "campaign contributions" (i.e., "bribes") the government and industry are basically one in the same?
Yes, that's America. But you can't say it! Because if you do, you lose. "Well that's ridiculous! I don't see any dictator marching Jews into ovens!"
You can't even criticize the system of our government, because the word that properly describes our system of government is no longer allowed in public debate. Orwell would be...not proud...sadly resigned?
Re:U.S. Citizens have historically... (Score:5, Insightful)
"They'd never call it "Patriot talk." Remember, "Patriots" are the brave men and women who spy on everything you do to keep this great nation and its people safe."
A friend recently linked me to an article about this very thing. For a change this is not Godwin's Law; this is actually relevant.
The reason it was possible for Hitler and the Nazis to rise to power, was because the populace mistakenly believed "patriotism" was not loyalty to The People or their country, but to their government. Big Mistake.
Patriotism is loyalty to your family and your neighbors, not to Barack Obama.
Re:U.S. Citizens have historically... (Score:4, Insightful)
The constitution is vague. We should rewrite it in Lojban to avoid all arguments about the meaning. Lojban as the advantage of having no native speakers and thus does not promote any one ethnic group.
Re:With all due respect ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I used to believe that the erosion of American values is recent too, but I don't think there's really any evidence for that. Consider ITT's involvement in the Pinochet coup, or the United Fruit Company's involvement in Guatemala. The history of the US government violating human rights to protect the profits of its businesses goes back a long time. If you want to talk about spying, consider J Edgar Hoover's spying on "subversives". Or the CIA's drugging and torturing unwilling participants in the 50s and 60s in order to learn effective methods of extracting information.
Hell, the country was founded by individuals who believed you supported the kidnapping and selling of other humans because it was profitable. Read the Constitution not as a moral document, but as a legal document that limits the extent to which the government can interfere in the lives of business owners.
Re:With all due respect ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, you are sadly mistaken. If you show any signs of 'morality', you don't go anywhere in the NSA or CIA.
For example, back in 1945, the NSA started project Shamrock http://www.dailydot.com/politics/nsa-prism-shamrock-history-spying-telegraphs/ [dailydot.com] where they asked the major telegram companies to give them all telegrams sent or received oversea's, every day. No warrant, just a 'give this to us'.
Totally illegal, but not public knowledge at the time and the governments response was basically "hehe, oops, of course we never looked at telegrams sent between Americans".
Or Echolon. Google it.
The problems every security service seems to have are:
1) they have nobody to say "this is as far as you can go within the law" that isn't hand-picked to have an extremely minimalist attitude towards what should not be permitted
2) nobody goes to jail or is even criminally investigated when these programs become public knowledge. There may be a investigation by Congress or the Senate, maybe somebody retires or they don't get promoted anymore, with a report that says "We stopped doing these outrageous things long ago, weeks before it became public knowledge", but nobody ever goes to jail. Actually, no, the people that go to jail are the ones that report the wrongdoing, to make others not report other wrongdoing [which is the exact opposite of what your 'moral American' would want].
A simple correction is in order ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Some people simply disgust me, and no I'm not going to get her point when the title of the essay intends to diminish the fact that the Government broke it's own laws
A correction is in order ...
It is The Constitution of the United States of America that the government of the United States of America has broken
The Constitution does NOT belong to the government
Rather, it ***IS*** the government which has to abide to The Constitution of the United States of America
Just need to clear things up