[lern_too_spel]

We were talking about mass surveillance. PRISM isn't that. They used to collect mass email metadata, using facilities like Room 641A. Snowden's leaks showed that they had already stopped. These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS. Gmail won't even accept unencrypted SMTP connections.

[autoexec]

> These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS.

These days the government wouldn't need to decrypt email traffic going over the backbone. They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp. The vast majority of the American's email can be obtained by controlling the servers of a very small number of corporations. We have Lavabit to thank for demonstrating that when the government comes knocking your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)

There's no reason to think that there isn't a Room 641A at Google, Apple, MS, etc.

[lern_too_spel]

> They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp.

This is illegal. If it were possible, they wouldn't have bothered with taps.

[Natfan]

Because a government has _never_ done anything illegal before(!)

[lern_too_spel]

After the Church Committee, it is very difficult for the government to do illegal things and for it to remain a secret. That's why in all of Snowden's leaks, he revealed only a single extant illegal program, and its legality wasn't so clear that it couldn't be argued in court.

Beyond that, you ignored my previous argument. If they were already doing this, why bother to collect metadata from taps?

[somenameforme]

Oh this is such absolute misinformation. The reason court cases against the NSA spying (and other related issues) fail is because you need to prove standing which means you need to not only prove you were spied on but that it also 'materially' affected you. And in order to do so you generally need to have reasonable justification to engage in discovery - in order to get the data from the NSA themselves. At that point the NSA simply declares 'nah, national security or something', discovery becomes impossible, you can't prove anything, and the case is dismissed.

These programs all overtly violate, amongst other things, the 4th amendment, but the structure of our legal system makes it effectively impossible to legally challenge them.

[lern_too_spel]

> The reason court cases against the NSA spying (and other related issues) fail is because you need to prove standing. These programs all overtly violate, amongst other things, the 4th amendment.

This is pure ignorance. If it actually sucked up everybody's data, everybody would have standing. Snowden's leaks showed that they don't, that only the phone metadata program did.

[somenameforme]

What!?!? Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program. And it's not metadata, it's piping entire content straight from the target to the NSA, in real time. This involves direct filtered data (such as Skype messages/videos) indirectly handed over by participating companies (which is probably all major tech companies in the US at this point), as well as raw upstream (essentially line tapping) data such as provided via STORMBREW. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STORMBREW

[lern_too_spel]

> Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program

You're more than 11 years behind the news. Less than a week after Greenwald published his initial ridiculous description of PRISM, it was corrected by the people who actually built the systems at the tech companies. He stupidly thought that the DITU was a machine at the companies that could get any data, when anybody with half a clue could have told him that it's obviously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Intercept_Technology_Unit. The Wikipedia PRISM article's description is very clear and well-cited, and it includes Snowden's slides there to cross reference the description with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_program

The FBI tells the companies to forward the communications of specific targets to the FBI. PRISM is a data integration system that ingests that data from the FBI into NSA systems.

[somenameforme]

This is overt misinformation. PRISM works directly with the companies (well, "indirectly" to offer plausible deniability). The section you're linking to entirely quotes some random government organization which is obviously an unreliable source on such topics. As is the writing, as opposed to sources, on Wiki.

This [1] is one of the more telling leaks. It's a technical users guide for NSA employees on using realtime Skype surveillance for all modes including video and landline on arbitrary targets. [1] It even includes debugging guides like why an agent might be getting multiple copies of the same message, as happens when somebody being spied on boots up a new device and all of their messages are sent from Microsoft to them (and the NSA) simultaneously, resulting a copy of older messages (from the snooper's perspective).

[1] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/Guid...

[ChrisKnott]

In what way do you think your document contradicts GP?