[timschmidt]

"NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"

https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/nsa-...

"A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."

https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/is-the-foreign-inte...

"The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.

[lern_too_spel]

> "NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"

This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.

> "A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."

What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.

> "The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans"

This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.

> So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.

That explicitly was not in Snowden's docs. The law is public, and warrants are almost always granted. In this case, as Snowden's docs said, the court orders are for foreigners, living outside the U.S.

[timschmidt]

> This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.

"According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

In fact, NSA's own slide deck, an excerpt of which can be viewed here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/fiber-optic-... indicate that all Google services including Gmail, Docs, Maps, and others were subject to interception.

Additional NSA slides here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr... detail email, chat, video, voice, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications, social networking details, and the ever ominous "Special Requests".

> What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.

"Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_don%27t_make_a_righ...

> This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.

The linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... contains 96 references to reporting from 2004 to 2021 from a wide variety of sources. The word "retraction" does not appear once. Among the cited sources are many examples such as:

A former federal judge who served on a secret court overseeing the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs said Tuesday the panel is independent but flawed because only the government's side is represented effectively in its deliberations.

"Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130711211028/https://abcnews.g...

[lern_too_spel]

> "According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."

Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data? Instead, he leaked many things that were perfectly legal as well as which high value targets were being surveilled in China in a transparent and failed attempt to get asylum in Hong Kong.

> "Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".

You are assuming it's wrong. Investigators aren't going to waste their time writing up court orders that aren't likely to be approved. Instead, we find that criminal defense attorneys rarely challenge the validity of warrants as issued but may challenge whether the warrant was followed.

> "Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.

You're confusing multiple things here. You're confusing bulk metadata collection, which Robertson opposed, with individual surveillance warrants, which are always done without informing the person being surveilled. There was no opposing side to the bulk metadata collection, which was shut down. There was no record of mass domestic surveillance in Snowden's docs.

[timschmidt]

> There was no record of mass domestic surveillance in Snowden's docs.

That's funny, because there's a full slide deck from NSA about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_slides

Notably, all the glossy corporate logos pictured are of American companies with predominantly American users. Not foreign ones. "Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden"

> Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data?

"Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true – allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses", and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", adding that "Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications", with numerous self-granted exceptions, and that NSA policies encourage staff to assume the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty."

https://web.archive.org/web/20130626032506/http://news.yahoo...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170103043118/https://www.thegu...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170103043118/https://www.thegu...

[lern_too_spel]

> That's funny, because there's a full slide deck from NSA about it here:

Did you look at the slides you linked to? They describe targeted surveillance on specific foreigners outside the U.S.

> "Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true

Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.

> allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses",

Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.

> and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", ...

The single U.S. mass data collection program in Snowden's leaks was phone metadata collection. Use of any data collected by the government is policy-based. In this case, use was limited to finding associates of foreign targets, and the query interface was limited to that. If it had changed, that would have been breaking the law, but Snowden showed no evidence of that. One more time: that single possibly illegal U.S. program Snowden leaked was then shut down anyway.

[timschmidt]

> Did you look at the slides you linked to?

Many times. They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.

Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons. Further demonstrating a lack of appropriate controls or process around such capabilities.

And testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks" indicating that mass surveillance infrastructure is used domestically: "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc

> Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.

"However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...