[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...

[lern_too_spel]

> Many times.

Clearly not.

> They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections.

PRISM is a data ingestion system whereby the NSA ingests data collected by the FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit that gets data from specific accounts under court order. The DITU is clearly labeled in the diagram on the slide showing how it works. The NSA has no integration with the companies at all. The "Internet backbone" has nothing to do with PRISM.

> No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.

If the FBI gives a section 702 court order to a company for an account that isn't for a foreigner outside the U.S., they are not going to comply. The FBI wouldn't even ask. The very idea that you think "verifiable proof" is needed shows you believed the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the NSA could directly fetch any account's data, which was supported by neither the law nor the leaked documents but only by Greenwald's fever dreams

> 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.

Yet another document that you claim to have read but didn't. The cases where they were able to surveil the person they were stalking were foreigners outside the U.S. The domestic cases involved querying for associates using the metadata. Neither one is "domestic spying" and certainly don't show any evidence of domestic mass surveillance.

> "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."

Once again, if you bothered to read the source documents, you would find that this quote is not supported by the citations. The first citation shows that the U.S. The first is about how the U.S. is allowed to use UK phone numbers in its metadata collection for chaining analysis, not to share that data or analysis with the UK as the quote claims. The second is about how Australia is allowed to share data it collected outside the U.S. and the U.S. with the U.S. without first looking for and removing the data of Australians who happened to be abroad whose data was collected, not for the U.S. to spy on Australians as your quote claims.

Lesson: If you see a claim that describes something that is clearly illegal, you should verify it before you repeat stuff that is very clearly nonsense and come off as a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.

[timschmidt]

Yes I am familiar with the official statements. They do not constitute "independently verifiable proof ... that US persons are not targeted by this program." and carry far less weight than the previously quoted and linked testimony which directly contradicts them when considered in context of the disclosures.

The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:

http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/nsa-director-alexan...

https://apnews.com/article/business-33a88feb083ea35515de3c73...

Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.

Should be pretty easy. NSA has EFF's contact information from that lawsuit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._National_Security_Age... ) in which they destroyed evidence against a court order, and argued "state secrets" against every claim. You know, the one that explicitly avoided deciding the constitutionality of all this on procedural grounds. Totally trustworthy behavior. Everyone responds that way when asked to prove they're not mass surveilling Americans.

[lern_too_spel]

> and carry far less weight than the previously quoted and linked testimony which directly contradicts them when considered in context of the disclosures

Previously quoted testimony from someone who doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented that does not match up with the documents that Snowden leaked? You would think that if there were something so blatantly illegal going on, that would be the first thing that Snowden leaked. Instead, there is not a whiff of corroborating evidence in Snowden's trove, and no oversight committee senator has asked for investigations based on Binney's mad ravings.

> The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:

So you would have us believe that Snowden's documents are lying too? The lies that were told weren't about what the programs did. Their statements were always consistent with the leaked documents and what the law allows. You are the one bringing up dark programs that go against the law and against all leaked evidence.

> Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.

The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming. The purpose of the Narus traffic analyzers in the Jewel case was revealed in Snowden's docs. Surprise, surprise. It turned out not to be mass domestic surveillance.

[timschmidt]

> doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented

"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

> The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming.

2. This case challenges an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (the “NSA”) and other Defendants in concert with major telecommunications companies (“Defendants” is defined collectively as the named defendants and the Doe defendants as set forth in paragraphs 25 through 38 below).

3. This program of dragnet surveillance (the “Program”), first authorized by Executive Order of the President in October of 2001 (the “Program Order”) and first revealed to the public in December of 2005, continues to this day.

4. Some aspects of the Program were publicly acknowledged by the President in December 2005 and later described as the “terrorist surveillance program” (“TSP”).

5. The President and other executive officials have described theTSP’s activities, which were conducted outside the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) and without authorization by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”), as narrowly targeting for interception the international communications of persons linked to Al Qaeda.

6. The Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence have since publicly admitted that the TSP was only one particular aspect of the surveillance activities authorized by the Program Order.

7. In addition to eavesdropping on or reading specific communications, Defendants have indiscriminately intercepted the communications content and obtained the communications records of millions of ordinary Americans as part of the Program authorized by the President.

8. The core component of the Program is Defendants’ nationwide network of sophisticated communications surveillance devices, attached to the key facilities of telecommunications companies such as AT&T that carry Americans’ Internet and telephone communications.

9. Using this shadow network of surveillance devices, Defendants have acquired and continue to acquire the content of a significant portion of the phone calls, emails, instant messages, text messages, web communications and other communications, both international and domestic, of practically every American who uses the phone system or the Internet, including Plaintiffs and class members, in an unprecedented suspicionless general search through the nation’s communications networks.

10. In addition to using surveillance devices to acquire the domestic and international communications content of millions of ordinary Americans, Defendants have unlawfully solicited and obtained from telecommunications companies such as AT&T the complete and ongoing disclosure of the private telephone and Internet transactional records of those companies’ millions of customers (including communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members), communications records indicating who the customers communicated with, when and for how long, among other sensitive information.

11. This non-content transactional information is analyzed by computers in conjunction with the vast quantity of communications content acquired by Defendants’ network of surveillance devices, in order to select which communications are subjected to personal analysis by staff of the NSA and other Defendants, in what has been described as a vast “data-mining” operation.

12. Plaintiffs and class members are ordinary Americans who are current or former subscribers to AT&T’s telephone and/or Internet services.

13. Communications of Plaintiffs and class members have been and continue to be illegally acquired by Defendants using surveillance devices attached to AT&T’s network, and Defendants have illegally solicited and obtained from AT&T the continuing disclosure of private communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members. Plaintiffs’ communications or activities have been and continue to be subject to electronic surveillance.

14. Plaintiffs are suing Defendants to enjoin their unlawful acquisition of the communications and records of Plaintiffs and class members, to require the inventory and destruction of those that have already been seized, and to obtain appropriate statutory, actual, and punitive damages to deter future illegal surveillance.

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/jewel/jewel.complaint.pdf