[drivebyacct2]

Wait, are there actually people in the US who still assume that there someone has to get a warrant to investigate them under the auspices of terrorism or National Security? I assumed this was a more or less accepted fact by now.

They take everything they want off the wire anyway; the best case scenario is that they have FISA rubber stamp warrants for the times where they "need a warrant".

Do we really care about specific instances of uses of PRISM? I mean, in an honest way I'm curious :: is there really any benefit if we could definitely prove that PRISM was used without a warrant? Is it worse than any of the other things that have been disclosed or leaked since originally finding out about PRISM?

I don't think so, but I was screaming bloody murder about NSLs in 2006, soooo......

[mayneack]

Just because everyone "knew" doesn't make this less useful to be released. Last month if you went on CNN and claimed that the NSA had free reign to access whatever they wanted, you'd be considered a conspiracy theorist. Now you are at least just considered to be aiding the terrorists. This type of thing is also useful for groups like the ACLU filing lawsuits because they need more proof than "everyone knows already"

[waqf]

"free rein". It's a metaphor about horses, not kingdoms (though I have heard that the one can be exchanged for the other).

[rafcavallaro]

I've heard that the offer has been made, but there's no record of the transaction ever having been completed.

[drivebyacct2]

You're right. I don't know why I was being such a pessimist about it. More ammo, more attention, it's probably good unless or until we reach the max attention span of people who need to become more informed. Or if we encounter the 'disaster porn/fatigue' effect of this stuff.

I guess that's pretty much exactly what I'm experiencing. "Why bother trying if no one is listening". Not exactly the concept of 'disaster porn' but it's a close enough allusion.

[steveklabnik]

> I don't know why I was being such a pessimist about it.

Almost everyone I know that's involved in some kind of activism has this happen to them; I know that I feel it almost all the time. I'm not saying you're actually _doing_ any activism, but I think it's a side effect of paying so much attention to the letter of the law: law is a messy, sloppy thing, or at least it appears that way to this non-lawyer. It doesn't mesh well with my 'computers are deterministic' general mindset.

And really, _especially_ on this privacy front, it's terribly hard to see that these things are going to happen, get called 'crazy' and 'paranoid,' see them happen, and then sigh: "I told you so."

[drivebyacct2]

>I'm not saying you're actually _doing_ any activism

You mightn't have meant it but that was a polite way of provoking a bit of self evaluating. I don't really know what more to do outside of donate to the EFF, write my Congresspersons, etc. But I haven't made nearly an exhaustive effort of investigating what I could be doing.

>It doesn't mesh well with my 'computers are deterministic' general mindset. And really, _especially_ on this privacy front, it's terribly hard to see that these things are going to happen, get called 'crazy' and 'paranoid,' see them happen, and then sigh: "I told you so."

Are both very insightful statements.

[steveklabnik]

:) I think something that's sorely needed is easy-to-use crypto for 'normal' people, and by 'normal,' of course, I mean most of us. I recently set up PGP for all of my email, but it wasn't exactly something that I'd recommend to a non-technical person.

If you're looking for something you could do.

[drivebyacct2]

koush is kind of kicking ass on this front: https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835/posts/gVt8SWRR...

From his comments it sounds like he's working with other app makers who are making independent apps so this could target everyone, effectively.

I do have a side project that would, at least personally, greatly decrease my dependence/reliance/usage of GMail...

[mtgx]

The use of FISA "warrants" (misnomer, really) is highly questionable as is, especially when they're just rubber-stamped anyway, but if we can prove that most of the time they don't even bother to use those "warrants", then we can at least take steps to sue them over it and try to declare it unconstitutional, and hopefully get Congress to not only repeal many of the current laws allowing them to do with this their secret interpretations of those laws, but also create other laws that put a lot of restrictions and oversight in place.

[justinschuh]

I don't think there's a single factually accurate statement in your comment. A FISA order really is a warrant in the legal sense, so it's not a misnomer. There's no substantiated evidence that the government is failing to comply with its legal obligations under FISA and other relevant laws here. The Supreme court has consistently upheld that constitutional protections do not apply to non US persons. The general trend since roughly 2008 has actually been increased oversight and scaling back of 9/11 era expansion of surveillance powers.

[mtgx]

FISA warrant = "general warrant" = misnomer

According to the 4th amendment, "warrants" must be used in specific investigations and for specific individuals. There's nothing specific about a FISA warrant. They just get data en masse from a lot of people. And they use this paper that they are calling a "warrant" from the FISA court, that says they can get the data on everyone.

Also, FISA warrants completely ignores such things as "probable cause" and "reasonable searches", which are pretty important for a democracy, I'd say. You can't say you're getting all the data of 100 million people, and also have "probable cause" for them.

"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It was adopted as a response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, which is a type of general search warrant, in the American Revolution. Search and seizure (including arrest) should be limited in scope according to specific information supplied to the issuing court, usually by a law enforcement officer, who has sworn by it."

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

[twoodfin]

FISA warrants are not the same thing as search warrants, in the same sense that an arrest warrant is not the same thing as a search warrant.

FISA "warrants" are really an oversight mechanism to the executive's generally accepted authority to conduct national security operations targeted at foreign powers. They're specifically to "warrant" that the Fourth Amendment is not being violated by a particular search, intercept, or program because the activity is appropriately targeted.

[rayiner]

You're both right. In the general case, FISA warrants are court orders sufficient to require a third party to disclose information in their possession. However, any given FISA warrant may not meet the requirements for a warrant that must pass muster under the 4th amendment. They are, however, sufficient for activity that does not require a warrant under the 4th amendment.

So the question is: what requires a warrant that meets the strictures of the 4th amendment? Not every kind of data gathering or information collecting activity requires a warrant.

A good hypothetical to think through is a Tesla car. Tesla has the capability to track you via GPS, though the functionality is apparently disabled on retail models. But say it was enabled, and Tesla collected and stored information about where you went to optimize your ownership experience. Do the police need a warrant to get that information?

On one hand, the police do require a warrant (meeting 4th amendment strictures) to put a GPS on your car (because it is a physical invasion of your private property). On the other hand, police don't need a warrant to ask your neighbors what they know about where you've been.

So: what do the police need to get your GPS information from Tesla? On one hand, you can say that the police shouldn't be able to do indirectly what they can't do directly, and say that they require a warrant meeting 4th amendment strictures to get that information from Tesla. On the other hand you can point to a crucial distinction: the police did not need to invade your physical property to put a GPS bug on you--you did that part yourself and voluntarily told Tesla exactly where you were going. If you had phoned Tesla, and told them exactly where you had went, and they wrote that down and stored it in a file, the police would not have required a 4th amendment warrant to get that data. Just a lesser court order in the event Tesla did not cooperate.

[drivebyacct2]

>I don't think there's a single factually accurate statement in your comment. A FISA order really is a warrant in the legal sense, so it's not a misnomer. There's no substantiated evidence that the government is failing to comply with its legal obligations under FISA and other relevant laws here.

Er, um, no. FISA warrants and courts are different than regular warrants and courts for a very good reason. Most of them are issued post de-facto and as mtgx and I have pointed out, are literally rubber stamped. ZERO were declined last year.

I'd love a citation for the last sentence of your post. I'll work on background info on FISA warrants. Like I said, wish I had my debate evidence I cut years ago. Rather ironically, it's actually remarkably hard to refind some of that evidence 10 years later. Google loves to emphasize more recent publications.

A FISA warrant is as much a warrant as an FBI agent wiping their ass on a piece of paper and calling it a National Security Letter makes it a "legal warrant". (Yes, field FBI agents can issue them, and they're issued in the tens of thousands every single year, AND a single letter can apply to a person, team, family, or entire workplace.)

You might call it "legal" in that a law passed by Congress with secret interpretations and special addenedums tells them they can... but yeah, I'm going to keep on calling FISA warrants and NSLs used on US Citizens what it is: unconstitutional and thus practically, illegal.

[justinschuh]

You genuinely have no idea what you're talking about and you're adding nothing to the discussion. I'll leave it to you to look up the definition of a warrant if you want to verify my statement.

[drivebyacct2]

A "warrant", "FISA warrant" and "National Security Letters" are all distinct things that are used to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. By definition only the FIRST of those three are allowed for by the Constitution; the others do NOT meet the same standards and probably or at least fortunately maqy exist primarily for that reason.

Literally hand picking any of these keywords pretty much leads to the same Wikipedia page discussing at least some of these things. I'm still reading it to see how complete it is. Again, where are you getting this information that the government has been more conservative or particular about these directives?

Ironically it actually has a fairly good record dating back to 2006 in several places when some of this stuff got stirred up that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...

The whole thing is insightful. (I edited this comment to be far less rude, my apologies, I should've slowed down)

[btilly]

Let me channel our resident conservative lawyer, raynier.

The 4th only applies to US citizens. Therefore a FISA warrant targeting people outside of the USA who are not believed to be US citizens does not have to meet the standard of the 4th.

A National Security Letter targets third parties (your email provider, your library, etc) and fails to search, seize, or directly affect any of you, your house, person, papers or effects. It therefore does not violate the 4th.

Channeling myself for a moment, this is not how I personally understand the clear intent of the 4th. I'm sure you agree with me. However I am forced to admit that multiple courts have sided with the interpretation that I just described.

Under common law, I don't get to decide what the law is. Judges do. Since they seem to be consistently accepting this line of argument, the 4th simply doesn't mean what I want it to mean. (I'm all for a better amendment, but that does not seem to be happening.)

[rayiner]

> Wait, are there actually people in the US who still assume that there someone has to get a warrant to investigate them under the auspices of terrorism or National Security?

What's amusing is how many people assume that the police ever needed a warrant to "investigate them." The police need a warrant to search your person or your property. The police don't need anything to investigate you, and need nothing more than a court order to subpoena documents from people who might have information about you. This has always been the way our system worked.

Depending on what exactly PRISM does, it may very well not require a warrant, any more than the police require a warrant to get your bank records or other kinds of information about you held by third parties.

[hindsightbias]

> soooo...

For some reason, it's not really been refreshing to see people paying more attention now. I thought maybe it was a holier than thou thing but hitting blogs where we were talking about it back then I see the same thing. People who were outraged then are doing what they were then - trying to read between the lines and figuring out how it really works while still being legally compliant. Try commenting on that, and you're called a sheeple and told how it's all un-constitutional, yada, yada.

I don't mind when my outlying beliefs become hip, but I do get annoyed when they jump the shark.

[mehwoot]

This document doesn't say that somebody in the U.S. can be targeted without a warrant. It says

For these reasons, we hold that a foreign intelligence exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement exists when surveillance is conducted to obtain foreign intelligence for national security purposes and is directed against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.

Not the same thing.

[drivebyacct2]

Aka, FISA warrants and FISA courts which in practice haven't been limited to foreign spying for... decades? now?