[rickhanlonii]

First, Wikipedia is not an authoritative source for government programs in which little is known by the public. By the very nature of being information which is classified or higher, in order for details of actual usage to be outlined on Wikipedia, an editor with access to that classified information would need to break federal law and put Wikipedia in a position of question legality.

That's not to say that it's not a fact that PRISM data is only used against a person when there is a warrant, but it is to say that we don't know that that is the case.

Second, no reasonable person with a decent understanding of this issue is claiming that the NSA isn't legally justifying their actions. Indeed, the NSA is using--as expected--national security in part as a motivating legal justification, and invoking Article IV Section 4. It is agreed: national security is their intelligence directive.

Nor are such people claiming that the government hasn't previously used secret surveillance programs, or that the government is necessarily intentionally tyrannical.

What we are saying is that legal justification aside, we want the details of this directive in the public conversation so that We the People can decide if we approve of the actions. We the People are the governors of this country, and We the People have the power to change the laws or the Constitution if we decide that the actions are not justifiable, are not reconcilable with liberty, or if the system of checks and balances have failed to check or balance.

This is a dangerous situation. If Snowden's claims are correct, not only are we being overbearingly surveilled, but that data is dangerously aggregated. Even if we are to assume complete benevolence and complete competence in our government (even government actors who may be under-paid and under-invested in their duties), then there is still a very real possibility that people who would seek destruction could acquire possession of that data, gaining a catastrophic trove of information about not just the American public--who would probably be protected by the overbearing force of the U.S. Military--but also the public of the rest of the world.

In conclusion, it seems to me that we can't know that PRISM or associated programs are necessary and justified government functions, because we know nothing about them. Of the 300,000,000+ people in the United States, 435 are in a position of both knowledge and decision on those policies, and given the importance of this issue that's just not good enough.

Especially when it is undisputed that those 435 people can't do their job even minimally effectively.

[lupatus]

I'm pretty sure that pg _was_ implying that the NSA program was frowned upon by the laws in the Bill of Rights; while it seems that the NSA is in fact complying with all applicable laws (based on what the government has revealed, as quoted in Wikipedia and other media outlets).

Regardless of whether Snowden is correct or not, I think that there are government functions that the general public should not be informed of. Having a policy of detailing the exact nature of PRISM could be just as damaging as, say, having a policy of publicly detailing all planned drone strikes. I bet the NSA's job is already harder because of Snowden's leaks.

I also think that there is a very real possibility that people who would seek destruction could acquire possession of an aircraft carrier's control systems or the control systems of the missile defense shield. Should the US not pursue those tools because of that possibility, too?

The citizenry will have a hard time exercising it's natural rights to participate in debates about national policies in the American Republic if each citizen has to also worry about protecting himself from thieves/bandits/pirates/foreign armies.

[ericd]

The 4th protects against search of those effects by the govt. without a warrant. What do you think the computers that store and index those things are doing, without a warrant?

There is no functioning missile defense shield, that program was a huge costly boondoggle.

There is next to no chance that terrorists would be able to take over an aircraft carrier or any other significant military target for any significant length of time. They're full of armed soldiers. Can you imagine what would happen if real, actually well funded militaries and spy agencies could do that? You should try not to live in fear of extremely unlikely dangers.

[rayiner]

> The 4th protects against search of those effects by the govt. without a warrant. What do you think the computers that store and index those things are doing, without a warrant?

You're pretty conveniently leaving out several important words, and also ignoring the ", and" between the first and second clauses of the amendment.

1) You left out the word "unreasonable" from "search." The 4th amendment doesn't protect against "search of those effects" it protects against "unreasonable" searches thereof.

2) You left out the word "their". The 4th amendment doesn't protect against searches of effects. It protects against searches of your effects. You might reasonably say that a Word document on your hard drive is your effect. It's a little harder to say that a Word document on Google's hard drives is nonetheless your effect. I think it strains the definition of the word "your" to say that Google's records about what you search for, or AT&T's records about who you call are your effects, rather than AT&T's effects, when you didn't generate those records and indeed when those records were never even in your possession.

3) Searches don't necessarily require probable cause. The ", and" separates the two parts of the sentence. Searches must be reasonable, and also for any search that requires a warrant, the warrant must be supported by probable cause.

[ericd]

You're arguing that the mass indexing of everyone's communication between two private parties that are not in public should be considered reasonable? This amendment was made partly as a reaction to large-scale fishing expeditions carried out by the crown, trying to root out dissent. That directly parallels the govt. carrying out a large-scale fishing expedition to root out terrorism.

Lawyers can try to wiggle through the subjective parts in the constitution's language, but the intent seems very clear, given the context. The founders did not want the government violating its citizens privacy except when there was a clear reason to, and then only in limited cases, or in trivial cases of privacy invasion that aren't worth considering. Any violation of that is a violation of the spirit of the amendment, if not strictly the letter of it. The language is very forceful on this, and it's clearly meant to be very inclusive on what is considered protected.

The founders didn't have anything in their world that paralleled telephone conversations or server records, except perhaps letters, which they would consider to be effects. They also didn't have anything to parallel our ability to pull out insights from masses of low-signal data.

When people talk on the phone, they have a reasonable expectation that that call is between them and the other person on the call, with AT&T acting as a dumb pipe between them, doing only as much as necessary to make that service work and count the time and rate for billing purposes. There is also the reasonable expectation that AT&T will do with that data what is necessary to bill you for it, but there is no reasonable expectation that they or the govt. will do deep analysis on it to figure out your social connections, who you like best, your travel patterns, who you might be planning something with, etc.

[rayiner]

The 4th amendment was not a response to British actions designed to root out dissent. It was a response to British actions designed to root out people bypassing customs tariffs.

In talking about intent you're projecting onto the framers a broad conception of "privacy" that they did not have. You can't just ignore the text. If you're arguing something is encompassed by the spirit of the law, there must be some evidence of it in the text. It's not there. The text and the discussion at the time is consistent with a more narrow principle: the sanctity of one's home and person, not some broad overarching principle of privacy that attaches to information even when it's shared with potentially hundreds of third parties (how many engineers at Google have access to your email accounts?)

The framers didn't have phones, but they did have all sorts of stored records. Banking records, ledgers, commercial transaction records, shipping records, etc. You can't just ignore the fact that all these things existed, yet the founders made no mention of protecting information that was routinely and by its nature disclosed to other people.

[pfortuny]

"Seizure" comes to mind, though.

Those data are seized. Either they are 'mine' or they are 'Google's' but they certainly are not 'public'. In any of both cases, it is unreasonable to seizure them (even if what you get is just a copy) arbitrarily.

[rayiner]

But the amendment doesn't talk in terms of "not public." It refers to "their... effects." Words aren't meaningless. To make a case for protection under the 4th, you have to make a case that something is your paper or effect, not Google's, and not just anything that is "not public."

[pfortuny]

You're right. AFAIK I keep ownership of my data when using Google's resources, now that I think of it.

[rickhanlonii]

Again, it can not be known to the general public that the NSA is in fact complying with all applicable laws because the legal justification is--in fact--classified. However, it is known thanks to an approved declassified statement that on at least one occasion, the NSA did violate the 4th Amendment[1]. This is taken from the legal director of Senator Ron Wyden as part of an official statement:

"It is also true that on at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment."[2]

Again, no one is saying that the government isn't claiming legal authority. But what you--we--need to understand and accept is that no matter what actions the government takes, they will always claim legal authority. If they were to take unconstitutional or otherwise illegal actions against U.S. citizens--even with benevolent intent (e.g. protection and safety)--they must claim the legal authority to do so. The problem at hand is that neither the actions taken nor the legal justification of those actions are known to the general public and thus we have absolutely no avenue to check the government and ensure that their claims of legal authority are accurate.

It's important to now note that by definition there is no enemy of any nation which presents a greater threat to the sovereignty of that nation than a corruption of that sovereignty itself--be it political corruption, abuse, or tyranny. Therefore, it is an a priori requirement to national security for the public to know that the actions and justifications of the government are legal--and that the public views their legality as justified.

And this can and should be done without releasing specific details which would result in an unreasonable threat to national security. We're not talking about releasing the source code here; we're talking about proving to the public that they approve of the both the actions and the justification of those actions. It may be inconvenient to be restrained by the constitution, but violation of it--even if only in spirit--is tyranny as the founders defined it.

Finally, as an aside to your point about aircraft carriers and missile defense shields, those examples are neither questionably unconstitutional nor are they equivalent. If a aircraft carrier or a missile defense shield become compromised, there will be destruction; but manageable, well-defined, destruction. We can measure and contain that sort of destruction. It's impossible to imagine or measure the amount of destruction caused by the release of in-depth intelligence data of many, most, or all citizens of the world.