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by declan 4729 days ago
That is true, but numbers matter. There's a big difference between the NSA serving 10 FAA702/FISA orders a year on Microsoft for Skype intercepts vs. 10 million. It's targeted vs. wholesale surveillance. We know from companies' disclosures the upper bound is on the order of thousands, and is likely to be far less.

Put another way, there are some actual terrorists/spies/etc. out there, even if the number of terrorists is far lower than the government would like you to believe. If the NSA serves Microsoft with, say, 10 or 100 lawful orders a year to eavesdrop on those communications, is that something worthy of working with "dedication" to prevent? Probably not.

What the companies should be doing is encrypting what they can to frustrate wholesale surveillance. Which Microsoft isn't doing. Which I wrote about here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/

And here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591179-38/
2 comments
oceanstone 4728 days ago
When Verizon was served with a FISA request for all their customer's meta data, each day for 3 months, that counted as one order.

That means Verizon might have "only" received 4 FISA orders a year.

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declan 4728 days ago
No, the Internet companies have said that's not what's happening. Facebook has said, for instance, it has received a total of requests covering 18,000 accounts over a 6-month period, which includes NSA requests and local cops trying to find a missing person: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589461-38/facebook-micro...

The Facebook etc. statements were designed to address precisely the concern you raised. Verizon and AT&T, on the other hand, have remained very, very quiet. For good reason: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591391-38/surveillance-p...

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coldtea 4728 days ago
>No, the Internet companies have said that's not what's happening.

Ah, it's ok then.

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declan 4726 days ago
If you have evidence they're lying, I'd be delighted to hear it. Otherwise I'll believe them over a random HN comment, thanksverymuch.
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grey-area 4728 days ago
While I agree with you that numbers matter, having the infrastructure in place and a secret court system which simply passes almost every request allows this to be used as much as the NSA decides is reasonable, and for that use to increase exponentially over time. That in itself is dangerous, because we have no idea what future administrations would use the data for.

A manual process would ensure that the number of requests is kept reasonable.

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