4 ms·

Surprising absolutely nobody.

by sayusasugi 7y ago

ceejayoz 7y ago
I'm surprised the FISA court objected, given their rubber-stamp nature.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  The conspiracist in me thinks it is a PR move to tell the public, don't worry about your privacy, we can/will/do police ourselves.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    One can also gain credibility by admitting to a lesser crime, then one is viewed as compliant and honest, when the lesser charge masks large wrong doing. Classic Sun Tzu.
    - captainredbeard 7y ago
      The intelligence community calls this a "limited hangout". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
  - wmil 7y ago
    These are coming out now because the DOJ OIG was asked to look into FISA abuse back in late 2017 or early 2018. There's now a report circulating for comment in the FBI and other agencies. Rumour is that it will be released next week.
- jonnybgood 7y ago
  > given their rubber-stamp nature. How do you know this? My understanding is that the agencies will try not to submit anything to the FISA court that they know will be rejected as it would be a wasteful use of time and money.
  - voxic11 7y ago
    > In June 2013, a copy of a top-secret warrant, issued by the court on April 25, 2013, was leaked to London's The Guardian newspaper by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. That warrant orders Verizon Business Network Services to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing "telephony metadata" – comprehensive call detail records, including location data – about all calls in its system, including those that occur "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
    - jonnybgood 7y ago
      This doesn’t answer my question. The question pertains to the FISA court’s rubber stamp nature.
      - mike00632 7y ago
        This answers your question because it's a request that should have been rejected by the explicit rules upon which the FISA court ostensibly operates. The FISA court approved it even though any fair minded person could tell that dragnet surveillance wholly within the United States is not within what the courts are only supposed to approve: specific communications between specific individuals of which at least one is outside of the United States.
  - dmix 7y ago
    If it was public I highly doubt there would be such efficiency. If I was a judge on the panel and I knew there will be little to no public scrutiny, and even when there is scrutiny like the article it zero details are given and no punishments, I wouldn't try nearly as hard to protect people's rights above everything. Especially if the only people arguing for it is the government, there's no one defending the people except the judges themselves. All day long they live in a security bubble listening the most paranoid people in the country. It's just too convenient of an excuse to say that they are simply getting it right every time so nothing to see here. Secret courts are never an adequate solution IMO.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
HashThis 7y ago
They look at full email bodies. For many years, they treated email older than 180 days as "Abandonded". They could collect and read these full emails (not just metadata) because they weren't private data but "abandoned". Every sends emails and they stay in their Sent Items for 180+ days, so that means every email everyone sent. This was true for many years, until recently that was disallowed. There are a ton of exceptions where they can see your full data. They just use an exception, like the abandonded email exception.
- autoexec 7y ago
  I doubt they've changed that much from their days in Room 641A copying literally every bit that passed over AT&T's network. They could take the contents of everything that isn't encrypted going over the wire in real time then and I don't expect they've backed off since.

Surprising absolutely nobody.

ceejayoz 7y ago

I'm surprised the FISA court objected, given their rubber-stamp nature.

jermaustin1 7y ago
The conspiracist in me thinks it is a PR move to tell the public, don't worry about your privacy, we can/will/do police ourselves.
- sitkack 7y ago
  One can also gain credibility by admitting to a lesser crime, then one is viewed as compliant and honest, when the lesser charge masks large wrong doing. Classic Sun Tzu.
  - captainredbeard 7y ago
    The intelligence community calls this a "limited hangout". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
- wmil 7y ago
  These are coming out now because the DOJ OIG was asked to look into FISA abuse back in late 2017 or early 2018. There's now a report circulating for comment in the FBI and other agencies. Rumour is that it will be released next week.
jonnybgood 7y ago
> given their rubber-stamp nature. How do you know this? My understanding is that the agencies will try not to submit anything to the FISA court that they know will be rejected as it would be a wasteful use of time and money.
- voxic11 7y ago
  > In June 2013, a copy of a top-secret warrant, issued by the court on April 25, 2013, was leaked to London's The Guardian newspaper by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. That warrant orders Verizon Business Network Services to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing "telephony metadata" – comprehensive call detail records, including location data – about all calls in its system, including those that occur "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
  - jonnybgood 7y ago
    This doesn’t answer my question. The question pertains to the FISA court’s rubber stamp nature.
    - mike00632 7y ago
      This answers your question because it's a request that should have been rejected by the explicit rules upon which the FISA court ostensibly operates. The FISA court approved it even though any fair minded person could tell that dragnet surveillance wholly within the United States is not within what the courts are only supposed to approve: specific communications between specific individuals of which at least one is outside of the United States.
- dmix 7y ago
  If it was public I highly doubt there would be such efficiency. If I was a judge on the panel and I knew there will be little to no public scrutiny, and even when there is scrutiny like the article it zero details are given and no punishments, I wouldn't try nearly as hard to protect people's rights above everything. Especially if the only people arguing for it is the government, there's no one defending the people except the judges themselves. All day long they live in a security bubble listening the most paranoid people in the country. It's just too convenient of an excuse to say that they are simply getting it right every time so nothing to see here. Secret courts are never an adequate solution IMO.
- ceejayoz 7y ago

HashThis 7y ago

They look at full email bodies. For many years, they treated email older than 180 days as "Abandonded". They could collect and read these full emails (not just metadata) because they weren't private data but "abandoned". Every sends emails and they stay in their Sent Items for 180+ days, so that means every email everyone sent. This was true for many years, until recently that was disallowed. There are a ton of exceptions where they can see your full data. They just use an exception, like the abandonded email exception.

autoexec 7y ago
I doubt they've changed that much from their days in Room 641A copying literally every bit that passed over AT&T's network. They could take the contents of everything that isn't encrypted going over the wire in real time then and I don't expect they've backed off since.