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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the standing-up-to-the-man dept.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced that Cloudflare is one of its clients in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of National Security Letters:

We're happy to be able to announce that Cloudflare is the second courageous client in EFF's long-running lawsuit challenging the government's unconstitutional national security letter (NSL) authority. Cloudflare, a provider of web performance and security services, just published its new transparency report announcing it has been fighting the NSL statute since 2013.

Like EFF's other client, CREDO, Cloudflare took a stand against the FBI's use of unilateral, perpetual NSL gag orders that resulted in a secret court battle stretching several years and counting. The litigation—seeking a ruling that the NSL power is unconstitutional—continues, but we're pleased that we can at long last publicly applaud Cloudflare for fighting on behalf of its customers. Now more than ever we need the technology community to stand with users in the courts. We hope others will follow Cloudflare's example.

16-16082 Notice to Court Concerning NSL


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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by bob_super on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:34PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:34PM (#453119)

    > the FBI's use of unilateral, perpetual NSL gag orders that resulted in a secret court battle

    How are those amendments working for you?
    I'm pretty sure that in the case of a Clearly Dangerous Terrorist, any sane judge would compel Cloudflare to help the FBI and keep quiet, warrant/injunction-style.

    That kind of precedent makes the new guy's contempt for judges even more scary...

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:46PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:46PM (#453123)

    Define "Clearly Dangerous Terrorist" for me and provide an example. People in custody for committing acts of terrorism don't count, because they are already in custody. People at large would count, but people who have committed terrorist acts tend to be in custody or dead. People who have committed no crime, however, are neither "Clearly Dangerous" nor a "Terrorist".

    You say that "any sane judge would compel". I say that a judge's role is to enforce the law and the constitution, not do whatever he or she thinks is best for society. And the constitution was written to prohibit this kind of unassailable government power. Whether it is effective or useful doesn't matter. National Security Letters prevent American citizens from knowing what their government is doing to them, which threatens democracy itself.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:57PM (#453125)

      Define "Clearly Dangerous Terrorist" for me and provide an example.

      That would probably be anyone whose ethnicity, politics or religion he disagrees with. People who are different are scary and dangerous!

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by bob_super on Friday January 13 2017, @12:29AM

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday January 13 2017, @12:29AM (#453128)

      I'll excuse you for not knowing how to read my tone, though both my question and the Unnecessary Capitalization should have given you enough of a hint.
      In a nutshell, we agree on the fundamentals, though not on the delivery.
      I'm going to have to disagree with your words

      >People who have committed no crime, however, are neither "Clearly Dangerous" nor a "Terrorist".

      One could easily argue that someone who's been observed studying carefully the location of a future event, has rented a truck, bought a metric ton of fertilizer for the cactus in his one-bedroom, and has had repeated communication with people encouraging violence, could be construed by a law enforcement agency as a likely source of imminent trouble, even if they haven't committed a crime.
      That's the way counter-terrorism works. If you wait for the crime, you've lost.
      The identification and sorting of the people who will act from the ones merely curious, boasting, or just plain dumb, is the toughest part. But you're a terrorist when you commit to a realistic plan to hurt people outside a battlefield (add qualifiers for cause and target, you get the point), not just after a bomb goes off.

      >You say that "any sane judge would compel". I say that a judge's role is to enforce the law and the constitution

      Precisely. That involves providing warrants for law enforcement based on upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. So, when the FBI has a good reason to look into someone, they should go in front of a judge and get a warrant, and an injunction to remain quiet about the warrant. That NSL bullshit is a way around the checks and balances of the executive power by the judicial.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by NewNic on Friday January 13 2017, @12:49AM

        by NewNic (6420) on Friday January 13 2017, @12:49AM (#453131) Journal

        Exactly right.

        The NSL is at its core, a threat to ruin the recipient's life if they don't cooperate. The FBI can drag someone into court and keep them there, even with bogus charges, draining their savings and any hope of future employment. That's ultimately the reason people comply with NSLs.

        It's not because NSLs are supported by constitutional laws (as far as I can tell, SCOTUS hasn't ruled on their constitutionality), instead it's because the FBI and other agencies wield a very big stick.

        --
        lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
        • (Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 13 2017, @07:17AM

          by dry (223) on Friday January 13 2017, @07:17AM (#453199) Journal

          It's not because NSLs are supported by constitutional laws (as far as I can tell, SCOTUS hasn't ruled on their constitutionality)

          This is one thing scary about America, just how easily SCOTUS can massively redefine rights. Some do need interpreting, what's a reasonable search is an example. Others are written in pretty plain English and the language hasn't changed enough that "Congress will not" or "the Right to Bear Arms will not be Infringed" has changed. Instead of saying, "the Constitution says this, don't like it, amend it" and perhaps stay their decision for a year to give government time to amend if it's that important.
          I can't see how an honest court could rule that NLS letters are Constitutional but I bet some of these Judges will find a way.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @09:15PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @09:15PM (#453463)

            It's not because we have a SCOTUS, it's because they're appointed for life and there isn't anything that you can do to remove them if they're incompetent.

            Ultimately, how laws are read and interpreted is going to be set by the judicial system, there's no way around it. But, the fact that many of these people sit on the bench for decades completely removes them from any meaningful comprehension about what the unintended consequences are.

            A better system would be for them to be appointed for a shorter period of time like say 10 years, that way, you don't have the long term problems associated with incompetent Presidents nominating incompetent justices like Thomas and Scalia.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday January 13 2017, @02:40PM

        by meustrus (4961) on Friday January 13 2017, @02:40PM (#453314)

        I'm glad I simply misread your tone (tone? on the internet?). I'm even gladder to read such great commentary.

        You're absolutely right that there has to be an effort to prevent terrorism before it happens. To do that, law enforcement needs to be able to track when somebody has been scoping out a target, buying materiel, and organizing.

        The use of NSL, and really all expansion of cyber law enforcement, is based on the premise that the problem is people having too much privacy. I say that this premise itself is faulty. Look at what has changed since before computers. People always had privacy. What changed was the amount of power we have within our own homes. The internet gives us a safe space to organize with random people, as opposed to the physical world where meeting places or routes to them are at least visible to random passersby who are part of the same community. The internet gives us a more anonymous means of buying dangerous things, as opposed to the physical world where people see what you're buying. Mail and phone orders have existed as well, but the cost barriers to running such a business kept those businesses within the scope of reasonable government surveillance. For anybody to effectively surveil all commerce on the internet, they would need to cast a net so wide as to eliminate privacy altogether.

        But what has changed most strongly is the dissemination of memes. I'm not talking cat pictures necessarily. I'm talking the original concept of "meme" as an "imitated thing" that passes through society like genes pass through populations. These days, mentally deranged anarchists have as much of a voice as happy, stable community leaders. This influences the ideas that can percolate through society.

        If we truly want to stop terrorism before it happens, we need to stop the ideas that lead people to abandon all hope in society. We need, firstly, to make society obviously worth being a part of for everyone. We need, secondly, to privilege the voices of people that will help resolve personal difficulties, and hinder the voices of people that will use your personal difficulties to incite hatred, fear, and violence. And we need, thirdly and most importantly, to do all of this in a decentralized manner that won't end up giving any group of people a control console over the thoughts and emotions of anyone else.

        The alternative, which is now the primary means of preventing terrorism, is to cast an ever-widening net of surveillance, feeding into an ever-growing body of unfathomable data about our lives, interpreted by an ever-more-powerful group of secret police, resulting in an ever-more-inescapable totalitarian society.

        --
        If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?