SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/us/politics/nsa-surveillance-terrorism-privacy.html
The National Security Agency said Friday that it had halted one of the most disputed practices of its warrantless surveillance program, ending a once-secret form of wiretapping that dates to the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 expansion of national security powers.
The agency is no longer collecting Americans' emails and texts exchanged with people overseas that simply mention identifying terms — like email addresses — for foreigners whom the agency is spying on, but are neither to nor from those targets.
The decision is a major development in American surveillance policy. Privacy advocates have argued that the practice skirted or overstepped the Fourth Amendment.
The change is unrelated to the surveillance imbroglio over the investigations into Russia and the Trump campaign, according to officials familiar with the matter. Rather, it stemmed from a discovery that N.S.A. analysts had violated rules imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court barring any searching for Americans' information in certain messages captured through such wiretapping.
Though I'm personally wondering why now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 01 2017, @01:25PM (1 child)
Like others here, I initially wondered, "Why?" Is the NSA really doing the right thing here? Was the FISA court really reining in the NSA?
Assuming the NYT article is accurately reporting what happened, there is perhaps a potential explanation buried deep in the article. I first was alerted to something fishy in the antepenultimate paragraph:
Although one official initially suggested that the more recent problem was that analysts had improperly searched that special database, a senior intelligence official clarified that the problem instead stemmed from querying for Americans’ information in upstream data generally.
So, it wasn't just looking for terrorists through collection of Americans' emails: it was "querying for Americans' information." That rang a bell for me with a passage earlier in TFA:
under rules imposed by the intelligence court, analysts were not supposed to search for Americans’ information within that data set [i.e., the "upstream" database].
Analysts are still, however, permitted to search for an American’s information within another repository of emails gathered through the warrantless surveillance program’s so-called Prism or “downstream” system, which gathers emails of foreign targets from providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. That system does not collect “about” communications.
The change announced Friday eliminated the factor that made upstream collection more sensitive than Prism collection, and the agency said it was purging its repository of messages it had previously gathered under the old rules. The official said the intelligence court’s presiding judge, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, has now authorized the agency to use Americans’ identifiers to query the newly captured upstream internet messages, too, for future intelligence investigations.
AHA! See, there's the upshot for the NSA.
Perhaps others can parse this differently, but the way I read this article is the following:
(1) This isn't about terrorists, it's about spying on Americans.
(2) The FISA court determined the terrorist "dragnet" was too large in the "upstream" collection, and ruled several years ago that the NSA couldn't directly query for Americans' info without a warrant.
(3) The NSA says "oops" to the FISA court: "We did keep searching for Americans' info."
(4) The FISA court says, "You need to fix that."
(5) Much handwringing at the NSA. Then, oh -- if we still want to put surveillance on Americans, maybe FISA will let us if we narrow the dragnet!
(6) NSA says, "We'll stop the 'about' collection from upstream!"
(7) FISA says, "Okay, now you're free to search the database for warrantless surveillance of Americans again!"
So, the cynical way to interpret this decision is that the NSA would rather have a more limited database to query for spying on Americans (i.e., limited to emails exchanged with foreign "targets"), rather than having more data allowing it to spy on actual foreign terrorists.
The even more cynical way to look at this is that the NSA will likely expand its definition of "foreign targets" quite substantially in the coming years, thereby enlarging the database of collected info again, though now with the freedom to search for Americans' information without a warrant.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday May 01 2017, @04:30PM
"What does William Binney say?" or WDWBS? :)
The US government liars and thus the NYT liars and the rest all tried this back in 2015 (see second blockquote below). No one of merit bought it then so they have to try again, and again no one with a barely functioning brain will buy it if they pay any attention at all.
Here's the recent Washington's Blog entry [washingtonsblog.com] from April 30ieth 2017 (yesterday, relative date), I've added the bold emphasis and removed link clutter:
Visit the link to the post to get additional and clickable links.
I would add that while nothing has changed for the better that fact alone means that it automatically has changed for the worse simply due to technological progress (examples like how public civilian research now manages to copy the entirety of a voice in near real-time needing only a sample of one minute of speech and immense improvements in automated intelligence analysis (Snowden's old job) only come in addition to more mundane things like Moore's Law).
Another nitpick is that Binney says "could" when he ought to say "will". There is no "could" in "automated retrieval of everything" :3
Compare the above to Washington's Blog [washingtonsblog.com] in 2015:
Visit their site for the links and more (including how the content of all your phone calls also goes into the in-box), the above blockquote is just a snippet.
Whatever any US government or anyone under their control (all western governments, all western media, all "opposition", all ideology, all "quarrels", popular culture and entertainment) says or pretends is manipulation. One has to remember that every time one sees anything at all be it about Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, the US itself, anything at all in the "news".
Surveillance is the "IN box", manipulation is the "OUT box".
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))