SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A federal appeals court in New York will hear oral argument on Tuesday in the ACLU's lawsuit fighting for the public's right to know the legal justifications for government spying.
The Freedom of Information Act suit seeks the release of secret memos written by government lawyers that provided the foundation for the warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications. In essence, these memos serve as the law that governs the executive branch. By withholding them, the government is flouting a core principle of democratic society: The law must be public.
The memos cover the government's legal interpretations of Executive Order 12333 [(EO 12333)], which was issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. It's the primary authority under which the NSA [(National Security Agency)] conducts surveillance, and it encompasses an array of warrantless, high-tech spying programs. While much of this spying occurs outside the United States and is ostensibly directed at foreigners, it nonetheless vacuums up vast quantities of Americans' communications. That's because in today's interconnected world, communications are frequently sent, routed, or stored abroad — where they may be collected, often in bulk, in the course of the NSA's spying activities.
For example, the NSA has relied on EO 12333 to collect nearly 5 billion records per day on the locations of cell phones, as well as hundreds of millions of contact lists and address books from email and messaging accounts. It also intercepted private data from Google and Yahoo user accounts as that information traveled between those companies' data centers located abroad.
Related: DOJ Made Secret Arguments to Break Crypto, Now ACLU Wants to Make Them Public
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @09:12PM (8 children)
You keep stating the obvious in order avoid engaging with the point - secrecy around regulations makes it practically impossible for them to ever be superseded by new laws. No person is ever convicted for violating a regulation, these are administrative laws, not criminal laws.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday December 06 2018, @11:31PM (6 children)
No, I keep stating the obvious because people keep wanting to deny the obvious. Secrecy certainly does not make regulations impossible to be superceded. One can in fact lay out the law by which any regulations - secret or not - must be held to. And what I am saying is that there are those who in the opposition political party who are entitled to know those regulations - secret or not. It's called the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence. They can in fact craft regulation that pulls the teeth of any executive order if they feel the need it should be done. They themselves can bring action if they really felt it vital to security - but that's not the way they work. And my understanding is that the actors in the TLAs do indeed care very much that they engage in legal behavior. Because the individuals who work there do NOT want to be held responsible either civilly or criminally for conduct authorized by regulation that turns out to be in fact illegal to the public law.
And again: You have a Freedom of Information challenge. A court is indeed looking into the matter. In a police state or society which does not follow rule of law an ACLU wouldn't be allowed to exist and certainly wouldn't have been allowed to bring this matter to court. It is FAR from academic as a distinction.
This sig for rent.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @11:33AM
Hey! Can you read? Do you know what "practically" means? Or how about "frustrates?" I think you do. Because you deliberately left out those words so that you could argue with a strawman instead of engaging with the actual point. Congratulations on that debate tactic, its a surefire way to make an unassailable argument. Because when nobody is actually arguing the other side of your strawman, you win by default. Yay for you!!!!!! Boo for reality. Muhguh my man, muhguhhhhhhh!!!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 07 2018, @06:15PM (4 children)
Not legally. You don't know which laws are followed and which ones ignored, if you don't have information about the secret activities.
"Are entitled to know" != know. It's interesting how much weasel-speak there is in your posts.
Contrary to your "understanding", we have numerous instances where illegal, widespread activity was only stopped (or perhaps more accurately, driven underground for a time) because the perpetrators got caught.
For now, that is the case. Let us keep in mind that if it takes numerous FOIA challenges and years to root out some misdeeds, then it's a poor tool for keeping tyranny at bay.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday December 07 2018, @11:17PM (3 children)
And you don't know which laws are followed and which ones ignored, you personally, even if you did have information. Aside from your personally being not aware of things there is a greater imperative. You don't have to know what's being broken to set out laws against the conduct. And you may not like what I said below, but you're incredibly naive if you think that widespread illegal action could be taken as a matter of policy without the political opposition finding out and making holy hell out of it. Not in this hyper-partisan atmosphere.
And it's amazing how much black-and-whiteness is in yours when we live in a world of grays. Plus how much you rampantly speculate without any evidence to back you up. But good, I'm glad you don't dispute that there are those - on both sides of the political aisle - who are charged with knowing. And that you have no evidence that they're not aware. Just because you don't know doesn't mean they don't, right? Just because you aren't personally handed compartmented information or classified regulations doesn't mean that an independent court can not or will not judicially review it.
Wait, how did the perpetrators get caught if it was all secret?
For now is what we're worried about, isn't it? Or are you worried about the bogeymen out there in the future? Or think that past misdeeds will never be learned of? Though I will acknowledge that great vigilance is required to keep things this way. Which is why we are where we are now and why we have this story as an example of exactly that.
What was the problem again?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 08 2018, @02:10AM (2 children)
Yet more weasel-speech. You have yet to state why the US needs this.
It varies. COINTELPRO [wikipedia.org] (FBI tool for infiltrating dissident groups) was revealed when someone burgled an FBI office. ECHELON [wikipedia.org] (a mass surveillance system, collecting information from telephone networks and other channels of the "Five Eyes" countries) was revealed by a few ex-employees of various intelligence agencies. Snowden revealed PRISM [wikipedia.org] (a mass internet surveillance system operated by the NSA) as part of his leaks. These programs were operating for years or longer before they were revealed.
We also have goofy stuff like the CIA being involved in the drug trade (including selling heroin [wikipedia.org] to US soldiers serving in Vietnam during the second phase of the war (between North and South Vietnam). Secrecy enabled this all to go on.
Finally, a number of these projects kept going in a different form after they were discovered. Secrecy allowed that to happen.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday December 13 2018, @08:00PM (1 child)
The system exists. It is upon you to justify why the US does not need this. But if you're suggesting that anything less than the world is black or white is weasel speech, we'll just have to agree to disagree. There will be no way to agree.
So, when such things exist they are discovered, by legal or extralegal means. The perpetrators got caught despite the measures of "secrecy" taken. Whether they actually broke any law and/or were or weren't prosecuted for that is a different question and only tangentially impinges upon the notion of secrecy. The public can indeed hold such people responsible, if we really wanted to. Failure to do so, however, has nothing to do with "secrecy."
It would be a lovely rainbow-colored world if secrecy did not exist, either as a concept or as a nation. It would be interesting to discover if we would be better or worse off as a nation without the ability to gather intelligence, and try to be proactive as a country without it. But that is not going to occur, whether or not you or I wish it to be so. There will be secrets, and intelligence, and spying. I'd much rather there be some method of regulation of it. These should be the lessons learned from Gitmo, COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, LOVEINT, and other forms of abuse of the system. Place such things under control rather than wishing them away, and provide outlets for addressing when they go bad. But since you won't advance a better method for obtaining control than "just say no," then I guess I have to accept what we currently have as the best possible option.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 14 2018, @05:01AM
Ok. With secret courts, secret rules, and secret breaking of the law, we can't have a free society in the long term. The powerful parties who do this, will simply get worse and worse, until the laws and such are no longer capable of restraining them.
The fact that you didn't even get the problem here implies a staggering level of ignorance. Imagine this were murders. It would be disastrous to not even know that murders are going on for many years (sometimes never learning at all), much less more often than not only catching murderers through very illegal tactics by insiders working with the murderers.
You're missing the excluded middle here. We can have fair, public trials without revealing all our national secrets. We can have intelligence and law enforcement agencies capable of protecting our interests without needing to siphon everyone's personal secrets or snooping on everyone's communications.
Then why are you so disinterested in getting that method of regulation? The only way meaningful regulation happens is if misdeeds are made public. That's it.
Defunding abuses of power is not merely saying "no" nor is it a less "best possible" option than allowing these abuses to fester, at best poorly checked.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday December 06 2018, @11:33PM
One correction: The Senate and House can craft bills which become law that regulate the regulations. (If that wasn't obvious....)
This sig for rent.