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One of the NSA’s most important surveillance authorizations is set to expire on December 31st, and all year, reformers have been looking at the reauthorization as a way to pare back the agency’s powers. But after months of negotiating terms, Congress is now preparing a bill with none of the proposed limits, and a number of troubling new measures that say could greatly expand the agency’s power.
Submitted by Rep. Nunes on Tuesday afternoon, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017 is based on a previous bill submitted by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), generally seen as the most NSA-friendly of the proposals. The current bill is narrower than Burr’s proposal in some areas, but makes a significant expansion to “about” collection, which allows the NSA to search communications that mention a given target but was not sent or received by the target. In practical terms, that could mean searching a message simply because it contains an email address, phone number, or other string of characters associated with a target.
[...] The bill would also codify the backdoor search loophole, which allows for intelligence agencies to search communications to and from US citizens without obtaining a warrant, as long as those communications were intercepted overseas. While that loophole is most associated with the NSA, it also includes domestic agencies like the FBI, which the current bill says “has the discretion to seek a warrant” if the bureau deems it necessary.
A vote is expected this week.
Congress is sneaking through a major expansion of NSA surveillance powers
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @01:35PM (14 children)
If you know about it, are they really hiding anything? The American folks don't really care about anything unless it directly affects them, so they're just not paying attention, as usual.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Thursday December 21 2017, @01:55PM (6 children)
Depends on the political climate and how it's spun. If this were still the Obama era we'd never hear the end of how barry-o (barry? who the fuck is barry?) and the rest of the librul slime wants to spy on you. Now I'd expect to hear how it's going to help make america great again and build a wall or something.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:53PM (4 children)
Obama reduced the scope and Trump is expanding it. Your false equivalency is false.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday December 21 2017, @07:04PM (1 child)
Did you reply to the right post?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 21 2017, @07:07PM
Yes. Apparently I don't know how to read though!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @10:33PM (1 child)
Reduced the scope? Which bill was that? The USA Freedom Act?
Also, I'm quite tired of this 'This evil piece of garbage is less evil than this other evil piece of garbage!' nonsense; it's such a vapid thing to argue about and it doesn't justify anything. I don't care who does it or who the people being talked about are. I don't want to see it. I want it to vanish from existence. You might even say I want a safe space from this type of content, or perhaps just a trigger warning. It's an eyesore. Vanish!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @02:35AM
Klaatu barada necktie!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday December 21 2017, @09:16PM
Mass surveillance and the abridgment of civil rights is a bipartisan affair. I believe you have both R's and D's both simultaneously lambasting it and supporting it. The Orange Anus is the Orange Anus, and his bullshit is expected and excoriated. Ol' Barry could do nothing wrong, and the masses cheered him on as his fucked over our rights.
In any case, it's fucking pointless and a waste of money. Why intercept the traffic when they can just come in with guns, threaten Facebook's executives, wield that unPatriot Act, and gather the data locally?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday December 21 2017, @02:52PM (1 child)
Close, but not quite.
10% of Americans will see this as an unconscionable invasion of privacy and have a chilling effect on the universe.
10% of Americans will see this as a way to strengthen the security of America by allowing to scan content.
1% of Americans will get the logical connection that all the discussion and promises about "Yeah we'll take a copy of everything but we won't search it, like Google or Microsoft does," were the absolute horseshit as we said when the promise was made that this would NEVER happen to us. (And no, I won't cite it... go do your own research if that statement is true.)
79% of Americans will see it as not their problem as you suggested. More may join one side or the other by education, but not enough to keep that 10% that are going to find a way to do this, to do this.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:49PM
At best, 1% of Americans will see it at all. It doesn't matter what percentages they like it hate it, because no one will notice.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:41PM (3 children)
Everything Congress votes on is public knowledge, and all the various horrors pushed through are always known about. However, if you can't get the media to focus on it then a very small number of citizens will know about it! It is effective secrecy, not total. Thus why it is so important for the powers that be to control the media, they can literally fabricate the reality for a vast majority of people and pull the rug out from any naysayers.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 21 2017, @07:12PM (2 children)
Calling a vote before anyone has a chance to read the bill is pretty sneaky...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:49PM (1 child)
Funny how both sides do that to each other
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @09:35PM
Is the political equivalency game really necessary for this comment? No one mentioned rep/dem. This is one of the reasons I think there are bots / shills all over this site. It has been reported that libertarians / conservatives are more highly targeted for manipulation so it wouldn't surprise me if this small site was actually a bigger target than many others.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday December 21 2017, @10:33PM
Remember the good old pre-Internet days, when legislative bodies could actually sneak things through because we didn't have ubiquitous visibility, and these sorts of issues never crossed the 'care enough to actively stay up-to-date on if you're not employed in politics' threshold? I wonder how long it will take before the new blood cycles in, and after having been raised by Facebook and Twitter, they automatically assume everything they do is in a fishbowl.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @02:00PM (5 children)
If communication crosses national border, it is a fair game for signal intelligence, because there could be a covert endpoint in foreign nation to which the communication is really addressed. NSA may be listening, but so might unknown others.
However, if communication within nation was deliberately routed outside borders with sole purpose of gaining legal permission to tap it, that would be a completely different matter.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday December 21 2017, @02:15PM (3 children)
Oh, bullshit. Or did you forget the /sarc tag?
Federal law enforcement wants to be allowed to tap into domestic communications without a warrant, because warrants require some degree of actual proof. They make it impossible to just go fishing.
And it's damned easy. All you have to do is take some random data stream and lie about the routing - pretend taht it is shorter to bounce the targetted packets across the border and back, rather than send then straight to their destination. And - voila - warrantless surveillance. Fishing expeditions enabled.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:01PM (2 children)
Run a traceroute on packets from your server to SN's server. Even if you live close by, you might be surprised to find connections through Germany and South Korea.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:56PM
I would have thought Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the UK would be more likely, because of 5 Eyes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:59PM
Which Linode data center is SN housed in? My guess is Sweden since I get routed through Stockholm. That automatically makes all SN traffic "suspect".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:33PM
An exception like that does not exist in the fourth amendment. Given the nature of the Internet, it is nearly impossible and not even remotely desirable to ensure that your communications never cross your national border. This is why mass surveillance on all kinds should not be allowed: Because, given how the Internet works, you'll end up spying on many citizens (and innocent foreigners, but many people don't seem to care about that). How about they just get a warrant for each individual they wish to spy on? Oh, sure, it's not easy, but our Constitution was never meant to make the government's job easy, not even in the name of safety.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Thursday December 21 2017, @02:12PM (13 children)
It's at times like this that one really has to marvel at the US Congress. It is just too remote, too removed from the concerns of the voters. Do any - any - of the people in Congress ever stop to think that they are supposed to be representing the interests of Joe Sixpack and Millie the Hairdresser? Apparently not. Just like the proposed bill to "restore" net neutrality, which was apparently written by the big corporations, because it codifies all the things they really want to do, like monetizing data streams on both ends. This bill codifies all the things federal law enforcement really wants, like being able to skip applying for those troublesome warrants. It's all about the interests of big organizations, while completely disregarding the concerns of Joe and Millie.
This is the kind of thing that makes me happy to live in a tiny country. Our politicians are regularly sighted on the same trains the rest of us use, or on the street, or wherever. They are embedded in the population, at least more so that the US "elite". We know where the bastards live. Too damned many of them are farmers, but maybe that's better than too many lawyers (though we have too many of those as well). More: When they do something stupid anyway, the population can, and regularly does tell them where to stuff it. [wikipedia.org]
When countries get too big, the government loses touch with the population. Which means: the population no longer really controls the government. US elections at the national level are a joke - you get to pick between two sides of the same clipped coin, over and over and over again. Best thing that could happen to the US (and to the EU, and to any other political entity with a population over 8 digits) is a break-up into smaller entities. Brexit is - I hope - just the beginning. Y'all need for Texas and California, and New Hampshire, and all of the other secessionist movements to succeed. But somebody needs to be first - and nobody has the guts.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Informative) by crafoo on Thursday December 21 2017, @02:41PM
This was how it was supposed to work in the USA as well. States and counties were to have the majority of power. Any power not explicitly granted to the local governments by the people was necessarily reserved to individual people. Federal government existed solely to deal with treaties and broader interstate travel and commerce issues. There was to be no standing military in peace time. There was no federal income tax.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday December 21 2017, @02:51PM (3 children)
It'd be a horrific, bloody mess, probably even worse than the last time someone tried to pull out of the union.
I sometimes think we need to split it up too, but the existing processes are unimaginably terrible.
It'd be nice if we could tone it down more gently, but it's hard to imagine anyone going along with that either.
What to do...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 21 2017, @03:25PM (2 children)
It wasn't a bloody mess. The subsequent attack on US-manned Fort Sumter was the bloody mess. South Carolina had seceded from the US without consequence in December, 1860 and attacked Fort Sumter in April, 1861.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:43PM (1 child)
That was back in the days when there wasn't really a standing army. Even by World War I it still took countries like 2-3 weeks to mobilize in event of surprise invasion.
And you might recall the Union had a lot of trouble with finding competent commanders for like the first half of the war, too.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 22 2017, @01:55AM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday December 21 2017, @03:09PM (5 children)
Possibly. You make striking points. I think you're right that the vast majority of Congresspeople really don't have any idea of the way Joe and Millie actually live their lives - not in the sense that they've experienced what it really means to be that, anyway. (They have LOTS and LOTS of experts to tell them how their constituents may react to a given proposition or whatever, especially concerning how a majority of their constituents will or will not vote for them based on whatever.)
But no, it's not entirely about disregarding what Joe and Millie want. Joe Sixpack really DOESN'T give a damn if the guv'mint can read every single email he's sent or Facebook Message he's sent. Nobody with access is going to give a crap that he spends money with a bookie or sent a message to his side honey to meet him at the motel. And Joe Sixpack IS Scared that that dark skinned feller walking into that there Mosque in Chicago just sent a message to an Imam in New York City that Mustafa can hijack the plane and fly it into the Sears Tower (yep, you and I know its Willis Tower - he DOESN'T CARE,) anyway that dark skinned Hadji can do that thang. He WANTS law enforcement to be able to check everyone's private Facebook if they can learn that Hadji is saying that thang. Joe KNOWS he's a God-Fearing, Gun Owning, Beer Guzzling American and he wants his Football and Guns and doesn't care about the rest.
Millie Hairdresser is worried about her hubby Joe, especially when he gets to drinking while watching Fox News. Millie wants to be sure that Joe keeps his job and brings enough money home that Joe has his nice beer and she can buy her knitting suppiles by Amazon. Plus she wants to make sure that Hadji won't come over and knock Joe off and take her into the bushes. So she's all behind having a nice great big wall built, especially if it won't be coming out of her tax bill. That little brown Jose who set her table and washed her dishes at the restaurant can sure keep doing that for her, so long as she never has to see him on her shopping trip to Sears or her annual fling at Macy's. But in the meantime, anything that the government does which keeps that brown boy from taking away Joe's job because he'd do it for less money if given a chance... yep she'll take that.
So no, Joe and Millie, for example, voted for Trump and are actually HAPPY at what he Tweets and would probably support these provisions. And what Trump getting elected proved was that they ARE still in charge of this country, no matter what those folks in the cities on the coasts (or on Lake Michigan - same thing really) think.
Don't think for a second that those folks who run for elections can't see these things, especially after they've happened. And, by the way, we HAD our Secessions and Seven States tried to get free. In 1861. The South Lost.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday December 21 2017, @03:36PM (1 child)
(Score: 2, Touché) by redneckmother on Thursday December 21 2017, @05:15PM
That reminds me of an unattributed quote:
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:17PM
Ha, your post reminded me of that song about "I'm an asshole, and i'm proud of it".
Joe and Millie Sixpack "I'm an asshole, yo-yo, yo-yo, yo-yo....We're assholes, and we're proud of it"
:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:42PM (1 child)
everyone I know that I've spoken to about this and other congressional grabs like this... are very against it
but feel powerless to stop it. and it is that powerless feeling that discourages any acting upon it.
many really really REALLY thought that the democrats were to blame, and draining the swamp would restore... something.
but they now concede what has happened wasn't what they imagined. even if it really is what they were told. everyone believed something else would happen, america would be stronger because of patriotism and traditions and... and not made weaker by fear.
now they are afraid, too
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:49PM
"I never thought leopards would eat MY face!" sobs mutilated woman who voted for Chief Leopard of the Leopards Eating Peoples' Faces Party.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @03:39PM (1 child)
I'm not the first to say this, but I'll repeat it:
If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:18PM
Justin Trudeau, the Waffle King!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:22PM
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/12/momentary-victory-against-nsa-surveillance [eff.org]
Other bills could be considered, or this one might creep back in.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:47PM (1 child)
When I went to look up this "Nunes" that they don't even give us the first name of, I expected it to be a Democrat they're skating over. But no:
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:59PM
When I went to look up this "Nunes" that they don't even give us the first name of
Oh that's funny. I didn't even notice.
I guess the author assumed (like I did) that everyone knew who that snake helping Trump obstruct justice was.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @05:10PM (1 child)
if the end-goal of expanding surveillance is to ultimately get rid of having to
eavesdrop on each and everybody then one could accept it.
however, it might also lead to a "information gap" that creates a cast of people
that "know" and a cast of people that "don't know".
if this cast system requires ever-expanding surveillance to exist then it will never end, ever;
the end goal being that only the "know" cast knows about the eavesdropping and the
rest will believe that there is non.
eavesdropping is good because it allows us to make it obsolete -or- eavesdropping is good so we can make you believe it has become obsolete?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:52PM
There is no possible "end" to surveillance, that is why we need privacy laws and preventive measures against the kind of overreach we have today.
So how about eavesdropping is bad because it is a violation of civil liberties? Any such violations better have a valid court granted warrant.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:04PM
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/20/fisa-section-702-renewal-surveillance-bill/ [theintercept.com]
It's good practice for finding and killing undesirable techies later on.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:54PM (2 children)
If everyone in the government wants the ability to spy on all citizens at will, then all citizens must have the ability to spy on everyone in government at will.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:59PM (1 child)
Well, you better get started now. I'm sure you've been on a watchlist or three for years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 21 2017, @09:28PM
"I'm sure you've been on a watchlist or three for years."
We all are.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @10:34PM
I wouldn't put it past them to route all comms traffic through an undersea cable loop that simply routes it right back to the homeland.