Discussion for article #224603
Yup, spying on Americans is at least as legal as invading Iraq, running torture facilities at Gitmo, killing American citizens abroad without a trial, and letting Wall Street fleece the joint. And pretty soon, thanks to the TPP that both Clinton and Obama are stealthily pursuing, it will be âlegalâ for corporations to challenge ANYTHING that gets in the way of their profit making
So very, very legal. Thank God we have a Constitutional Scholar for a Prez to guide us through this challenging âlegalâ landscape.
The US governmentâs privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agencyâs mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.
That was in January. And nowâŚPRESTOâŚLEGAL!
Looks like someone had a little âtalkâ.
Stuff a big green sock in your phoney dripping outrage. Itâs legal. Donât you have an auto dealer to torch?
At one time, some of the âtellsâ of the right-wing âsock puppetâ troll was their use of terms such as âDemoRATSâ or âDemonratsâ for Democrats, and their repeatedly calling Obama âObummer,â âObomberâ or âObomba.â But theyâve mostly changed that language as actual progressives began to notice those repeated constructions and the fetid and simpleminded opinions attached to them
Right-Wing Sock Puppets Pretending to Be Liberals Assault Progressive Websites:
The EFF on this ridiculous whitewash:
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) issued a legally flawed and factually incomplete report late Tuesday that endorses Section 702 surveillance. Hiding behind the âcomplexityâ of the technology, it gives short shrift to the very serious privacy concerns that the surveillance has rightly raised for millions of Americans. The board also deferred considering whether the surveillance infringed the privacy of many millions more foreigners abroad.
The board skips over the essential privacy problem with the 702 âupstreamâ program: that the government has access to or is acquiring nearly all communications that travel over the Internet. The board focuses only on the governmentâs methods for searching and filtering out unwanted information. This ignores the fact that the government is collecting and searching through the content of millions of emails, social networking posts, and other Internet communications, steps that occur before the PCLOB analysis starts. This content collection is the centerpiece of EFFâs Jewel v. NSA case, a lawsuit battling government spying filed back in 2008.
The boardâs constitutional analysis is also flawed. The Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for searching the content of communication. Under Section 702, the government searches through content without a warrant. Nevertheless, PLCOBâs analysis incorrectly assumes that no warrant is required. The report simply says that it âtakes no positionâ on an exception to the warrant requirement when the government seeks foreign intelligence. The Supreme Court has never found this exception.
All Prime Slimer attacks will be ignored. Have a great day!
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The ACLU also thinks itâs a crock of shit:
WASHINGTON â The Privacy and Civil Liberties Board is expected to approve today a report on NSA surveillance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The report suggests some reforms, but the American Civil Liberties Union believes the proposals are inadequate.
ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, who testified before the board about Section 702 in March, had this reaction:
âThis is a weak report that fails to fully grasp the civil liberties and human rights implications of permitting the government sweeping access to the communications of innocent people. It is jarring to read this report just weeks after the House voted to limit the NSAâs âbackdoorâ searches, and just days after the Supreme Courtâs cell-phone-search decision defending privacy rights in the digital age. The Supreme Court, Congress, and the American people have recognized the need for fundamental reform. It is disappointing that the boardâs report does not.â
A White House White Wash.
UnfadingGreen, your passion for this issue is indeed passionate. It may also be clouding your reading comprehension, or at least your ability to refrain from commenting on an article until youâve read the entire thing. As this article clearly states the ruling in January was related to phone date. This ruling relates to Internet data.
This is a complex issue, clearly. The same people that found some NSA activity to be illegal have also found some other NSA activity to be legal. It sounds to me that this panel is doing due diligence and reviewing these programs on a case by case basis, with respect to American law and legal precedent, instead of just crudely judging the entirety of modern technological surveillance with a broad, myopic stroke. I appreciate this kind of nuance. I also appreciate the role that this panel is playing in dealing with this panel in an apparently appropriate and rational manner.
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But I thought that when a government contractor unilaterally ruled that this program was illegal, that meant that it was illegal. Doesnât the opinion of one guy trump decades of court rulings and legal precedent?
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Yeah, it said that.
Sorry, but having an administrative board give an opinion doesnât make the programs constitutional. 2 republicans lawyers, 2 âsecurity expertsâ (paid shills for the Intelligence Industrial Complex) and 1 ex Dem judge isnât a substitute for our legal system.
Indeed, I have to question the slant of the author of this piece with such tidbits as, âthe NSA uses court orders and taps on fiber optic lines to target the data of foreigners living abroadâ. Pure speculation, given what we have seen so far. Indeed,the NSA has made no grudges about the fact that they arenât just targeting foreigners abroadâŚthey are capturing as much as possible for future referenceâŚdomestic and foreign.
Likewise this one, âunder which the NSA collects foreign intelligence from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and nearly every other major American technology company.â Only foreign intelligence?? That is beyond laughable. Especially when he further admits âThose steps include âminimizationâ that leaves out the names of Americans from intelligence reports unless they are relevant.â
SoâŚonly foreigners are having their data compiled. And we wonât show the names of domestic targetsâŚunless we think they are relevant. âI never go out in the sunshine. And when I do, I always wear suntan lotionâ
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Yes, it is a complex issue. But there is no question that they are gathering more internet data from more sources, than they are phone data. So how you come to the conclusion that a more pervasive search is constitutional while collecting phone data isnât, is a mystery.
And before people on here start mixing âlegalâ and "constitutionalâ as being synonymsâŚthey arenât. A law is legal until it is found unconstitutional in a court. These programs are damn near impossible to get into a court to determine the constitutionality of the underlying laws, but I think it is worth while to review some of the more recent SCOTUS opinions. Unanimous decision that cell phones cannot be searched when arresting someone. Unanimous decision that using a GPS to track someone was unconstitutional. (even more interesting when you read the opinion by Alito,of all people. He goes well beyond the specific case and calls into question privacy assumptions on nearly everything in todayâs technological world). Indeed, the only unanimous decisions we are seeing are all related to privacy issues.
That doesnât bode well for these programs when eventually, one of them is brought before the Court.
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Yup, when it comes to All Things NSA, TPM is pretty much a like the White House stenographer that Stephen Colbert famously described:
The President makes decisions. Heâs the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!
The tidbits they exclude are telling, like this little gem
It added, however, that certain aspects of the program raise questions about whether its impact on U.S. persons pushes it over the edge into âconstitutional unreasonablenessâ.
The watchdog said it was concerned about the incidental collection of U.S. personsâ communications and the use of queries to search the information collected under the program for the communications of specific U.S. persons.
I do not believe anything coming out of this administration regarding privacy - let the supreme court decide
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Yup. His credibility is pretty much shot on this issue.
âSo how you come to the conclusion that a more pervasive search is constitutional while collecting phone data isnât, is a mystery.â
It isnât a mystery. Itâs based on previous Supreme Court decisions, which I think we can all agree is the gold standard for what is both constitutional and legal.
Like you said a law is legal until it is found unconstitutional. Therefore, these laws are constitutional. I hope the Supreme Court takes up these issues sooner rather than later to add extra clarity, especially in light of technology that has rapidly changed since their previous rulings on these sort of matters, specifically Smith v Maryland. The decision regarding searching of physical cell phones currently has no legal standing when it comes to non-physical metadata that is housed in a separate physical data center owned and operated outside the legal protections of the private individual. I certainly find that distinction both fascinating and potentially problematic, but that is the current legal (and Constitutional) standard. Itâs also how our current laws regulate the ownership and control of metadata and for that matter personal writings that are then copied and stored by an outside third party vendor.
I suspect that the Supreme Court will not be quite so unanimous with their decisions when it comes to issues that pit personal privacy against the rights of corporations to âownâ and control the metadata of those same individuals, especially with regards to national security issues. Weâll see. But under current law, (and under current Constitutional interpretations by the people granted authority by our Constitution to interpret and enforce the Constitution) the findings of this advisory board seem to me to be accurate.
If I had to venture a guess, when/if one of these programs is brought before the Supreme Court the Supreme Court will rule on them in a case by case basis and will probably deem some of the programs unconstitutional while deciding some of the programs are indeed constitutional, similar to the finding of this advisory board. Itâs not going to be a one-size fits all decision, much to the disappointment of the people that think unwarranted GPS tracking of a single private cellphone is somehow synonymous with the warranted gathering of internet data.
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Smith v. Maryland is not the panacea that so many think it is. In fact, its only comparable on the most basic levels.
Smith v. Maryland was dealing with one individual, who was already under suspicion of a crime. They knew exactly what they were looking for when the conducted the wire tap in that caseâŚnamely, evidence that he had made a call to threaten the victim at the time in question, from his home phone.
So, they were meeting all the requirements listed out in the 4th Amendment. The NSA, by comparison, has no idea of what individual(s)they are looking for, none of which are under suspicion of any crime, and they have absolutely no idea of what they will findâŚcertainly nothing they can attest to before a judge.
My point about bringing up the latest rulings regarding privacy, is to show that their is indeed a sentiment growing in the SCOTUS to seriously question privacy assumptions of law enforcement in todayâs technology.
And its pure distraction to bring up how the SCOTUS would rule on corporate ownership of customer data. The issue at hand is the 4th Amendment, which prevents the GOVERNMENT from unwarranted search and seizures.
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