[HN Gopher] NSA's Warrantless Wiretaps (2012)
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NSA's Warrantless Wiretaps (2012)
Author : night-rider
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-08-12 20:31 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nerdylorrin.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nerdylorrin.net)
| akomtu wrote:
| Some philosophical thoughts. The internet implements the innate
| quality of our consciousnesses to unite and act as one, and
| surveillance corresponds to omniscience when anyone can see and
| think with eyes and minds of others, seeing and knowing
| everything as a result. However, some among us are very grabby:
| their vision of omniscience is a one-side mirror type of
| surveillance and their vision of united consciousness is a hive-
| type central will ruling others.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| NSA: "it doesn't count as a 4th Amendment search if we don't find
| anything!"
|
| It's dumb, it's gross, but sadly it has been normalized -- if the
| Snowden leaks couldn't get the ball moving to rein them in, what
| can?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if the Snowden leaks couldn 't get the ball moving to rein
| them in, what can?_
|
| Things happened. Encryption went mainstream, particularly in
| tech. Some minor but meaningful limits on dragnet surveillance
| were passed.
|
| Privacy has a problem of political nihilism. I worked on
| initiatives years ago. Simply getting people to show up to town
| halls led to endless bullshit about how America is hopelessly
| corrupt and why should they bother with a meaningless measure.
| Then the guys pushing a chicken farming bill show up and they
| all have flags and some are in costumes and they offer to
| petition and join the phone banks in her next campaign should
| she back the bill... Is there any reason for an elected to
| entertain the former?
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Snowden pointed and everyone looked at his finger. I feel like
| US citizens as a whole are a lost cause.
|
| We're basically living the 1984 surveillance nightmare
| (remember the monitoring devices that lived in everyone's homes
| that were watching them?). The only difference is we've
| _actually been duped to pay for the devices that spy on us and
| install them willingly_. But it 's soOoO convenient to ask
| Alexa "what's the weather like outside" (because sticking your
| head out the fucking front door is just, ugh, such a nightmare)
| or to save you from the unbelievably arduous and thankless task
| of _having to flip a light switch with your finger_.
|
| Definitely worth it.
| xxpor wrote:
| It's not like 1984 at all. You're missing the important half
| of the equation. No one's (at an aggregate level) getting
| Room 101ed from it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| The NSA warrantless wiretapping was reported in the regular
| news years before Snowden.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Sure, but the revelations about PRISM are pretty damning.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| In what way? PRISM (as described in the leaked and
| declassified document instead of Greenwald's wacky
| interpretation of those documents) is very clearly legal.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Why is "legal" the bar here? What is something is legal
| but still bad otherwise?
| alsaaro wrote:
| I have a hunch that Snowden is a spy himself.
|
| Like Cypher in The Matrix, who wanted his machine masters to
| reinsert him as a celebrity after his betrayal, Snowden's
| Russian masters made him into a celebrity after his betrayal.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| if the us didn't want him in Russia, why did they cancel
| his passport when he was in the Russian airport?
| ben_w wrote:
| If nobody in Russia so much as _tried_ to milk Snowden for
| all he 's worth, someone ought to have been fired.
|
| However, every impression I have of Snowden is that he is
| patriotic _to the USA_ , and that the sole reason he is in
| Russia now is genuinely because of the pressure that the
| government of USA put on every other government to turn him
| over.
| plonk wrote:
| > However, every impression I have of Snowden is that he
| is patriotic to the USA, and that the sole reason he is
| in Russia now is genuinely because of the pressure that
| the government of USA put on every other government to
| turn him over.
|
| Can be both. NSA contractor sees unethical secret
| programs, gets disillusioned and considers disclosing
| them, Russian SVR somehow picks that up and encourages
| him to do it, maybe promises him support, money, or
| refuge if he does. Everybody wins, except the US.
| anonporridge wrote:
| > if the Snowden leaks couldn't get the ball moving to rein
| them in, what can?
|
| Likely nothing.
|
| We'll all likely be ruled by Rehoboam soon, if not already.
| Surveillance and manipulation of the masses has always been a
| presence in civilization. It's most effective when the masses
| don't know or care that it's happening.
|
| So long as the watchers can keep the bread and circuses
| flowing, nothing will change.
| ben_w wrote:
| Probably not already. Current AI is fast enough to read,
| watch, and listen to the entirety of human communication and
| media, but dumb enough that _despite_ consuming a significant
| fraction of everything humans have put on the internet, they
| still only operate at the level of someone with medium-stage
| Alzheimer 's (based on my experience caring for a relative
| with that).
|
| (Of course, that does suggest we're merely an algorithmic
| breakthrough from something genuinely transformative).
| kvetching wrote:
| It was frustrating to listen to the literal CIA Spy on Lex
| Fridman call Snowden a traitor for exposing this system. He
| says America is less safe because of him, as if the program
| stopped because of Snowden.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Before Snowden people with a clue about the possibility of
| pervasive surveillance were derided as wearing tinfoil hats.
| Now we have pervasive use of TLS which makes it harder to
| pick data off of any random wire.
| pilgrimfff wrote:
| If any politician ran on bringing the 4th amendment back, they'd
| have my vote. But spying on the populace is bipartisan.
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _spying on the populace is bipartisan_
|
| Because of attitudes like this. Political nihilism never won
| any battles.
| autoexec wrote:
| Obama ran on the promise to end domestic spying by the NSA, and
| as president he would have had the authority to do it at any
| time, but once he got into office he expanded the domestic
| spying program. The most simple explanation is that he lied
| through his teeth and that he had no intention of stopping it.
|
| It's also possible that once he got elected he was convinced
| that it was so worthwhile that it was worth violating his
| campaign promises, but what worries me most is the possibility
| that Obama honestly believed, and still believes, that it was a
| unacceptable violation of our constitutional rights and that he
| only had to be shown a sample of the data collected on him and
| his family to get him to fall in line and approve whatever the
| NSA wanted.
|
| "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most
| honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang
| him." The NSA has so much data on us that they could blackmail
| anyone, and could likely plant incriminating data as well. That
| power exists for them to use at any time. If they're willing to
| use it in order to keep that power over anyone they see as an
| enemy then it's possible that no president or politician will
| ever be able to do anything to stop America's domestic spying
| program.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > but once he got into office he expanded the domestic spying
| program.
|
| Exactly the opposite happened. According to the documents
| Snowden leaked, Obama had already shut down email metadata
| collection, and after the Snowden leaks, Obama limited the
| phone metadata collection. There are no other NSA domestic
| spying programs that we know of.
| autoexec wrote:
| > "Exactly the opposite happened. According to the
| documents Snowden leaked"
|
| according to the documents Snowden leaked:
| https://www.propublica.org/article/new-snowden-documents-
| rev...
|
| see also: https://www.zdnet.com/article/days-before-trump-
| takes-office...
|
| There's also a great timeline here:
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/timeline-nsa-
| do...
|
| After Obama got into office the NSA got retroactive
| immunity, a massive shiny new data center, and they started
| collecting data from Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype,
| AOL, Apple, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon as
| well as collecting credit card transaction data.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| For a lot of these cases, I suspect the politicians just get
| rolled by a series of Very Serious People who spend all their
| time working on briefings which justify their jobs and the
| attendant concentrations of power. "If not for this program,
| we would have had [large number] of 9/11s!"
| cowpig wrote:
| > The most simple explanation is that he lied through his
| teeth and that he had no intention of stopping it.
|
| This doesn't really fit anything I understand about Obama or
| about the world. Much more likely is that upon taking the
| responsibility of president he learned a lot of new things
| and received a lot of new advice/opinions and changed his
| mind.
| wrs wrote:
| I imagine that anyone who becomes POTUS is quite suddenly
| exposed to a whole lot of new information that might change
| some of their previous views. Also, in so many areas of
| life (management, parenting, writing device drivers) you
| may have strong and idealistic views from the sidelines,
| but once you're responsible for actually doing it your
| default view becomes "it's complicated".
| scottyah wrote:
| He was also determined to shut down Guantanamo Bay, but
| things ended up being a lot more messy than signing a paper
| to make bad things go away
| autoexec wrote:
| Not in this case. The president has full authority over
| the NSA which is part of the DoD. With Guantanamo Bay, he
| needed to find states willing to take in the prisoners
| and he needed congress. As commander-in-chief Obama could
| have ended the domestic spying program with a single
| order.
| autoexec wrote:
| > This doesn't really fit anything I understand about Obama
| or about the world.
|
| The world should have taught you a thousand times over that
| politicians tell lies to get elected. If Obama was being
| honest, he would be the exception. Obama was a typical
| politician in a lot of ways. For example, he was bought and
| paid for by the RIAA and after he was elected he stacked
| the justice department with their layers and as a result
| his administration was extremely favorable to them. (see
| https://www.wired.com/2009/03/obama-sides-wit-2). That
| said, listening to him talk about ending domestic spying, I
| believed him.
|
| It's possible he was shown a lot of things that convinced
| him, but I can't think of anything that would justify the
| ongoing violation of our basic constitutional rights. He
| gave some lip service about improving transparency at the
| NSA but ultimately did nothing to increase accountability
| for the misuse of the data being collected. Misuse that we
| now know was commonplace (thanks to Snowden).
|
| I'd like to think that if he did see some legitimate use
| that made him believe it was a necessary evil that he would
| have done something to minimize the number of people with
| access to that data, but instead he made it easier for that
| data to get shared with other agencies and gave the NSA
| more power than when he entered office.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Modern infrastructure routers have the ability to replicate
| traffic on any network interface to a second network interface,
| and to do this without affecting throughput or latency through
| the node. I have long suspected that the story of "beam
| splitters" on optic fibers was a red herring to distract from how
| it is really done.
|
| If you are surveilling a foreign adversary's submarine cable, OK,
| you need to actually tap-in to a fiber cable. But for a fraction
| of the price of one sigint satellite, you could provision "twin"
| NICs and build/buy backhaul from every backbone node in the US.
| samstave wrote:
| > _If you are surveilling a foreign adversary 's submarine
| cable_
|
| This is exactly what the USS Jimmy Carter does.
|
| And supposedly it was namesaked to spite carter as he was
| against spying, but the sub was built to splice and tap sea
| fiber.
|
| Recall all the lines going down off Libya, Egypt and the like,
| and there was a brief controversy as the US was being accused
| of splicing into those lines....
|
| I cant find the article I was thinking of, as apparently these
| cable cuts are more frequent than I knew...
| kkielhofner wrote:
| It's been around a lot longer than anything I would call
| modern! I remember managed switches from over 20 years ago
| having it.
|
| For anyone curious the blanket term is "port mirroring". These
| days there's little to no distinction between "switch" and
| "router" ports at this level so the term applies regardless.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > Modern infrastructure routers have the ability to replicate
| traffic on any network interface to a second network interface,
| and to do this without affecting throughput or latency through
| the node. I have long suspected that the story of "beam
| splitters" on optic fibers was a red herring to distract from
| how it is really done.
|
| They probably do both... beam spliters are nice, for when you
| don't even want the telco to know.
| user00012-ab wrote:
| GPT3 write me an article about NSA's Warrantless Wiretaps in a
| format to get people angry:
|
| The NSA's warrantless wiretapping program is a blatant violation
| of our privacy rights. The program allows the NSA to collect the
| communications of Americans without a warrant, and without any
| suspicion of wrongdoing.
|
| This program is a direct assault on our Fourth Amendment rights,
| and it must be stopped.
|
| The NSA claims that the program is needed to fight terrorism, but
| there is no evidence that it has actually done so. In fact, the
| program has been repeatedly ruled to be illegal by federal
| courts.
|
| It is time for Congress to step in and put an end to this
| program. We cannot allow the NSA to continue to violate our
| constitutional rights.
| [deleted]
| the_optimist wrote:
| Well at least we have secret courts to protect us. Making false
| statements to those secret courts is punishable by community
| service and probation.
| [deleted]
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| Uhhmmm aggregate "non-personal" profiling by faang
| [deleted]
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