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Comment by AstroNutt

4 days ago

Why should they when they have access to FAANG? No need for massive data centers.

By access to FAANG, you mean they can issue court orders to surveil specific foreign accounts, right? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.

  • "NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"

    https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/nsa-...

    "A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."

    https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/is-the-foreign-inte...

    "The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans""

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

    So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.

    • > "NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"

      This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.

      > "A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."

      What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.

      > "The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans"

      This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.

      > So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.

      That explicitly was not in Snowden's docs. The law is public, and warrants are almost always granted. In this case, as Snowden's docs said, the court orders are for foreigners, living outside the U.S.

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