Comment by lern_too_spel
2 days ago
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.
2 days ago
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.
> 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.
"According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
In fact, NSA's own slide deck, an excerpt of which can be viewed here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/fiber-optic-... indicate that all Google services including Gmail, Docs, Maps, and others were subject to interception.
Additional NSA slides here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr... detail email, chat, video, voice, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications, social networking details, and the ever ominous "Special Requests".
> What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.
"Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_don%27t_make_a_righ...
> This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
The linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... contains 96 references to reporting from 2004 to 2021 from a wide variety of sources. The word "retraction" does not appear once. Among the cited sources are many examples such as:
A former federal judge who served on a secret court overseeing the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs said Tuesday the panel is independent but flawed because only the government's side is represented effectively in its deliberations.
"Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130711211028/https://abcnews.g...
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