"Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”"
Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Can please someone explain the concept of a 'classified interpretation' [of law] to me like I'm 5? I know the concept exists, but I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
It's not justified and it can never be. Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation. And even then it must be balanced against the public interest in transparency, strictly time limited and narrow scoped (no blacking out whole documents).
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
You’re government agency, and you ask your lawyers about how the law operates given a particular set of circumstances.
In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.
Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds some additional protections against release.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this.
There are whole laws that are classified and cannot be discussed in open court. Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law and that’s still true in the USA even if the law is classified and you are not authorized to know what it says.
No one is giving the real answer to this question which is that these laws touch on the legality of capabilities the US does not want to acknowledge it has, and so it won't. Secret information in the US is like glitter - if you touch it, it spreads to you too.
It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.
Really what it is is they had a lawyer say, "We can justify massive spying on citizens via [long long list of arguments and precedents]", the security apparatus would like to keep the veneer of legality that provides and knows if what they were doing was known there would be massive backlash and the law would be changed to make it more clearly illegal so they keep that interpretation secret. Basically going on the logic that they don't have to tell Congress or the Courts how they screwed up the 4th Amendment and it's not their job to fix it.
Read it as classified misinterpretation of laws, so that they can do illegal things and claim this loophole when caught.
Usa has constitution and its government more or less side steps it in many things. Might as well have no constitution. Usa is a jungle for practical intends and purposes compared to europe or any functional democracy. This is the problem with allowing interpretation of law rather than taking law as it is written. Someone somewhere can interpret it in completely twisted way and throw away the spirit of the law.
A good faith answer to the question; classification hinges on damage done to the United States if it is released. So for example, a law might constraint or enforce the usage of a capability against an enemy, and this, of course would hang on some sort of spectrum also probably defined in law or in an agency interpretation. The agency interpretation is also probably classified and so as you start applying that spectrum, you enter gray areas and niches, and extremes, and so you have to ask a lawyer to disambiguate. And so this lawyer's interpretation is now the fulcrum on which employment of classified US capabilities is based. So therefore, teleologically this lawyer's interpretation has to be classified because it all goes back to whether public knowledge of this capability will damage the United States interest. if you know what the lawyer's interpretation is then you know the spectrum if you know the spectrum then you know the capability then you can damage the United States.
I guess when you have secret courts, it's something that starts to make sense.
I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.
different countries have different platforms or mechanisms where interpretations of law are discussed, in Belgium for example there are "rondzendbrieven" by which say judges discuss how to collectively misinterpret the law.
from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.
lol “we don’t feel like following the law so we just picked some fresh dog poop and yelled about bad things that were unrelated and then did whatever we want and invented these funny little games with paper thin jokes everyone is going to pretend is valid so we could do whatever we wanted to anyway lol”.
> I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't count as a vehicle. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.
So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single prior ruling from one local municipal court has low weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carries maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.
Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky when the law is new or there aren't decades of court precedents. So lawyers have to do research and assess how a court would probably rule on a given situation. That's called "a formal legal opinion" and it's provided in writing, usually including research and justifications, like references to existing case law, as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on the lawyer's opinion, they won't be on the hook - you will). It's called an opinion because that's really all it is.
When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret legal opinion on whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. After it happened and was no longer secret, Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say killing a U.S. citizen without any legal due process was first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President. While it's true his Dad was sort-of a terrorist (the real terrorists were happy to use him for propaganda but being an American, they never really trusted him). The dad was arguably an enemy combatant and maybe you could make a case he was an "exigent threat", but the kid wasn't and didn't. Reasonable people can differ on acceptable levels of 'collateral damage' (aka killing foreign innocents) but U.S. law is clear, non-combatant American citizens who aren't a clear and immediate threat are a hard, bright line. They get a judge and jury, not a drone.
Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate intelligence committee, so he gets oversight on what intelligence agencies are doing and sees the secret legal opinions they're relying on. And he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a secret legal opinion to do something in secret which is obviously, very, VERY wrong - but he's forbidden from telling us what it is because they made it top secret. For context, Ron Wyden has been a Senator and on the intelligence committee for a while and is pretty much a straight-shooter, not known for hyperbole or politically-motivated grandstanding. He'll call out his own party when he feels they're seriously wrong and he gets no benefit from making a big deal over this. His own party isn't supporting him and wishes he'd shut up about it. Yet for the last six months he's been signaling "DANGER, DANGER" in interviews, speeches and in writing over and over again - so I'm going to assume whatever it is is way beyond the Snowden revelations and probably in the neighborhood of the worst things we can possibly imagine.
The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is (and are like, "Hmph amateurs, we've been doing that to our citizens years").
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement
Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.
To add to this, it's completely dumb to think that any party is necessarily the same over decades. Look around. Most of what you see today is reactionary. Hold on to party views from 10 or 50 years ago, and you won't get elected today. Both parties are in turmoil in terms of public support.
Historical "bipartisan did X" means nothing today. The time is always right now to define what a future party should be. It's a great time to destroy the old and reimagine the new.
You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about (s/the law of physics/US history) that pushes (s/cancer cure/the right to privacy) a long time away.
Don't mind me, just repurposing one of your old comments to save time.
That's Wyden as Wyden, not because he is a Democrat. Some of the strongest proponents of these intelligence authorities, and in many cases the literal authors of bills expanding these powers, have been leading Democrats e.g. Feinstein.
There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.
For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.
Such evidence could be:
Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.
Gonna take a wild guess that this has to do with the purchase of privately (and lawfully) collected bulk data for the purposes of mass surveillance. Who needs PRISM or xKeyscore when people willingly purchase TVs and install weather apps that spy on them 24/7? The open legal question has been whether the government is free to do whatever it wants with the data it purchases.
You know what I love? We have spent over 100 years going back and forth on party politics. It has done nothing to move the bar on justice. The democrats silently allow the same things under the radar while the republicans do things out in the open. Its the carrot and the stick approach. Populism isn't working. We need to focus on systemic change. Both parties are filled with institutionalists that will do nothing to stop the real abuses because they gain significantly by keeping things they way they are..
It literally is both sides though. Congress, courts, and executive all love spying, have for decades. Do you have evidence that the Democrats have tried to curtail anything?
The 6th Amendment was written to prevent secret courts. The English Star Chamber was frequently secret and you could be put on trial without knowing what evidence/testimony was brought against you. The Star Chamber was also why the 5th Amendment exists.
A secret court is arguably not even a court. It provides no legitimacy whatsoever. It's a bunch of people in a room making a decision. I don't understand why they even bother. Just conduct your dictatorship by issuing decrees over a Zoom meeting.
It's a word game. By calling it a court, legitimacy is implied. Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends. The NSA isn't a "surveillance state", it's "intelligence gathering". It's not a war, it's a special military operation. And so on.
I came to say the same thing. The secret courts and even the administrative agency courts should not exist. They are a violation of our rights. Any court where the prosecution, judge and jury are all government employees is a gross abuse of authority.
In Australia are have organisations with titles like "Independent Commission Against Corruption". Their remit is to investigate political corruption and corruption in the public service (like say the police). They come in two flavours. In some states their deliberations are done in public. In other states they are secret.
Over time it's become evident open model is far, far more effective at ensuring the public has confidence the people running the place are doing the right thing. It does risk the occasional unwarranted "witch hunt". But that threat ensures powerful people avoid doing things that while above board, could arouse public suspicion. Less suspicious acts mean higher trust in the government.
The US doesn't have the most freedom. There's precisely zero evidence that people in the US are the most free, except for the fact that its government tells them they are. But North Korea tells its people that even harder.
Make a joke about immigrants on twitter in the UK and you get arrested. Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America. Most of Europe can't be called a free country anymore.
The evidence is our humor. We can make fun of our leaders without being thrown into prison or worse unlike say China or North Korea. Try posting a Winnie the Pooh meme in China and see how fast it gets censored.
I disagree. The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government, and which lets us criticize the government without repercussion. No other country grants its citizens those rights, and you can see the effects of that worldwide, where despite it all, we still have our free speech!
Not exactly a democratic country, but came across these instructions what to do in China when police has detected a VPN in your household, or you have posted something
The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.
This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.
> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.
Under the Israel-US agreement for surveillance, that section was circumvented, as the NSA and other agencies are feeding raw unminimized tappings directly to the ELINT/SIGINT agencies and getting relayed back. [1]
This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.
When you stop judging systems by their design intent and instead by their outcomes, it makes perfect sense. Democracies inexorably diffuse responsibility until its component entities are distant enough from punishment that hiding power levers becomes an easy advantage to grab for, whether the justification is internal or external conflict. All that's needed is for the necessary overseers to be rubber stamps.
Democracies that are real democracy also exists and they don't have systemic corruption such as hiding behind complexity or interpretations or misinterpretations, or repeatedly pushing to pass draconian laws. Number of real democratic sovereign countries can be easily counted in one hand and may be it can extend upto two hands. Countries with monarch who has any power are not exactly democratic, uk for example even though it has democracy like parliament. Transparency and real oversight by citizens is required in a democracy. What if representatives make draconian laws? People need to be able to veto it. What if representatives refuse to make a law people want? They need to be able to make it directly. Systems can be designed to make these happen regardless of the size of the country or its population count.
The difference is willingness to act on said spying. Luckily, despite the massive surveillance capabilities the U.S. "Intelligence" Community has, they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much. This gives some credence to the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" point of view, but only if you can guarantee you have nothing to hide (which can change drastically depending on who is in power, hence why I don't believe in this - the classic example being that hiding one's religion in and around Germany in the 1930s and early 40s was not seen as important until it was really important).
China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.
> they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much.
Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:
> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]
Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?
Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens".
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
Well your assumption is that they are not using it; they weren't able to use it all before.. Times are changing; Now they can use and use it a lot.. military Ai infrastructure that is to connected political arm will read and process everything and they can target their apposition... its just matter of time. Absolute power = absolute corruption.
How it is done, everybody knows how.. backdoors in servers, back door in communication equipment, decryption method for of all that goes through fiber in entire world.. Massive data storage to store everything. How is not an issue; every node and communication, hardware and software has a backdoor.
Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.
Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
> Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
Absolutely. AI only needs to bring the keys, and everything else will be waiting for it on a silver platter. And AI is really good at making spare keys.
Isn't that what all the hype about National Security Letters (and related events from those years) were all about? I never thought any of that went away, the media just stopped reporting on it. We had Lavabit and Snowden showing us how unhinged these things can get.
Even more unhinged once you realize that trust fund kids are regularly placed in three-letter agencies because those role provide literal immunity. Much better than just a simple diplomatic passport from some micro nation.
It's not only about assassinations or intelligence, things like organizing beauty pageants or producing snuff porn are valid duties for secret police. And this does not even touch the whole KKK thing. Those are the people writing the NSLs.
The debate about reapproval of section 702 is all theater. Does anyone genuinely believe the government would stop surveilling us if the authorization expired?
I guess that depends, do you think that an administration would be willing to prosecute its predecessors for doing it if it were against the law? Maybe you don't because of mutually assured destruction, but lately there's been a lot more appetite for prosecuting people in the other party (with some charges being extremely trumped up, if you'll pardon the pun), so I don't know that this is a given anymore.
they are doing much more than reading private messages in real time; they are also manipulating, distorting, delaying, etc based on the content; even going so far as to muck with your local programs (such as VPN) to throttle internet connectivity so that the most sensitive information cannot propagate virally as it should.
The AI matrix prison is real and discussions about it are censored.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that state secret classification of our law enforcement systems should only exist for a year max. We've abused the system to shield evil people from accountability and to hide evil actions by our government, and that has to change.
This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas, Julian Assanges, <insert national activist of your choice>, etc. gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class. This is why the owners of every country come together to support these technologies, without exception and regardless of political coalition membership.
Going all the way back to lenin these guys were often controlled by third party states anyhow with the goal of destabilizing power structures. Almost like a virus you unleash. That is why lenin was shipped via railcar by germany to the russian empire in 1917 at the height of war. The plan worked and the third rome fell apart shortly thereafter.
> This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas [..] gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class.
They are way ahead of you. The intent is not just to monitor, it's also to predict/preempt and to shape.
The whole sales pitch of Palantir is effectively marketing talk for pre-crime. And if we see what the russians and the chinese are doing online to shape our opinions I can only imagine what the US capabilities are in this realm.
This is not just about stopping the next Mandela. This is about knowing who the next Mandela is before future Mandela even knows it. And this about shaping the opinion of all potential future Mandela's into a neutered state.
That only protects him from non-Senate consequences. He could certainly be ejected from the Senate. Can the Senate try and convict him of breaking national security secrecy laws?
He would most likely not be chosen for the intelligence committee anymore if he did that, it would only be worth before retiring or for something really huge
This is why I laugh at the face of anyone demonising china and on the moral high horse. At least the Chinese government doesn’t lie about their surveillance. It’s far more insidious what the American government does, it just outright lies and indoctrinates its citizens.
What else could have been expected when this fake imitation America started creating the FISA courts and created the treasonous 5-eyes network of circumventing the Constitution like traitors do.
The article could have been interesting but by fundamentally misrepresenting the structure of the American federal government they made it impossible to take seriously.
I had a dream last night that the government had a database that corps sent in "opt-out" info from people. Anytime someone opted out of a surveillance system (e.g. ad tracking, etc...) that info got sent to the government as a signal that the person is sus. They took the "if you have nothing to hide" logic to its full conclusion.
The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this.
But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.
what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do.
fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.
the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.
You are assuming they are trying to do the best for citizens or best to abide by the constitution. They are not. In fact they actively try to side step the laws and constitution, and have these kind of secret interpretations ready. Would also like to remind you that no democratic country would allow smuggling of drugs by its own government apparatus but the usa has done that, so the drug epidemic isn't that shocking outcome.
What enrages me is the longstanding precedent that the government cannot read your letters without a warrant, but apparently electronic messages that are directly analogous are fair game.
> The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators.
How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.
Yep this authoritarian movement is much bigger than the parties. We will see, again and again, how much it matters and the go back to the same old game every election and everyone will forget about how they have been played the first time. Im so sick of this corrupt system.
If that were true, he wouldn't have had a second term. Americans are finally experiencing his fuckery first hand with fuel prices, which is why he is going to lose. The lies weren't much of a concern. Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
> Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
Not only is this true, but most of the legacy media landscape also shifted hard to the right (in large part due to massive corporate consolidation) over the past decade, so Fox isn't even especially unique anymore in terms of being extremely right-partisan.
"Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”"
Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Can please someone explain the concept of a 'classified interpretation' [of law] to me like I'm 5? I know the concept exists, but I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
It's not justified and it can never be. Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation. And even then it must be balanced against the public interest in transparency, strictly time limited and narrow scoped (no blacking out whole documents).
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
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You’re government agency, and you ask your lawyers about how the law operates given a particular set of circumstances.
In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.
Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds some additional protections against release.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this.
Once you have secret courts and secret warrants, secret interpretation of the law seems like a natural, if not necessary, progression.
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There are whole laws that are classified and cannot be discussed in open court. Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law and that’s still true in the USA even if the law is classified and you are not authorized to know what it says.
Check out Gilmore v Gonzales for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales
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No one is giving the real answer to this question which is that these laws touch on the legality of capabilities the US does not want to acknowledge it has, and so it won't. Secret information in the US is like glitter - if you touch it, it spreads to you too.
It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.
Really what it is is they had a lawyer say, "We can justify massive spying on citizens via [long long list of arguments and precedents]", the security apparatus would like to keep the veneer of legality that provides and knows if what they were doing was known there would be massive backlash and the law would be changed to make it more clearly illegal so they keep that interpretation secret. Basically going on the logic that they don't have to tell Congress or the Courts how they screwed up the 4th Amendment and it's not their job to fix it.
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Read it as classified misinterpretation of laws, so that they can do illegal things and claim this loophole when caught.
Usa has constitution and its government more or less side steps it in many things. Might as well have no constitution. Usa is a jungle for practical intends and purposes compared to europe or any functional democracy. This is the problem with allowing interpretation of law rather than taking law as it is written. Someone somewhere can interpret it in completely twisted way and throw away the spirit of the law.
A good faith answer to the question; classification hinges on damage done to the United States if it is released. So for example, a law might constraint or enforce the usage of a capability against an enemy, and this, of course would hang on some sort of spectrum also probably defined in law or in an agency interpretation. The agency interpretation is also probably classified and so as you start applying that spectrum, you enter gray areas and niches, and extremes, and so you have to ask a lawyer to disambiguate. And so this lawyer's interpretation is now the fulcrum on which employment of classified US capabilities is based. So therefore, teleologically this lawyer's interpretation has to be classified because it all goes back to whether public knowledge of this capability will damage the United States interest. if you know what the lawyer's interpretation is then you know the spectrum if you know the spectrum then you know the capability then you can damage the United States.
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Not what you’re asking for, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_law#Secret_law_in_the_U....
I guess when you have secret courts, it's something that starts to make sense.
I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.
different countries have different platforms or mechanisms where interpretations of law are discussed, in Belgium for example there are "rondzendbrieven" by which say judges discuss how to collectively misinterpret the law.
from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.
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Basically any time a corrupt regime is hiding something it's either bad or embarrassing--usually both.
lol “we don’t feel like following the law so we just picked some fresh dog poop and yelled about bad things that were unrelated and then did whatever we want and invented these funny little games with paper thin jokes everyone is going to pretend is valid so we could do whatever we wanted to anyway lol”.
> I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't count as a vehicle. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.
So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single prior ruling from one local municipal court has low weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carries maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.
Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky when the law is new or there aren't decades of court precedents. So lawyers have to do research and assess how a court would probably rule on a given situation. That's called "a formal legal opinion" and it's provided in writing, usually including research and justifications, like references to existing case law, as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on the lawyer's opinion, they won't be on the hook - you will). It's called an opinion because that's really all it is.
When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret legal opinion on whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. After it happened and was no longer secret, Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say killing a U.S. citizen without any legal due process was first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President. While it's true his Dad was sort-of a terrorist (the real terrorists were happy to use him for propaganda but being an American, they never really trusted him). The dad was arguably an enemy combatant and maybe you could make a case he was an "exigent threat", but the kid wasn't and didn't. Reasonable people can differ on acceptable levels of 'collateral damage' (aka killing foreign innocents) but U.S. law is clear, non-combatant American citizens who aren't a clear and immediate threat are a hard, bright line. They get a judge and jury, not a drone.
Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate intelligence committee, so he gets oversight on what intelligence agencies are doing and sees the secret legal opinions they're relying on. And he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a secret legal opinion to do something in secret which is obviously, very, VERY wrong - but he's forbidden from telling us what it is because they made it top secret. For context, Ron Wyden has been a Senator and on the intelligence committee for a while and is pretty much a straight-shooter, not known for hyperbole or politically-motivated grandstanding. He'll call out his own party when he feels they're seriously wrong and he gets no benefit from making a big deal over this. His own party isn't supporting him and wishes he'd shut up about it. Yet for the last six months he's been signaling "DANGER, DANGER" in interviews, speeches and in writing over and over again - so I'm going to assume whatever it is is way beyond the Snowden revelations and probably in the neighborhood of the worst things we can possibly imagine.
The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is (and are like, "Hmph amateurs, we've been doing that to our citizens years").
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If they could justify it, it wouldn’t be classified.
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement
Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.
To add to this, it's completely dumb to think that any party is necessarily the same over decades. Look around. Most of what you see today is reactionary. Hold on to party views from 10 or 50 years ago, and you won't get elected today. Both parties are in turmoil in terms of public support.
Historical "bipartisan did X" means nothing today. The time is always right now to define what a future party should be. It's a great time to destroy the old and reimagine the new.
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> Make it a priority in primaries.
lol what primaries?
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It will never get declassified. Never. The people get weaker and more passive with time, the govt gets stronger and reckless and less accountable.
Please stop with the security/privacy nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975.
Don't mind me, just repurposing one of your old comments to save time.
To be fair, the one raising this point, Wyden, is a Democrat.
That's Wyden as Wyden, not because he is a Democrat. Some of the strongest proponents of these intelligence authorities, and in many cases the literal authors of bills expanding these powers, have been leading Democrats e.g. Feinstein.
There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.
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Wyden is an aberration. He (unfortunately) does not represent the party on these issues.
The one raising the point. Apparently standing alone amongst otherwise bipartisan support of spying on Americans.
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In American politics it seems like all the good ones side democrat, but it's few enough that most of the democrat party still isn't good ones.
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what happens if he just tells us what it is?
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.
For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.
Such evidence could be: Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.
Gonna take a wild guess that this has to do with the purchase of privately (and lawfully) collected bulk data for the purposes of mass surveillance. Who needs PRISM or xKeyscore when people willingly purchase TVs and install weather apps that spy on them 24/7? The open legal question has been whether the government is free to do whatever it wants with the data it purchases.
Spying on American citizens and going together on Lolita Express to Epstein island...
Nah, mostly republicans
I love the both siding argument springing up right before election day.
You know what I love? We have spent over 100 years going back and forth on party politics. It has done nothing to move the bar on justice. The democrats silently allow the same things under the radar while the republicans do things out in the open. Its the carrot and the stick approach. Populism isn't working. We need to focus on systemic change. Both parties are filled with institutionalists that will do nothing to stop the real abuses because they gain significantly by keeping things they way they are..
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It literally is both sides though. Congress, courts, and executive all love spying, have for decades. Do you have evidence that the Democrats have tried to curtail anything?
It's all one side as far as I'm concerned and always has been.
Secret courts are anathema to democracy and need to be abolished.
The 6th Amendment was written to prevent secret courts. The English Star Chamber was frequently secret and you could be put on trial without knowing what evidence/testimony was brought against you. The Star Chamber was also why the 5th Amendment exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
6th amendment is strictly about criminal prosecutions. The court in question is not a criminal court.
A secret court is arguably not even a court. It provides no legitimacy whatsoever. It's a bunch of people in a room making a decision. I don't understand why they even bother. Just conduct your dictatorship by issuing decrees over a Zoom meeting.
It's a word game. By calling it a court, legitimacy is implied. Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends. The NSA isn't a "surveillance state", it's "intelligence gathering". It's not a war, it's a special military operation. And so on.
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I came to say the same thing. The secret courts and even the administrative agency courts should not exist. They are a violation of our rights. Any court where the prosecution, judge and jury are all government employees is a gross abuse of authority.
Democracy has been deprecated in the United States, and will be removed in a future 'election'.
If this is the case, then I shudder for democracies that look up to the US for inspiration on how to run their country.
Great to see unfettered public discussion of such matters. Oh wait, "You've read your last free article."
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In Australia are have organisations with titles like "Independent Commission Against Corruption". Their remit is to investigate political corruption and corruption in the public service (like say the police). They come in two flavours. In some states their deliberations are done in public. In other states they are secret.
Over time it's become evident open model is far, far more effective at ensuring the public has confidence the people running the place are doing the right thing. It does risk the occasional unwarranted "witch hunt". But that threat ensures powerful people avoid doing things that while above board, could arouse public suspicion. Less suspicious acts mean higher trust in the government.
The root of the question though is "Is secrecy an anathema to democracy?"
The us constitution has been destroyed one step a time. It's dead letter now.
I will always be baffled by the dichotomy of "the US has the most freedom" and "no democratic country spies more on its citizens".
The US doesn't have the most freedom. There's precisely zero evidence that people in the US are the most free, except for the fact that its government tells them they are. But North Korea tells its people that even harder.
Make a joke about immigrants on twitter in the UK and you get arrested. Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America. Most of Europe can't be called a free country anymore.
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They don’t know that they’re not free. The good thing about a real dictatorship is that you know exactly what the rules are.
The evidence is our humor. We can make fun of our leaders without being thrown into prison or worse unlike say China or North Korea. Try posting a Winnie the Pooh meme in China and see how fast it gets censored.
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It's mostly corporations that are the most free to do as they please here.
I disagree. The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government, and which lets us criticize the government without repercussion. No other country grants its citizens those rights, and you can see the effects of that worldwide, where despite it all, we still have our free speech!
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So free in Europe you guys don't even have a legitimate tech industry. Anyone who wants to build comes to the US.
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Not exactly a democratic country, but came across these instructions what to do in China when police has detected a VPN in your household, or you have posted something
https://x.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=20
We have some flexibility with freedom left, and let’s keep it that way.
If the US state regime would benefit from blocking VPNs, they'd do it in a heartbeat. They just don't need to yet.
That link you just posted is blocked for me because I don't have an X account. Here's an unblocker redirector - suspiciously like a HTTP VPN: https://xxcancel.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=...
The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.
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> 去了之后，态度好一点，姿态低一点，开口说：“领导，不好意思，给你添麻烦了。”
Is 领导 not an incredibly subservient way to address someone? How do people normally address police officers in China?
Already answered here:
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/43535/do-other-...
closing as duplicate. (/joke)
> "the US has the most freedom"
This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rightthink
"A" marketing for a "B" product usually wins over "B" marketing of an "A" product.
FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Section 702
> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.
https://www.intel.gov/foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act/...
Under the Israel-US agreement for surveillance, that section was circumvented, as the NSA and other agencies are feeding raw unminimized tappings directly to the ELINT/SIGINT agencies and getting relayed back. [1]
This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/11/ns...
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i would give the article a quick (re-?)skim for context of V__'s comment, as the article repeatedly talks about spying on american citizens
When you stop judging systems by their design intent and instead by their outcomes, it makes perfect sense. Democracies inexorably diffuse responsibility until its component entities are distant enough from punishment that hiding power levers becomes an easy advantage to grab for, whether the justification is internal or external conflict. All that's needed is for the necessary overseers to be rubber stamps.
Democracies that are real democracy also exists and they don't have systemic corruption such as hiding behind complexity or interpretations or misinterpretations, or repeatedly pushing to pass draconian laws. Number of real democratic sovereign countries can be easily counted in one hand and may be it can extend upto two hands. Countries with monarch who has any power are not exactly democratic, uk for example even though it has democracy like parliament. Transparency and real oversight by citizens is required in a democracy. What if representatives make draconian laws? People need to be able to veto it. What if representatives refuse to make a law people want? They need to be able to make it directly. Systems can be designed to make these happen regardless of the size of the country or its population count.
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Why are you baffled?
passport wise, probably true or close to true.
9th place
https://www.passportindex.org/de/byRank.php
I bet you that China, Russia and the UK rank higher
>China, Russia
both notorious for bragging about being the most free country on earth
Are China and Russia democracies?
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nah the UK spies pretty hard on its citizens.
CSIS and ASIS in Canada and Australia have far more powers than anything the CIA could ever do.
I owned more guns, got paid more, and had more vacation while working for a US company than I ever did in the Oz or Glorious Canukistan
The difference is willingness to act on said spying. Luckily, despite the massive surveillance capabilities the U.S. "Intelligence" Community has, they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much. This gives some credence to the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" point of view, but only if you can guarantee you have nothing to hide (which can change drastically depending on who is in power, hence why I don't believe in this - the classic example being that hiding one's religion in and around Germany in the 1930s and early 40s was not seen as important until it was really important).
China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.
> they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much.
Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:
> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]
Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/us-drug-agency-g...
Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens".
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
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Well your assumption is that they are not using it; they weren't able to use it all before.. Times are changing; Now they can use and use it a lot.. military Ai infrastructure that is to connected political arm will read and process everything and they can target their apposition... its just matter of time. Absolute power = absolute corruption.
How it is done, everybody knows how.. backdoors in servers, back door in communication equipment, decryption method for of all that goes through fiber in entire world.. Massive data storage to store everything. How is not an issue; every node and communication, hardware and software has a backdoor.
Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.
Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
> Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
Absolutely. AI only needs to bring the keys, and everything else will be waiting for it on a silver platter. And AI is really good at making spare keys.
Isn't that what all the hype about National Security Letters (and related events from those years) were all about? I never thought any of that went away, the media just stopped reporting on it. We had Lavabit and Snowden showing us how unhinged these things can get.
Even more unhinged once you realize that trust fund kids are regularly placed in three-letter agencies because those role provide literal immunity. Much better than just a simple diplomatic passport from some micro nation.
It's not only about assassinations or intelligence, things like organizing beauty pageants or producing snuff porn are valid duties for secret police. And this does not even touch the whole KKK thing. Those are the people writing the NSLs.
The debate about reapproval of section 702 is all theater. Does anyone genuinely believe the government would stop surveilling us if the authorization expired?
I guess that depends, do you think that an administration would be willing to prosecute its predecessors for doing it if it were against the law? Maybe you don't because of mutually assured destruction, but lately there's been a lot more appetite for prosecuting people in the other party (with some charges being extremely trumped up, if you'll pardon the pun), so I don't know that this is a given anymore.
Even if it were perfectly illegal plain as day, they’d launder the intelligence gathering through a partner intelligence org like mossad.
They already do, look up a thing called 5 eyes.
they are doing much more than reading private messages in real time; they are also manipulating, distorting, delaying, etc based on the content; even going so far as to muck with your local programs (such as VPN) to throttle internet connectivity so that the most sensitive information cannot propagate virally as it should.
The AI matrix prison is real and discussions about it are censored.
They don't want the public to see the big green "APPROVED" rubber stamp that the FISC uses.
FISA court is an insane post-9/11 secret tribunal, a bad idea for these past 25 years.
But at least they were subject to Congressional oversight.
> the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress
Oops.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that state secret classification of our law enforcement systems should only exist for a year max. We've abused the system to shield evil people from accountability and to hide evil actions by our government, and that has to change.
This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas, Julian Assanges, <insert national activist of your choice>, etc. gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class. This is why the owners of every country come together to support these technologies, without exception and regardless of political coalition membership.
Going all the way back to lenin these guys were often controlled by third party states anyhow with the goal of destabilizing power structures. Almost like a virus you unleash. That is why lenin was shipped via railcar by germany to the russian empire in 1917 at the height of war. The plan worked and the third rome fell apart shortly thereafter.
Lenin was supported by Germany, but I don't think anyone credible would say he wa controlled by Germany.
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> This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas [..] gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class.
They are way ahead of you. The intent is not just to monitor, it's also to predict/preempt and to shape.
The whole sales pitch of Palantir is effectively marketing talk for pre-crime. And if we see what the russians and the chinese are doing online to shape our opinions I can only imagine what the US capabilities are in this realm.
This is not just about stopping the next Mandela. This is about knowing who the next Mandela is before future Mandela even knows it. And this about shaping the opinion of all potential future Mandela's into a neutered state.
They are only doing it for the children.
He should go further and describe or read these secret rulings on the Senate floor, where the speech and debate clause protects him.
That only protects him from non-Senate consequences. He could certainly be ejected from the Senate. Can the Senate try and convict him of breaking national security secrecy laws?
He would most likely not be chosen for the intelligence committee anymore if he did that, it would only be worth before retiring or for something really huge
This is why I laugh at the face of anyone demonising china and on the moral high horse. At least the Chinese government doesn’t lie about their surveillance. It’s far more insidious what the American government does, it just outright lies and indoctrinates its citizens.
This kind of thing will never stop. And those who control it have all the leverage and power.
Perhaps all the spying data should just be publicly accessible and easily accessible for all to use and abuse.
Would democratizing it all so there is never an expectation of privacy from the public vs a select few in power be better in the long run?
Yes, if it truly all data, available to all.
No.
So grateful to have Wyden in my corner. Especially for the last decade or so it sparks joy to fill his bubble in on the ballot.
He's my favorite democrat
archived, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/the-us-government-is-hiding-a-secret-c...
Secret methods are an unavoidable necessity of governance. Secret laws an legal decisions are the hallmark of a failed polity.
This headline has been relevant since 2001.
I would argue it's been relevant since July 26, 1908
Could you be a bit more specific about the relevance of that date?
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What else could have been expected when this fake imitation America started creating the FISA courts and created the treasonous 5-eyes network of circumventing the Constitution like traitors do.
"Secret court ruling" — Land of the free, home of the brave
A ruling belongs to the judicial branch.
The article could have been interesting but by fundamentally misrepresenting the structure of the American federal government they made it impossible to take seriously.
I had a dream last night that the government had a database that corps sent in "opt-out" info from people. Anytime someone opted out of a surveillance system (e.g. ad tracking, etc...) that info got sent to the government as a signal that the person is sus. They took the "if you have nothing to hide" logic to its full conclusion.
The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this.
But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.
> there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this
It took an insider with one of the highest clearances you can get to break the news about these kinds of wiretapping deals.
Apple, Google, and other insiders were very quiet about those back room deals. You can bet they never stopped and only expanded too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore?useskin=vector
what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do.
fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.
the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.
You are assuming they are trying to do the best for citizens or best to abide by the constitution. They are not. In fact they actively try to side step the laws and constitution, and have these kind of secret interpretations ready. Would also like to remind you that no democratic country would allow smuggling of drugs by its own government apparatus but the usa has done that, so the drug epidemic isn't that shocking outcome.
What enrages me is the longstanding precedent that the government cannot read your letters without a warrant, but apparently electronic messages that are directly analogous are fair game.
> The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators.
How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.
Remind me in February to look back at how much the Democrats have done about it.
If it's simply not blocking this answer, then it's a win. Doing nothing is better than actively breaking the law.
Yep this authoritarian movement is much bigger than the parties. We will see, again and again, how much it matters and the go back to the same old game every election and everyone will forget about how they have been played the first time. Im so sick of this corrupt system.
Trump is going to lose. People are tired of his lies.
If that were true, he wouldn't have had a second term. Americans are finally experiencing his fuckery first hand with fuel prices, which is why he is going to lose. The lies weren't much of a concern. Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
> Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
Not only is this true, but most of the legacy media landscape also shifted hard to the right (in large part due to massive corporate consolidation) over the past decade, so Fox isn't even especially unique anymore in terms of being extremely right-partisan.
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