Comment by timr
13 years ago
That's not PRISM. That's the other program revealed last week. The warrantless collection of phone number "metadata" has also been ruled legal by the Supreme Court, whereas the legal basis for PRISM has never been reviewed by SCOTUS.
Which leads me to an important aside: how much of the outrage being vented here comes from people who don't even know that these are two different programs? Take everything you read here with a huge block of salt.
I know the difference between the two. My point was that the Verizon collection of data very clearly was for the entire customer base of their major subsidiary. Also this 'metadata' has a staggering amount of information, like geocodes, dialed and received numbers, potentially content of SMS, downloaded apps, sites visited, etc. Further if this subsidiary controlled any Internet backbone (which I have no idea if that's the case), the implications are huge.
Edward Snowden's rationale for leaking this info is that people never realized that collection of metadata of phone records and PRISM and other programs had gone so far. Maybe SCOTUS ruled on some of this, but the public never realized the implications, largely because it's all protected by top secret classification.
I used the Verizon story in my comment because those implicated in PRISM said in their carefully crafted PR messages that their warrants were for specific subjects and unlike Verizon's vast dragnet. Anyhow, as other have pointed out, it's not hard to draft a specific warrant for the narrow group of 'every US user 13 years or older' which is what I'd presume PRISM involved. Also, the slides leaked for the PRISM stories showed that PRISM was the improvement on older collection techniques of essentially splicing Internet backbone cables.
Agreed on taking replies here with a grain of salt.
"I know the difference between the two. My point was that the Verizon collection of data very clearly was for the entire customer base of their major subsidiary."
Again, though...that program is legal. It's not even a controversial point (unlike with PRISM). From what I know of it, the rationale for the supreme court decision that says mass collection of metadata is legal is fairly well established, has a long judicial precedent, etc.
Yes, Snowden's rationale seems to be forthright. He's bothered by the implications of surveillance on this kind of scale. And I get it -- hell, I even agree. But most of the commentary I've been seeing on HN is just embarrassingly uninformed (or misinformed).
"it's not hard to draft a specific warrant for the narrow group of 'every US user 13 years or older' which is what I'd presume PRISM involved."
All of the public information about PRISM has explicitly said that information can only be obtained when one party to the conversation is a foreign national. I've read nothing to suggest that broad warrants of the sort you describe are any more legal than before.
Regarding the point I made on warrants for broad groups, remember that it's been leaked (or who knows, publicly admitted probably), that the NSA considers collection of data to be distinct from analysis of data. And that mere collection doesn't require cause/warrant. What needs to be leaked are how they define all those terms... and if there's any commonplace rule-bending. Who's to say that between the collection of data and the analysis, they don't then go and get warrants to analyze based on their work separating out what data they already had warrants for? What about computerized analysis (is that technically 'collection' to the NSA)? There's all sorts of room for abuse when you have this absolutely massive set of data and secrecy protecting almost every aspect of the operation.
Granted, IANAL, but I have worked as an engineer in In-Q-Tel funded companies, text analysis, and search. Nothing I'm saying is any reflection or representation of anyone I've worked for and is only my ill-informed, zany, personal opinion.
> Anyhow, as other have pointed out, it's not hard to draft a specific warrant for the narrow group of 'every US user 13 years or older' which is what I'd presume PRISM involved.
Can you really get a warrant that broad? I assumed PRISM still entailed warrants issued on a user-by-user basis.