There is a kind of sleight of hand at work in this counterargument, which is that nobody is advocating for a secret, extrajudicial, arbitrary set of rules about what is allowed and what isn't. Even if I say I'm OK with the government reading my email, all the work is ahead of them to prove specific charges in a court of law, should I catch their interest. The spy agency does not, in fact, get to decide what's right and wrong. The existence of a surveillance state does not imply the existence of a secret police with extrajudicial powers.
It wasn't a normative statement. Rather, it was intended to point out what you just did: if you want spy agencies to follow the same laws everyone else does, you're effectively arguing that there should be no spy agencies.
Well, you seem determined to avoid actually addressing what I am saying. The Constitution harshly proscribes dishonest statements by officials to lawmakers. The surveillance policy was sold through lies and obfuscation to both Congresspeople and the general public. The American people may not broadly oppose espionage, but unless they broadly support it with actual foreknowledge of the specific policies, the lack of opposition is irrelevant. It is hardly surprising that no one is sure what to think in such an environment.
Snowden's leaks have changed that to some extent, and hopefully they will continue to shed light on these policies so that an informed decision can finally be made.
EDIT: And seriously you can't read a paragraph of text without getting snarky? You asked what the Constitution had to say and I responded in detail.
This is a strawman or reduction to the absurd (I can't decide which) and it is throughly unhelpful to convincing anyone of anything - I'm getting rather tired of seeing it.
There is a huge difference between refusing to have a lock on your front door and being okay with advertising to pay for a free service.
There is also a huge difference between publicly broadcasting your email and only the government having access to it.
Here's a hint: The NSA is not the general public.
(This comment should absolutely not be construed as acceptance of spying)
You misunderstand. I was merely pointing out that the existence, or lack thereof, of a court order, was completely beside the point as far as the National Security Agency is concerned.
The NSA is chartered and bound to not do domestic spying.
The only thing stopping anybody from doing anything is the law, and the threat of potentially violent enforcement of that law upon them. It's no different for the Agency.
"When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’"
How does he arrive at that conclusion? I have nothing to hide, but I still don't support the violation of these rights. Does he suggest that we instead support some other service or method under the illusion that we are immune from NSA spying?
How do we know this judge hasn't been blackmailed, by the way? The honest protestations of a security agency that genuinely believes the ends justify the means?
The public statements of the NSA imply that there's no choice in this matter -- that this kind of surveillance is mandatory.
What hasn't happened is an honest debate about whether the public is willing to trade away whatever remains of their privacy for a fractional increase in "security". I think the public ought to at least have the opportunity to make a voting statement on that matter.
Secret privacy invasion programs make the debate impossible, until they're not secret.
What's happened is that the NSA has made the decision for us.
That's the problem, while you say we shouldn't use the argument that "spies need 100 percent transparency", they do pretty much use the opposite argument, that we can never know anything about what they're doing, often even their overseers, because it would "endanger national security".
Plus, even though the 4th amendment clearly states that you can't even seize stuff from a person, without probable cause. Yet, they keep saying that they can, and it's ok to do it as long as they don't search it. They intentionally omit the seizure part of the 4th amendment.
Look at it this way. Would it be ok for the police to come into your home, no proper warrant other than a "general warrant", like the writ of assistance for which Americans rebelled against UK, and take your stuff, as long as they promise to not look through it?
I think that would be completely unacceptable and immediately be declared unconstitutional. Yet, NSA keeps pretending it's completely fine to take your "digital" stuff as long as they don't look at it.
I don't think the NSA has actually ever made that argument. There is, after all, a lot of law governing privacy. And the NSA's capabilities and required procedures are also specified in minute detail.
Even though these rules are far from adequate, their mere existence already shows a shared assumption that privacy is a legitimate interest. Arguing against the very idea of privacy would mean trying to prove far more than they could ever want, and doing so against essentially everyone else.
>You aren't the voice of reason. You're the guy with his fingers in his ears and his eyes closed. You are the worst possible neighbor to have in a democratic society. Until you are directly and personally affected, you will continue to argue that those who oppose surveillance are all "unreasonable" to expect the gov't to follow the law, or for even "believing" that the gov't does not, despite clear evidence of wrongdoing.
Not going to touch that one.
>The NSA keeps _all_ of the source data. A file can be built at any instant by a simple query. The distinction of not having a "file" at some particular moment is without meaning. One might even argue that the architecture of the systems are designed to allow this "lie" to be told. At the very least, officials have demonstrated their willingness to exploit this semantic loophole, which by the strict rules of logic, evaluates as "true" but which all honest people consider "lying through your teeth".
It's not all kept.
>The NSA passes evidence of non-terrorism, non-national-security, ie domestic crimes to domestic law enforcement on its own accord, as has been reported widely in the press. Additionally, US intelligence services have in the past been caught passing inside information to commercial interests, also well beyond the scope of "strictly foreign surveillance".
You're confusing NSA with FBI.
>You have no proof of that. Even given the little that is actually revealed about the NSA so far, it is not reasonable to claim that the NSA has followed the rules in this particular scenario, given the many examples of rule-breaking, and the NSA's demonstrated contempt of FISC rulings.
I do have proof. I was in the NSA and I took the yearly FISA training. NSA analysts take FISA violations very seriously, and always err on the side of US person if in doubt. Why? Because collecting on a US person is the quickest way to get fired.
>I can say with complete confidence that you are wrong again. Laura Poitras, Jacob Applebaum, many others have been receiving extralegal searches, seizures of their electronic devices at the border for years. Just a few weeks ago, a family received a visit by virtue of their internet searches. Even if you were correct, it is an extreme threshold for opposition to gov't lawbreaking. You think that no person should make a fuss, until the speech of "white suburban bloggers" is targeted?
Now you're confusing NSA with NCTC http://www.nctc.gov/about_us/how_we_do.html. Awesome. NSA does not watchlist people. That's a combination of the Terrorist Screening Center (FBI) and NCTC. That being said, Laura Poitras and Jacob Applebaum aren't going to be on that list unless they're somehow funding Hezbollah.
All in all, I find your response to be composed of pure internet anger and no factual content.
It's pointless to talk to someone who concludes that the NSA is willing to ignore the law simply by extrapolating from things it has done that demonstrate intent to stay within the law as understood.
Yeah this type of logic regarding the NSA spying has been driving me nuts. It is illegal regardless of what I choose to do or use. The applicability of these laws does not depend on what I or anyone else buys, uses or patronizes and neither does our right to complain about it.
I love the government's response here. "Sure, we can have a debate about state surveillance, but the guy that forced this debate IS A NO GOOD DIRTY TRAITOR!"
True. In a perfect scenario I would rather the NSA not store my communications at all, and have them no reason to even look at me to assume I am either good or bad.
But, unfortunately, looking at the absolute pushback from congress and the white house over this whole thing, it's pretty clear the citizens have absolutely 0 say in the matter. After all, we're just ignorant sheep. They're the ones will all the knowledge and we should just trust them. We're not going to be able to change the NSA's policies or magically make everyone follow the constitution and the law to the T overnight. This is a compromise on our end.
The NSA may have a large amount of resources for storing and running attacks on my emails, but they don't have limitless resources. For every hour they spend bruteforcing my keys to recover a sappy "Just thinking of you <3" to my wife, the less time they're spending bruteforcing someone else's emails.
I get that you and we all have different interpretations of what we would expect privacy to mean. But the government only has the one that it has to go by, the law, and the law was made much more expansive by the USA PATRIOT act and only brought back in a little bit by the 2008 Amendments. I could have sworn that the Supreme Court has had a chance to strike down part of the USA PATRIOT Act by this time and hasn't.
I like your analogy on physical proxies, but I didn't need convincing that information given to a third-party on the Internet deserves a "reasonable expectation of privacy" (up to the limits of the privacy policy itself, though...). I just don't think the law agrees at this point, which is why I'm pushing back against people with the idea that everything the NSA has ever done is illegal.
The law needs fixed, once and for all. I think most of us agree at least in theory that there is a need to handle counter-terrorism and domestic law enforcement so we also need to decide what "features" (if any) are built-in for that.
And then we need to decide how far those laws extend to cover those from outside the U.S.
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