The NSA watches you poop.

Beef Supreme_sl said:

Are you being this dense on purpose? EVERYTHING released by Snowden so far confirms that not only have the NSA, along with GCHQ and who knows who else, have been systematically spying on the citizens of both their respective countries and foreign private citizens. There is no oversight that is available for public scrutiny. NSA desk jockies have to convince their immediate superior of 51% probability that a person of interest is not a US citizen to begin surveillance. And god forbid you have correspondence with someone in another country, because that exempts them from the law.

The FISA court is an affront to democracy. PRISM and it's brethren are an affront to democracy.

You are to this thread what Astr0 is to the Movie and GOT threads, but less funny. Waaaaaaaaay less funny.

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No documentation he has released confirms spying on US citizens. Documentation confirms using FISA to get phone records. Everything else is some shit someone said.

Blazin_sl said:

Many people keep talking about "classified" information in a manner that assumes such things are needed in a free society at all. What purpose does "classified" information on this level serve? Other than the exact location of the President and his itinerary it seems difficult to justify the government having secrets. I have a new fancy laser for killing brown people. Letting people know I have it is a better deterrent to behavior then keeping it secret then jumping out of the bushes saying "surprise bitches!".

Chaos you keep taking the position of being so offended at the information that Snowden took but I really can't understand how you feel it harms our nation's interest for it to be revealed. People keep saying he is a criminal for revealing secrets, then follow up with "we all knew the NSA was doing this" Is it a secret or not? If not then what is his crime? If people want to take the position that the NSA should be able to record and store our communications then be open about it and say "hey guys we are going to record your communications if we later feel you are a terrorist we will go to a judge and get permission to listen to them" Many won't like this and we have a system in place to try to change it, but what is gained by keeping such a program secret?

And if we don't trust an ally (say France) what do we gain by secret surveillance, why not just tell them, "We don't trust you and will be monitoring you both at home and abroad" People keep justifying our nation being a two faced bitch and it doesn't sit well. Saying others do it is not a justification.

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Are you fucking for real? In a free society we would just have open intelligence? That is some stone cold crack-smoking tactics there. What is the purpose of collecting intelligence if you just tell the targets "Oh hey, we collected this intelligence through these means. Have a nice day!" That undercuts our entire intelligence industry, military, parts of our economic and foreign policy, that is just insane.

Blazin_sl said:

Is my understanding of it wrong? That they store the data and when they want to access it they go to FISA? THe order of things matter and maybe I'm not getting what is actually happening. If they collect the data (even if they don't listen to it) without a warrant that is inappropriate and needs to change.

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What has been confirmed is that they go to FISA and get warrants for huge swathes of data in connection with foreign targets. The only collection that I am aware that has been confirmed was the DNI in testimony before Congress saying that they intercept all encrypted data, but he didn't get specific on how they do that. There is no documentation released by Snowden that says "they collect everything", just hearsay.

Insane is the notion that these programs actually do anything but spy. They certainly didn't prevent Boston, they didn't prevent anything. The NSA _claims_ to have prevented, what, 50 terrorist attacks in the last few years on US ground by whatever it is they're doing, but for further security reason, no details whatsoever can be given. These people are trained to lie, they do it all the time and trusting them, that is insane.

Malakriss_sl said:

Nothing that has been released so far is illegal and he was not compelled by any sense of patriotism. He went there to grab as much as he could and release it, straight up intending to commit espionage from day 1.

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There is a big difference between seeking evidence of wrongdoing that he already knew was going on, and going there not knowing what he would find just to obtain more classified information to release to the public for... what? lulz?

I don't much care how the lawyers weasel their way around laws to make this terribly unethical behavior technically legal anyway. I'm no lawyer but this domestic spying seems to shit all over the fourth amendment in my view, considering it has long since been decided that it applies to private communications. Bush made torture legal, Obama made warrentless wiretaps of Americans and assassinations of Americans legal. The real questions to me are, should our government be doing this stuff? Should the voters in a democracy know it's going on? The answers to those questions for me, personally, are an emphatic No and Yes.

Malakriss_sl said:

So the biggest awe value was US privacy concerns? That they're getting court orders for call records and some data from the big companies?

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I'm constantly amazed at how many people have such little regard for their privacy. 'US privacy concerns' are a big fucking deal to me. Perhaps because I'm an extreme introvert-- I loathe having my picture taken, being in crowds, talking to large groups of people, and honestly just being looked at in general. The thought of every single URL I visit, every phone call, every email, and every IM being recorded is highly offensive to me.

This stuff starts getting really serious if you become a political problem for the administration in power-- and I'm talking about ANY future administration since your data is stored. Nixon infamously sicked the IRS on enemies, bugged offices, and stole psychiatrist files. You think the FISA court would stop a president?

I want you to keep in mind that the people working at the NSA are just like anybody else. People seem to believe that faceless government employees are somehow more ethical than the people they know in person. Do you honestly believe that there will be no abuse of this? The abuse is already there. I'll quote this again because, to me, it'sabsolutely outrageous:

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

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Those calls included aid workers and journalists working overseas, not just military.

You wanna know how fucked up the whole legality of PRISM is?Their own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion called it unconstitutional, so the DoJ pushed to have the opinion remain secret. When the EFF tried to get the opinion with a FOIA suit, and then by filing a motion with the FISC, the government went from declaring that only FISC could release the opinion to declaring that only the executive branch could. They are avoiding legal challenges by changing the rules.

The big deal with the leaks is that now the government can't deflect legal challenges by dismissing suits on a lack of evidence. Snowden removed that barrier.

foreignpolicy.com_sl said:

On Feb. 26, the Supreme Court ruled in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA that Americans lacked standing to challenge an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorized electronic surveillance of non-U.S. citizens abroad -- but which inevitably resulted in the surveillance of persons inside the United States -- because, in essence, the snooping was classified and therefore couldn't be proven to exist. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion, "respondents fail to offer any evidence that their communications have been monitored" under the expanded version of FISA. Theirs, according to Alito, was a "highly speculative fear."

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Also, another big reveal was finding out that the government removed the barrier of needing to get the permission of tech companies to get data on people. Instead of asking google for information on person X, and then having google send that information, the FBI/NSA just taps into their system directly and essentially makes the promise that they don't look at the data without a secret court's rubber stamp. Snowden's leaking classified information is in itself evidence that that the government cannot police themselves, because if they can't prevent these massive leaks of highly sensitive information then they sure as shit can't stop some random NSA admin checking on who his wife has been calling. And even if they caught him, they have reason to keep the matter secret, which would probably mean a slap on the wrist for punishment.

Blazin_sl said:

Can you give me an example? Foreign Policy for example, how does secretive spying help more than it hurts our foreign policy. You mean the intelligence service that put dictators in power the world over, or fed arms to religious fanatics? Since I'm so crazy should be easy for you to make a point instead of blindly defending something without establishing the value of its defense. What the fuck do I care if we undermine the "intelligence industry"

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You seem like a reasonably informed guy, I can't believe that I would really have to explain to you the value of having intelligence assets in 2013. How about all of that Iranian bank hacking that we uncovered and stopped? Or the Chinese constantly doing the same shit? Or information provided to soldiers in the field? Information used to avoid conflicts? Strategic partnerships we have developed with nations all over the world? I'm not blindly defending it, it's such a basic part of our nation functioning out in the world that I didn't consider anyone would actually fail to acknowledge that, no matter how you feel about Snowden.

Quineloe_sl said:

Insane is the notion that these programs actually do anything but spy. They certainly didn't prevent Boston, they didn't prevent anything. The NSA _claims_ to have prevented, what, 50 terrorist attacks in the last few years on US ground by whatever it is they're doing, but for further security reason, no details whatsoever can be given. These people are trained to lie, they do it all the time and trusting them, that is insane.

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They did give details on some, did they not? Off hand I remember the New York bombing.

If they didn't do anything but spy, what would be the point? Spying for spying's sake?

Blazin_sl said:

You are not being detailed enough explain the need for secrecy that is kept from the American people using your own examples listed. And please don't twist my words, it's not that we are told everything on an operations level that would be idiotic, but that I know the program exists. I don't want my country waging a secret war. If we are at war either through conventional or non conventional means then the public has a right to know it. I think it is likely a disconnect between what you and I mean than one of us being retarded. Though I'm always willing to keep the window open on the possibility of my ignorance.

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I think it is a fair argument to make that maybe the existence of a program should be disclosed. Maybe not the full capabilities of the program, again that kind of defeats the purpose. We aren't waging a secret war, there's a very real one still going on (people tend to forget about Afghanistan) and we're also engaged in activities against Iran, China, lots of nations I'm sure.

This kind of goes back tot he Patriot Act and FISA, people were largely ok with that stuff back then. This is the result of that. People keep trying to downplay that aspect of it, but that is the reality.

Beef Supreme_sl said:

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Bro, if I'm wrong, educate me. Literally every time a document has been linked in this thread it has not said what the person claimed it said. There is no document in that whole PRIZM slide deck that states that the NSA intercepts all internet traffic, or stores it, or analyzes it.

chaos_sl said:

How about all of that Iranian bank hacking that we uncovered and stopped? Or the Chinese constantly doing the same shit?

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One of Snowden's revelations was that we were hacking China as much or possibly more. Iran started up their hacking program as a response to our stuxnet attack. Cyberwar is just the latest boogeyman for the military industrial complex. The threat is overblown and the threat that is there is aggravated by our own attacks.