The easiest way to fix the problem with the NSA having access to too much personal information is for the government to pay the telecommunications companies to retain the information, which can then be subpoenaed if someone needs to look at it.
Here’s an example of why this makes sense. When the bombings happened at the Boston Marathon, we obviously wanted to look at the bombers’ communications. Who did they email? Who did they call? Who called them? What web sites did they visit? What did they do with social media? That information is kept by the telcos for about six months, and anything older than that is probably gone.
Now, we can have the NSA store that information because it is quite expensive to save it. But, we can also just pay the telcos to retain it. It’s the same thing. The cost is the same, anyway. But if the telcos have it, we don’t have to worry about some bureaucrat listening to celebrities’ phone calls or reading our emails for shits and giggles.
I think it’s valid to preserve the information, but we can do it in a way that better protects our privacy. And it’s simple.
My thoughts exactly.
Think about the security camera footage they reviewed after the bombings. The government doesn’t require all the stores in Boston to give them copies of their security camera footage every week. When they need to go through the information, they go get the tapes from the stores.
Booman Tribune ~ A Progressive Community
Is there not an even greater danger othat a commercial organisation might want to abuse our data – e.g. data mining emails or addresses to prospect for potential donors or receptive recipients of corporate propaganda? Would you prefer the Koch brothers has access to your data?
That’s a concern, but we can write laws that restrict how the information can be used.
I think that we have built huge warehouses in the desert to house the storage for this information, which is why the NSA has it in the first place, because it isn’t profitable to keep it. So, the biggest problem is how to hand the info back to the telcos. Because it’s a major taxpayer investment. So, the idea is simple but the execution could be a nightmare.
Yeah, but if they pull a News of the World, it’s illegal. And they can’t toss you in jail via clerical error. And they don’t (yet) have access to assault teams. And they don’t necessarily share the information with temps at Booz. And they’ve already got the information for entirely legitimate reasons, so this doesn’t give the Koch-alikes any additional access. And they don’t have access to all your data from every other telco (and god knows where else) so they can’t create quite as complete a profile of your masturbatory habits.
Other’n that, though.
Well, corporations already have access to our data, and if they thought it would be useful, I assume they would be spending their own money to keep storing and analyzing it.
They’re already storing and analyzing your data. That’s their business model. But it’s not just an expense, because your information is precisely what they’re selling. They’re selling advertisers access to your data so that their ads can follow you around from one site to another.
I know Internet companies are doing that. Are phone companies doing it as well?
Yeah, but seriously, the phone company can do all that already. I mean, it’s their data.
Honestly, I’m a hell of a lot more concerned about the complete lack of transparency around the issue than I am with the policy details regarding NSA acccess to call metadata. The problem isn’t that there’s a particular policy that has potentially wide-ranging effects on our privacy and even the basic understanding of privacy, it’s that the three branches of government have worked together to come to that policy without any sort of informed consent on the part of the populace. That’s really the only check there is on the power of the federal government when the three separate branches are aligned[1], as they are here, and having the checks in place is important even if the actual policies are acceptable.
But in a time of rapid expansion of the government’s ability to collect, store and correlate data about us, we have had a debate that’s been largely concealed by public view, and it’s been concealed by a much more punitive and even vindictive stance towards leakers. This is exactly the wrong time for us to be bootstrapping the already pretty terrible Espionage Act into an Official Secrets Act[2].
[1] This is one of the reasons I get kinda frustrated by people who frame this in terms of an “out-of-control executive branch”, which increasingly strikes me as having roughly the same informational content as “activist judges.”
[2] This can be much more fairly blamed on the executive branch, since it really boils down to prosecutorial discretion, and ignoring a forty-year status quo on how the issue should be handled.
How do you think this guy would handle a George Zimmerman incident?
How would he have handled Occupy Gilberton PA if it ever occurred?
Or the meeting of the Democratic Party precinct committee?
Doesn’t matter. Now that this has become A Story he’ll become a folk hero to his fellow travellers. He’ll never have to buy a beer again. Likely he’ll never need to worry about a job again.
By giving Zimmerman an assault rifle?
The companies already retain the metadata information for their internal operational and billing purposes. The question is what retention schedule is relevant for law enforcement, because if it is on US soil we are talking about law enforcement.
The critical legal question is about retention of the content and what expectations of privacy customers of those companies should have. And right now that question is being dodged with over-complicated, long, and fine-print terms of service that essentially let the companies do a whole lot of things. And because the terms of service are relatively uniform standard practices, there is not consumer choice about the terms, so it is in fact forced terms of contract that everyone agrees to without reading just to obtain service. Those terms need to become more compliant with Fourth Amendment expectations.
For cases like the Boston Marathon bomber, there is no need to go to a FISA court and issue a secret warrant. You are issuing a warrant with probable cause for a specific person and a specific location and specific time period. That is pretty routine and in compliance with the Fourth Amendment.
The current issue arises with the government siezing of content and metadata from telecommunications and internet companies on a bulk basis. There are also issues with the way that pen register warrants have been issued ever since the FBI began wiretapping. Those issues were aired in the Church committee but nothing was done to effectively rein in the political abuse of pen register warrants by the FBI. What has happened with the erasure of the supposed wall between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement is that domestic law enforcement has assumed para-constitutional powers that it never was granted just because the minimization rules for foreign intelligence bleed over into domestic law enforcement.
Finally, why should corporations be compensated for doing their civic duty? Are ordinary citizens going to be compensated for giving up their privacy?
IMO, this does not solve the Constitutional problem at all. It just shifts it to legal entities that courts would hold are not bound by the US Constitution. And represents a further privatization of the government’s intelligence function.
“The critical legal question is about retention of the content and what expectations of privacy customers of those companies should have.”
Hold on a second. Retention of what content? Because what we’re talking about is the storage and access of metadata, and the constitutional questions surrounding that have been settled long ago.
The Constitutional issues about pen registers were settled long ago, but current metadata is more extensive than pen registers.
And, the information leaked by Snowden and subsequent government statements have said that in searching for content analysts search for 300 different kinds of tags (implying that the metadata has 300 different attributes, not just the less than 10 that pen registers do) and that the search goes three hops out in the social networks constructed from the metadata to pull up content. That means that a single search can pull up content on from 270,000 to 27 million persons (per those who have done the combinatorial math). And once pulled up, that content is stored by NSA.
The idea that only a pair of phone numbers or IP addresses and a date-time stamp is involved is mistaken and disinformation that is pushed by NSA. And Ron Wyden has called NSA out on this issue now that the Snowden leaks show the discrepancies in stories.
The Constitutional questions about meta data have been settled, too.
Perhaps not particularly well, though. They can do so much more with metadata today than in the 1980s. Does this change the Constitutional standing? I don’t know, maybe it’s just a policy question, but it’s an important one.
The ACLU and other organizations who are customers of Verizon Business Systems have sued to clarify the Constitutional nature of bulk collection of metadata. The case is still in court. The administration argued that the claimants, although verified Verizon Business System customers, do not have standing because they cannot prove that NSA has their metadata. And the NSA cannot be ordered to provide the metadata that they have on these organizations because of “state secret preivilege”. How do you clarify the Constitutional issue with that argument? It’s pure stonewalling.
The Constitutional issues about metadata were not settled for bulk collection. The FISA Court was intended to provide the vehicle to prevent bulk collection of pen register data. And the FISA Court was to substitute for a regular court in delivering a specific warrant. What has come to light is that the FISA Court has expanded the powers of surveillance through secret decisions and interpretations. That body of secret law should be declassified. Members of Congress have asked that it be declassified. The Obama Administration so far has refused to declassify this information.
The issue is gaining bipartisan and judicial legs. If there is not good faith dealing with it by the Obama administration and quickly, this could be the story of 2014. This issue is not going away because it is a matter fundamental to our system of government.
It is much more than a policy question. Reducing it to a policy question strips out the working of the separation of powers. And yes, the Congress and Supreme Court are kinda dysfunctional at the moment, but public pressure on this is indeed building. And folks are resenting the intelligence community’s transparent and self-serving fear campaign and dismissal of concern. And increasingly so are members of Congress.
There are some novel questions. Sort of like a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it. The way they’re using the metadata, no human being is ever going to look at more than a tiny fraction of it. They’re writing these complex queries that are basically equivalent to spiders or crawlers. So these crawlers are going through millions and millions of records, one at a time, looking for specific values in specific fields, and if they don’t find them they move on. I don’t particularly find that kind of search unreasonable, but obviously opinions differ.
Read this about the “three hops” fan-out in searches.
I’m Three Hops from a Terrorist, and Therefore Probably in the NSA’s Dragnet. And You?
And remember that all searches are stored for a retention period specified by these rules for US citizens. After all if your information is pulled up under the three-hops rule, it is “incidental”.
And these rules for non-US citizens.
Pulling up metadata is under section 215. We know that the NSA is pulling everything from every telecommunications provider in the US and sucking it out of international cables at entry points to the US and with undersea taps that have been there several decades. Pulling up content is under section 702.
And we know from the 2009 NSA Inspector General’s report that the Bush administration was clearly exceeding its authority under law and the Constitution when it initiated the program to suck up all metadata and only got brought under the color of law in December 2008.
If you find the search reasonable, you are saying you find the NSA arranging your call metadata so as to view your social networks is a reasonable seizure of your private information.
And that wasting tens of billions of dollars a year on keeping track of billions of people, of what way more than 99% are innocent of any suspicion of being threat to the United States is a wise use of your tax dollars when public schools and clinics are shutting down and veterans are receiving substandard response from the VA because of sequesters and budget cuts.
Well, somebody shouda thought of this before our unaccountable surveillance state committed itself to having its favorite agency store in Bluffdale UT every bit of electronic data ever generated. Indeed, it likely was considered and rejected. NSA is now more favored than the DOD!
Bamford has a new piece up in NY Rev of Books on Snowden’s info. It seems that this NSA expert learned quite a lot about what NSA is pulling technologically from the Snowden releases. But we already “knew” all this already!
The question is, do we really need to permanently store the past calling data of anyone/everyone for more than a year? What more are you really going to learn about the Boston Bombers before that? Anything useful? Certainly nothing “preventative”. More is always better for all “analysis”, but when there are such large costs (monetary, constitutional and societal–think “1984”) is there to be no cost/benefit analysis here? Can we save it all? Then DO IT! This is the “thinking”.
Make the goddamn telecoms (via statute) store the call metadata on their systems for a year if it’s so goddam useful. After that, dump it. But then whatever would NSA do, other than monitor every other country on Earth. But apparently that’s not enough for the American Big Brother state, even we domestic peons have to be surveilled around the clock because, um, er, terra. Riiigghhtt….
No, the real problem is that we built the Internet. It’s important to keep in mind that what we’re talking about here is Internet traffic, and asking whether there could be any valid reason for the government to be monitoring all that traffic.
I think there is, and it has nothing to do with terrorism. It’s because the NSA is a very long way form being the only major player on the Internet. One way to put it is that the NSA server farms, wherever they are, are not the only server farms on the planet. Some are run by big corporations like Google and Amazon and so forth, and others are run by foreign governments that are willing and able to fuck with us.
And yes, I still can’t get over how willing people are to trust Google. I’m used to libertarians trusting privately held and unaccountable corporations where they’re unwilling to trust the government, but Democrats have a long history of fearing and loathing corporations above all other things.
People allow private corporations to abuse them much more than government because they feel that they have political recourse with government and no recourse, practically because of cost, with corporations. For government, there is always a city councilman, county commissioner,state representative, or US Congressman to complain to and who has various forms of constituent services to deal with issues.
People hate the long terms-of-service agreements they are forced to sign for access with internet services. But they click through because without that there are no practical alternative services with different terms of service.
This is more of a problem for social media services than for, say, search services, but it still is a problem.
I don’t trust Google, but they have obtained a (supposedly legal) monopoly over an essential service by our failed state. What’s my choice, other than not use internet?
This privacy issue involves internet and telephony, both apparently carried over fiber optic cables that NSA has been allowed to cut into nationwide. The law dealt with phone records and call content for years without allowing collection of everyone’s records by the gub’mint. And not every corp gets every business record, they get their customers records and decide how long to keep them. They also usually make (some) privacy promises. Keeping metadata on every phone call/email is horrendously expensive and there’s no reason to think each individual oligopolist will do it.
The NSA is also clearly obtaining records from EVERY US corporate entity, the individual oligopolist can’t ever do that.
They can’t? Why not? If you compare estimates of server capacity, it seems pretty clear that Google, for instance, has way more than the NSA.
I found some estimates for the NSA here. These require all kinds of qualifications, of course, because there are all kinds of assumptions and flat out guesses involved, but you can get a sense of relative scale. Apparently we’re looking at a total of around 170,000 square feet of new capacity for the NSA’s data centers, with an unknown amount of existing capacity. Compare that to Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon, which is reported to cover 66,000 square meters–around 700,000 square feet–by itself.
And that’s just one of thirteen. It’s highly unlikely that the entire center is occupied by servers, but it is worth noting that Google has four other data centers that are estimated to have more servers than The Dalles, which implies even greater square footage.
So if you want to talk about who has the capacity to monitor the entire goddamn Internet, it seems pretty clear that Google has the NSA beat by a considerable margin.
Too bad they didn’t do this before spending billions on the new Utah data center.
They spend billions for this??WTH!! http://linkapp.me/A6Odp
No, they spent billions on this:
http://nsa.gov1.info/data/index.html
Not sure if that site is real or a spoof, but the Utah data center is real.
I’m sure the telecoms won’t have to save anything for ‘us’ that we won’t be saving ourselves soon enough.
I prefer the European solution in that the information has to be deleted after a short period of time. If that puts us more at risk, it’s worth it.
Which is why European countries partner with NSA to search records on their own citizens. For the NSA, they are foreigners, which is legal and since the Supreme Court has ruled that the US Bill of Rights is not a document of universal human rights, it is also Constitutional.
There are some recent Der Spiegel articles on this.
So the NSA is negotiating with the power of US partnership to allow other countries to circumvent their own legal restrictions.
Thanks, I will make sure to look it up. From what you’ve said, I see it as all the more reason why we need to pass those laws ere. Pass it in the US and doing so become harder. Who’s left? Israel or China?
Fact Sheet on the Amash-Conyers Amendment
Here is the 205-217 vote:
Amash of Michigan Amendment No. 100
Looks like Boehner and Pelosi cut a deal for an image vote that just fails to be effective.
Joe Wilson (R-SC) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) For
Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) Against
Boehner, Pelosi, and Cantor against.
Tell me this isn’t bipartisan kabuki.
Yes on Amash Amendment:
Mark Sanford (SC-01)
Joe Wilson (SC-02)
Jeff Duncan (SC-03)
Trey Gowdy (SC-04)
Mick Mulvaney (SC-05)
James Clyburn (SC-06)
Tom Rice (SC-07)
Walter Jones (NC-03)
Patrick McHenry (NC-10)
Mark Meadows (NC-11)
Mel Watt (NC-12)
No on Amash Amendment:
G. K. Butterfield (NC-01)
Renee Elmers (NC-02)
David Price (NC-04)
Virginia Foxx (NC-05)
Mike McIntyre (NC-07)
Richard Hudson (NC-08)
Robert Pittenger (NC-09)
George Holding (NC-13)
Not voting:
Howard Coble (NC-06)
An excellent idea, Boo, but you miss the point. NSA doesn’t gather this data for legitimate law enforcement. They gather it to gain more control, to become a Rasputin behind the throne. How many Congressmen, Senators, and other high officials have they caught in extramarital affairs, pedophilic pornography, crooked deals? They can then use blackmail to get whatever they want, whatever Booz-Allen wants. It’s not that they are trying to keep us safe. If they were we would see trials and the NSA blowing its horn about how great and necessary they are. It’s about power and maintaining a shadow government.