PRISM

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

The hypothetical example in PH45's link is far too tenuous to carry much weight at all.

Regarding PRISM's legality, there are many other sources that suggest the same thing. Whether someone agrees or disagrees with it, it does seem to be legal.

Regarding the argument, it hold just as much weight as your argument as well.

Originally Posted by LampLighter

The Boston Marathon bombing shows that a program that has been in operation for at least 7 years failed to do what it is supposed to do.

This has no perspective because it doesn't state how many attacks have been prevented because of PRISM. If PRISM has only stopped a single, small attack while not preventing the Boston Marathon bombing then I would agree with you. IF PRISM has stopped 1,000 attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing was someone who slipped through the cracks (this will always occur), then I would disagree with you. Reality is likely going to be somewhere in-between.

[Griff]

I can't tell you what privacy means in the electronic age. I do know that I choose to share on the cellar but I don't name a lot of names and am vague when I feel its warranted. My company forces me to use gmail so I keep that account pretty sterile. I don't fazebook but I have an unused lunkedin account with minimal info and few connections... The English version of privacy has government cameras rolling the Merican has private cameras rolling... Corporations spend a lot on collecting data to sell or to sell us stuff. The same data that sells me a subscription to Mother Earth News could put me on a nutter survivalist watch list. If we look at the drug war folks are killed by their government by accident all the time so what would make the WOT any different? I ask because I don't know. The fascination with secrecy displayed by our government is interesting, individuals have no expectation of privacy but the government that serves us has become extremely opaque.

[Lamplighter]

@PH45: Yes, we are in agreement
... my example was intended to be trivial and carries no weight.

The problems are that with secrecy and "not on my watch",
we (the public) will only know what we are told and/or what
is leaked by insiders-with-their-own-motives and whistle blowers.

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

The problems are that with secrecy and "not on my watch", we (the public) will only know what we are told and/or what is leaked by insiders-with-their-own-motives and whistle blowers.

Yup. In an ideal sense, the issue with security versus privacy is sort of like quantum physics. The public cannot know of the security practices without compromising those security practices. On the other hand, if the public does not know of the security practices, there is no accountability and much risk of these security practices being misused. In my opinion, there is no is no perfect way of dealing with the security versus privacy problem but informed representatives (congress) and occasional whistleblowers may be a decent equilibrium…

I am pretty agnostic on the current practices but I do think this is a true slippery slope. Here is a good perspective on this slippery slope (I’m emphasizing certain parts):

And yet, Jenkins thinks that the U.S. government’s counterterrorism policies—which he’s helped influence over the decades—have gone too far. “What we have put in place,” he said, “is the foundation of a very oppressive state.”

The oppressive state doesn’t yet exist, he said, but if a president wanted to move in that direction, “the tools are in place now.” The choice to do so “could be made under circumstances that appear perfectly reasonable,” he went on, noting, “Democracy does not preclude voluntary submission to despotism. Given a frightened population, Congress can legislate away liberties just as easily as tyrants can seize power. That seems to be what has started to happen.”

…

“We are driven,” he continued, “by fears of what might happen, not by things that havehappened.” He noted that since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been 42 terrorist plots in the United States. All but four of them were halted. Three of those succeeded and killed a total of 17 people. “Not that this isn’t a tragedy,” he said, “but, really, in a society that has 15–16,000 homicides every year, it isn’t a lot.

…

Jenkins thinks the occasions should be mandated. It appears that these programs are renewed periodically. After the Guardian reprinted a court document allowing the NSA to mine data from Verizon, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, revealed that this was a routine renewal of a long-standing program. But Jenkins is bothered that the renewal is so routine. “I don’t know if it’s every year or five years or seven years,” he said, “but somebody should have to come back and say, ‘These are the measures in place, they were useful in the following circumstances.’ Then a choice should be made on whether to keep them in place. The government will always argue that they should be, but at least they should have to make the argument, again and again.”

This means Congress should take its oversight responsibilities more seriously—and the debate should be conducted more broadly, as much of it as possible in public.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...ernment.2.html

[Undertoad]

There aren't many companies better at Google in the EFF "Who's Got Your Back 2013" ratings.

[Clodfobble]

Tell users about government data requests. To earn a star in this category, Internet companies must promise to tell users when the government seeks their data unless prohibited by law. This gives users a chance to defend themselves against overreaching government demands for their data.

It's a cool report, but I have to admit I'm not impressed with the stringency of this particular criteria. It's the only one that doesn't actually require the company to do anything, and gives them a built-in excuse if they do break it--how many places/situations is this sort of thing prohibited by law? Who knows? It's like, I promise I will totally murder that guy for you, except where prohibited by law.

[sexobon]

Americans typically think that of part of their right to privacy is the government not being able to obtain their private communications without justification. That's not the way the government has seen it at least since I qualified as a bona fide US intelligence operative* in military service a quarter century ago. The government makes a distinction between information (raw data) and intelligence (data processed into a useful form). Government does not consider the gathering and accumulation of information to be a violation of the right to privacy because the data accumulation is not yet in the useful form of an intelligence collection that can be used to the detriment of citizens. An intelligence collection without proper authorization has been what constituted violation of privacy rights.

It's the citizens' responsibility to either exchange their private information in a way that can't be accessed by the government; or, via a third party willing render it unsalvageable. It is the government's responsibility to secure its caches of information from misuse. The first level of protection was classifying the information. That way most people wouldn't even know there's something to look for let alone try to exploit. That first level of security is gone.

I don't object to the premise of caching bulk information that can be sifted through later, under a well defined warrant, and processed into intelligence in the pursuit of national security. I don't object to continuing the practice since I know there are remaining levels of security progressively more difficult to breach. I do object to any unauthorized individual deciding for everyone else that subverting a security measure implemented to protect them is what's best for them. The Bradley Manning treatment would be appropriate.

*A condition of which is that federal law restricts my information gathering activities on US citizens for the rest of my life, not just for while I was in federal service.

[Lamplighter]

<snip>I do object to any unauthorized individual deciding
for everyone else that subverting a security measure implemented
to protect them is what's best for them....

Being an informed adult a quarter-century ago means that the
"Pentagon Papers" would be well known to you, and since then
you would have recognized the impact the events had on governmental policy.

In my opinion, the publication brought about the end of the war in Viet Nam,
demonstrating that an altruistic insider, such as Daniel Ellesberg,
can make better decisions than those technically assigned to
carry out governmental intentions.

Ellsberg was wrong legally, but it made little difference,
and that's the problem with trying to distinguish differences
between "data gathering" and "intelligence accumulation".

[sexobon]

I not sure about you Lamp. You put "data gathering" and "intelligence accumulation" in quotes. I talked about information (raw data) gathering and accumulation, the processing of information into an intelligence collection, and how government views the relation of information gathering to privacy differently from the relation of an intelligence collection to privacy. Where you got "intelligence accumulation" from I don't know.

Think of it this way: A guy regularly "gathers" loose "change" from his pockets and puts it in a jar where it becomes an "accumulation." He does this in anticipation of someday starting a "coin" "collection." Right now, he doesn't know if the "change" will be useful or not. When the time comes, he decides to collect just quarters. He takes only the quarters from the jar and organizes them by date and mintmark into a "coin collection". So far this scenario has been analogous to the difference between an information accumulation and an intelligence collection. The term you put in quotes, "intelligence accumulation", would in this analogy equate to something like an accumulation of coin collections! That's something a coin dealer might have; but, nobody would refer to it as that. They'd just call it inventory and it wouldn't really be a part of the story. I hope this helped.

The contention that "an altruistic insider, such as Daniel Ell[e]sberg, can make better decisions than those technically assigned to carry out governmental intentions" is widely seen as bass ackwards. The career government workers in that field, the ones who stay regardless of which politicians are in power, are generally the good stewards of government. They know that for every altruistic Daniel Ellsberg, there are a thousand subversives, mercenaries, and attention whores who will give up classified information while claiming to be altruistic and collectively do more harm than all the genuine Ellsbergs can ever offset. They don't do what he did because they don't want to be part of making it more acceptable. There are better ways to deal with situations than betraying a trust.

If you had said that an altruistic insider, such as Daniel Ellsberg, can make better decisions than those elected to form governmental intentions ... I would have agreed with you; but, still not with his methods.

In any case, you seem to have created a fusion of two different topics when you said: "Ellsberg was wrong legally, but it made little difference, and that's the problem with trying to distinguish differences between "data gathering" and "intelligence accumulation"." The Ellsberg controversy was over his divulgence of government classified information and the government's classifying of information, not about the government gathering information, processing it into intelligence; or, the relation of these activities to privacy rights.

But how nice you're of the opinion the Pentagon Papers brought about the end of the war in Viet Nam. If we had won the war, that opinion might have been worth something.

[Undertoad]

TechCrunch: Tech Giants Built Segregated Systems For NSA Instead Of Firehoses To Protect Innocent Users From PRISM

Who's got your back? Google and Facebook

[Lamplighter]

@Sexabon: Such an attempt distinguish between "gathering" and "accumulation"
is akin to something Humpty Dumpty might have said to Alice.
Your lead paragraph essentially uses the words interchangeably

The government makes a distinction between information
(raw data) and intelligence (data processed into a useful form).
Government does not consider the gathering and accumulation of information
to be a violation of the right to privacy because the data accumulation
is not yet in the useful form of an intelligence collection
that can be used to the detriment of citizens.<snip>

If you wish to duel about dictionary definitions, we can do that... I prefer not.

Your analogy of a "coin collection" is essentially misleading for PRISM,
because each individual coin is not "linked" to any other individual coin.
The properties of any one coin does not lead to the discovery of any other specific coin in the collection.

If we are to carry on a discussion of what we think we know of PRISM,
let us focus on "data" and "intelligence", because I think they come closer to your attempt
to distinguish between the constitutional and unconstitutional activity of our government.

But first my assumption: The government is obtaining raw data from
service providers and storing it in some logical format.
We (you and I) don't yet know if this format is file cabinets of paper,
databases of virtual data, or a Sheldon Cooper who simply remembers everything.

But I strongly doubt it is anything other than a database, and
I also doubt such database is just a non-sequential data dump
of phone numbers, dates and durations.
Instead, I suspect it is more likely to be a relational database,
organized by caller-ID, recipient-ID, which are in turn linked via date/time
with their durations and maybe even other kinds of data.

If my suspicions are correct, this meets your definition of "intelligence",
because it is the processing of raw data into a useful form.

The government makes a distinction between information
(raw data) and intelligence (data processed into a useful form)

Even if you are squeamish about this level of "processing",
just combining raw data from multiple providers across phone ID's
would constitute your definition of an unconstitutional collection.

And yes, this may be "legal" via the FISA court, but now we are back
to talking about altruistic leaks of classified information and whistle blowers.

[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

TechCrunch: Tech Giants Built Segregated Systems For NSA Instead Of Firehoses To Protect Innocent Users From PRISM

Who's got your back? Google and Facebook

I suspect that this is exactly the kind of thing Sen Ron Wyden
was referring to in the YouTube video posted above.
.. not just PRISM, as we are hearing about it now,
but it's correlation with other virtual data of businesses, etc.

NY Times

Because of smartphones, tablets, social media sites,
e-mail and other forms of digital communications,
the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily,
according to I.B.M.

Ummmm.... lets see now.

That would be 2.5 x 10^21 bytes (letters or characters)
That would be 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000

With little public debate, the N.S.A. has been undergoing rapid expansion
in order to exploit the mountains of new data being created each day.
The government has poured billions of dollars into the agency over the last decade,
building a one-million-square-foot fortress in the mountains of Utah,
apparently to store huge volumes of personal data indefinitely.

It created intercept stations across the country, according to former industry and intelligence officials,
and helped build one of the world’s fastest computers to crack the codes that protect information.

When separate streams of data are integrated into large databases
— matching, for example, time and location data from cellphones
with credit card purchases or E-ZPass use —

intelligence analysts are given a mosaic of a person’s life
that would never be available from simply listening to their conversations.
Just four data points about the location and time of a mobile phone call,
a study published in Nature found, make it possible to identify the caller 95 percent of the time.

[sexobon]

Lamp, I can better see where your coming from; but, you still have some gross misconceptions. I never tried to distinguish between "gathering" and "accumulation." I used "gathering" as a verb and "accumulation" as a noun both in regard to information (raw data). The distinction I made, in both actual and analogous form, was between "accumulation" and "collection" as nouns in which accumulation applies to information [loose change] and collection applies to intelligence [coin collection]. I can't break in down much further that; but, I can notice the ease with which you've previously misquoted me and misrepresent what I've said. That's why I don't interact with you much.

Don't worry that "Your analogy of a "coin collection" is essentially misleading for PRISM,". It wasn't leading to PRISM, that's what the plain language was for. It was merely to help explain the relationship between the terms I was using. Not everyone can see that correlation; but, that doesn't mean they're bad people and I won't think any less of you.

Non sequitur here Lamp: "... because each individual coin is not "linked" to any other individual coin. The properties of any one coin does not lead to the discovery of any other specific coin in the collection." I already know what coins are in the "collection." What I don't know specifically is what other coins are among the "accumulation" in the change jar. If my "collection" is arranged in chronological order and I'm missing a date, I go to the "accumulation" in the change jar to look for that date (i.e. not to the other coins in the "collection"). If there's only one - BINGO. If there's more than one, then I have other discriminating criteria with which to choose the best one.

Ref: "let us focus on "data" and "intelligence", because I think they come closer to your attempt to distinguish between the constitutional and unconstitutional activity of our government." How nice of you to regurgitate what I've previously said and present it as your own idea. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When I visit people in the old folks home they flatter me like that all the time.

"If my suspicions are correct, this meets your definition of "intelligence", because it is the processing of raw data into a useful form. ... Even if you are squeamish about this level of "processing", just combining raw data from multiple providers across phone ID's would constitute your definition of an unconstitutional collection." Nopes, processing for easier access and processing into a useful form for a particular application yield individual results which may converge, diverge, or make no difference. I can take all the change out of my change jar an divide it into multiple change jars separated by denomination; but, I still don't have a coin collection. Apples and oranges.

"And yes, this may be "legal" via the FISA court, but now we are back
to talking about altruistic leaks of classified information and whistle blowers."
But at least now you may have gleaned some insight into why it was deemed legal. Perhaps you could start another thread devoted to whistle blowers. I already know you to be a person for whom the end justifies the means from your positions on other topics right down to your methodology in debate; so, I wouldn't be inclined to join in. Good day.

[tw]

Too many make conclusions before defining what is actually being collected. We have long known that metadata was being collected. After all, phone companies already have those records. The difference is that NSA can hold those same records BUT not view them without a 'secret' court order.

The problem is that NSA does not need those records. Phone companies have them. Violations of court orders can easily occur when those records are freely available without going to another party. Who is holding the data is the problem.

Meanwhile, we have long suspected that all conversations that go international are also stored. That is properly also legal. But again, the conversations cannot be 'listened to' without a court order.

That's why this has all changed. The laws never considered stored conversation. The public also does not understand the difference between actual data and metadata. Some local gossip reporters clearly have no grasp of that important concept. Creating fears that are unjustified. And lack of any serious call to actually define the problem

[ZenGum]

Just noticed, the chap who did the leak made sure he was in Hong Kong before decloaking.


Hmmm.