Rand Paul: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communications Without Warrants

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/

by remx • 9 years ago

542 245 9 years ago

theintercept.com

exabrial• 9 years ago

My opinion on hn was unpopular when I spoke out against Apple during the San Bernardino affair, because the FBI seemed to have the proper DOJ signoff and I think the motivation was obvious.

However this is unacceptable. We are a society of laws, and one of them is due process. Spying likely started during the Bush years, and Obama somehow escaped scrutiny for continuing the program (even with Snowden leaks). Hopefully it finally gets shut down during the Trump administration, even if merely because the media seems far less tolerant of his transgressions.

mattnewton2• 9 years ago

Your opinion was probably unpopular because DOJ signoff does not make good encryption with a master key any more technologically possible, and HN is a very pro-encryption crowd as a technical means to privacy. The disagreement for me is not about the warrant process but about why this warrant would be different. I think the warrant should not have been granted and needed to be fought in court. And the great thing about the warrant was, since it notified the defendant and could be eventually made public we could have this debate.

I think (hope?) we are all totally on the same page about warrants being necessary. I wouldn't hold your breath about due process coming back under trump, media intolerance hasn't changed a lot. What has is direct legal action on behalf of citizens, from states and agencies like the ACLU. I urge everyone to contribute to the EFF, and the ACLU, and let them, and your state legislature know this is a key issue to you.

luxuryballs• 9 years ago

I've always felt like the intent of a warrant was to prove to ME that the police were authorized to search my property. I'm thinking back to when people had to physically show up and be allowed entry into your estate.

If my feeling on warrants match up with the true intention of the law (as it was originally written) then no-knock warrants are suspect as well as any kind of secret warrant to tap your phone/computer.

I think even with warrants we still have an issue, because what's really stopping them from getting a warrant in this day and age?

JumpCrisscross• 9 years ago

the FBI seemed to have the proper DOJ signoff [in San Bernardino]

Due process means both sides get to argue their cases in front of a court. Apple chose to do that [1]. Presumably, the FBI figured it would lose and so dropped the case [2]. Apple contesting an executive branch order in a court is different from directors and employees at the NSA deciding they can act in defiance of our courts and laws.

[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/apple-timot...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/28/apple-fbi...

uptown• 9 years ago

"Hopefully it finally gets shut down during the Trump administration, even if merely because the media seems far less tolerant of his transgressions."

I haven't seen any indication that either party is looking to end these practices. It's hard to shut down "big brother" when it's your turn to play big brother. Furthermore, this doesn't exactly seem the the administration that's likely to dial-back intrusion into people's personal lives:

"U.S. House bill threatens employees with fines if they refuse to undergo genetic testing"

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/03/13/gene...

nerdponx• 9 years ago

Haven't we been spying on our own citizens since WWII? Or at least since J Edgar Hoover and thr McCarthy era?

datatan5• 9 years ago

McCarthy didn't spy on anyone. He was a Senator not an intel agent. Additionally, McCarthy has been proven right. His estimate was that there were around 20 Soviet agents that had infiltrated the US government at the highest levels. Once the USSR fell and their documents became public it was proven they had well over 200. McCarthy was right but people still tarnish his name out of spite.

Hoover was an SOB far worse than McCarthy ever could have been but is still revered by many in the intel services. His name still adorns the FBI HQ building and other than accusations of cross dressing, no ones dug in to truly uncover the evil things that man did.

kabdib• 9 years ago

Surveillance has been at smaller scale, but increasing as the technology behind the data footprint has moved from punchcards and magtape to farms of SSDs and gigabit optical links.

Hoover didn't know your shoe size. It's likely that the NSA could find that out in seconds to minutes (and I'm not kidding).

UnpossibleJim• 9 years ago

Not that I endorse this reality, but we have been, for quite a long time, a society that has one set of laws for certain segments of society and another set for disparate segments of society.

joering2• 9 years ago

Hopefully it finally gets shut down during the Trump administration

Are you insane?? Didn't you hear many of Trump speeches saying that NSA doesn't have enough power??? And that we need to monitor more, especially certain groups but pretty much everyone as well?

And that companies like Apple should be forced to decrypt or have tools to decrypt their own technology.

Bush made surveillance wanted by public fear because of 911. Obama made it further legal by not doing anything against it and praising NSA as "your friendly neighbor". Trump is here to make it more invasive and to make it stay for good!

anigbrowl2• 9 years ago

Spying likely started during the Bush years

It got worse during the Bush administration, but government surveillance isn't a new thing.

Hopefully it finally gets shut down during the Trump administration

Not sure if serious

wallace_f2• 9 years ago

He must be kidding. Trump has said repeatedly "I want surveillance..."

willvarfar2• 9 years ago

Why aren't politicians and their staff using end-to-end encrypted VOIP?

mysterypie• 9 years ago

The same reason you aren't. The same reason PGP has been around for 25 years and only a miniscule fraction of people ever encrypt their email.

I.e., it's because none of this privacy technology is built-in as the default into our communications infrastructure. Therefore, for the average person (and even for privacy-conscious techies), it is inconvenient and difficult, and you have to convince the party you're talking with to also install and configure something that is inconvenient and difficult for them.

I'm convinced that the question of why end-to-end crypto isn't the default is a political one; i.e., there is pressure not to do it.

willvarfar2• 9 years ago

Politicians and their staff should not be ignorant; they ought be very acutely aware of the risks and that they are a target, and ought be highly motivated to fix this for themselves by securing their own systems.

dmix• 9 years ago

Shifting people onto E2E encrypted VOIP as we move off analog phone lines would be far easier than moving peoples existing email to PGP. Much like how it was pretty seemless for WhatsApp to turn it on.

Email is a special case because of the various semantics like searching and federated clients.

remx• 9 years ago

There's a big discussion about PGP here and why so many fail to use it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114538

Some of the comments are worth reading if not for the sheer size of the discussion. It could take an afternoon or two to fully digest that thread.

The comments are in response to this: https://blog.filippo.io/giving-up-on-long-term-pgp/

mirimir5• 9 years ago

It's really not that hard. Mumble works quite well in TCP mode, via Tor onion service. That gives you end-to-end encryption plus some anonymity. Except for the voiceprint issue, anyway. And you get cellular-level sound quality. Latency isn't problematic if you run in press-to-transmit mode.

willstrafach23• 9 years ago

They often are definitely doing so, at least for sensitive calls. Did I miss something in the article indicating otherwise?

mgamache• 9 years ago

The problem with the press coverage of this topic is a lack of personalization. What does the government know about me and why is that important? I think most US citizens would be shocked to learn that most of our personal information is accessible without a warrant. (phone records / bank account / email / web history / phone location data / Car location / Purchase history / Facebook etc....). Also, how much the government can interpret from that information.

joshontheweb2• 9 years ago

Unfortunately I have found that most people aren't shocked when I explain this to them. Most commonly they just say That their life is boring and they've got nothing to hide. Additionally they think that it may be worth the invasion if we can catch the 'bad guys'. I'm not sure what would need to happen to change this sentiment on a large enough scale to get people motivated into political action.

snerbles2• 9 years ago

We're fighting an uphill battle against fear peddled by various media outlets to attract viewers and clicks. Fear that is useful to the surveillance apparatus.

VA3FXP3• 9 years ago

    The fight against apathy is unforgiving, relentless, and it only works in small doses.  As long as the masses have their opiate of choice nothing will ever change.

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

I'm not sure what would need to happen to change this sentiment on a large enough scale to get people motivated into political action.

A couple of razzias where they or their loved ones were taken to gas chambers should do the job.

But we have such short memories.

In just about every Dutch town, usually near the railway station there is a monument documenting just that and it still does not seem to make much of a difference.

Thriptic• 9 years ago

I've found that while it is true that most people don't care about government surveillance, many do care about cyber crime, identity theft, and unsettling ad personalization. I typically am successful in getting people to adjust their behavior to counter these things which has the added benefit of protecting against mass surveillance somewhat.

jupiter90000• 9 years ago

I've heard this same argument, "I've got nothing to hide." I personally don't understand how, even if that's true, someone would want to freely provide many personal details of their lives for strangers to look at. Maybe certain privacies are becoming uncommonly valued.

Even though I feel I don't have anything worthwhile to hide, I don't like the idea of random strangers finding out the details of my personal life and habits. I don't understand why some(most?) people are totally fine with that...

snerbles2• 9 years ago

It would have to be revealed in a fashion genuinely disruptive to the public. The average Joe Sixpack may grumble about the occasional privacy headline, but he won't feel the impact until it dwarfs our daily distractions.

strictnein3• 9 years ago

All that is available without a warrant? Strange then that the government gets search warrants for lots of that stuff.

edit: Maybe my sarcasm/snark wasn't clear: almost the entirety of the parent comment's list of stuff available to the government without a warrant actually requires a warrant.

shagie• 9 years ago

A formal statement of "we want this information and may be using it." There is a lot of paperwork that government goes through to document how it gets its information. Getting the information via warrant shows that this was asked for and received in a legal manner (rather than someone dropping some illegally obtained data on a website - even if there are legal channels to get it).

fictioncircle• 9 years ago

They can't get the content of communications w/o a warrant is the reason. They need that for legal action.

However, the stuff they can get without a warrant is enough people /do/ freak out if its applied in a manner they understand.

kfe• 9 years ago

I think it is important to note, that thought "lots of stuff" may may be available to the government without a warrant, "lots of stuff" may not be usable in court without a warrant. So - search warrant is often needed...

toddmorey• 9 years ago

Would be interesting to get a comprehensive list of what is and isn't available without a warrant from a judge. For example...

"Police can get phone records without a warrant thanks to a 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which found that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure doesn't apply to a list of phone numbers. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) — a 1986 law that underpins much of how the government can get digital data — requires providers to allow access to real-time data with a court order and historical data with a subpoena."

https://www.propublica.org/special/no-warrant-no-problem-how...

Bartweiss• 9 years ago

Someone (the EFF?) put out a really interesting widget a few years ago that demonstrated what you could learn about a hypothetical person using two-removes metadata. In fact, they managed to build a metadata feed which cast the innocent person as a major terrorism threat by sheer coincidences.

noobiemcfoob• 9 years ago

I'd love a link!

Dirlewanger• 9 years ago

What does the government know about me and why is that important?

This is why no one will care until we're years beyond too late. It won't be until the federal government starts mass-arresting (e.g. hundreds of thousands) people for some thing found through the dragnet. This probably won't be for several years, if not decades, but it will come.

datatan5• 9 years ago

Not as long as we have a second amendment it won't. Amazing the foresight the founders of this country had.

willstrafach23• 9 years ago

I think most US citizens would be shocked to learn that most of our personal information is accessible without a warrant. (phone records / bank account / email / web history / phone location data / Car location / Purchase history / Facebook etc....).

They would probably be shocked if they did learn that, but there is no evidence for any of those besides phone records prior to 2015. Thankfully (after 2013 leaks), the USA Freedom Act was enacted in response to the "metadata" versus "data" interpretation, so now your phone records (Call Detail Records) will require a warrant if you are a US Person.

1001101• 9 years ago

It's interesting that the article mentions then Sen. Obama's change of heart re: the FISA Amendments Act - saying he would filibuster it and then voting for it. I wonder what led to his change of heart. I haven't heard that explained.

andy_ppp2• 9 years ago

Probably that he was running for president and wanted to appear on the side of the security services? Then when in office it clearly must be a useful tool to start build profiles of everyone and be able to mine their activities.

grandalf39• 9 years ago

Exactly. I think it also underscores Obama's unprincipled, opportunistic nature. This is not a criticism of Obama, I think it applies to all presidents, and likely most elected officials worldwide.

thinkling• 9 years ago

It's easy to be principled when you're not calling the shots yet and not confronted with all the realities of the choice.

I imagine once Obama was in office, he was told what had been accomplished so far using this kind of intelligence (terrorists killed, plots prevented, lives (allegedly) saved, etc) that the US would give up if the intelligence dried up. Who will chose to accept that attacks might happen on your watch as President when the tools to avoid them are already in hand?

solotronics2• 9 years ago

JFK.

Darthy• 9 years ago

Of course the other 7.2 billion people in the world are also routinely monitored, but since this is an action on foreign territory, these 7.2 billion people have no recourse against this practice.

willstrafach23• 9 years ago

I hear this brought up a lot but do not see how it would be an issue. This is part of the job of an intelligence agency.

Something often ignored: The intelligence agencies of other countries are likely to be doing the same thing. It has already been shown that BND and GCHQ engage in similar behavior with regards to upstream and satellite signals interception, but it seems foolish to assume that other countries are not engaging in this type of intelligence collection.

rbg246• 9 years ago

No i don't think it is the job of an intelligence agency to spy on the rest of the world's citizens and i think its a terrible idea to normalise this behaviour as such or to somehow make it sound ethical.

The everyone else is doing it defence does not change the unethical nature of the action.

krushing• 9 years ago

Imagine if the US just bought all the foreign media companies it could and then controlled the news to protect national security. Would that be ethical or legal?

This is analogous to what the government is doing with privacy rights. The US can't say we're a nation rooted in innate human rights but then dismiss those rights when dealing with the rest of the world.

To the contrary, the US should be supporting countries that don't spy on their citizens and punishing those that do. We should want to encourage liberal free societies, and not become a global threat to freedom.

k-mcgrady3• 9 years ago

> I hear this brought up a lot but do not see how it would be an issue.

Because it's a massive human rights violation. Just because the agencies job is to gather intelligence doesn't mean it can trod all over the rights of non-US citizens.

bo10243• 9 years ago

I don't think it's a given that the right and proper thing for an intelligence agency to do is spy on every person it possibly can as much as it possibly can.

oculusthrift• 9 years ago

sounds like a problem for them and their governments

thrillgore• 9 years ago

They could declare war on the US.

lordnacho• 9 years ago

I have a question about this whole government intrusion thing. Perhaps a lawyer can explain:

Suppose the government gets a warrant to wiretap some guy. He happens to get a call from his lawyer, and the government overhears that he's committed some crime.

Now there's an attorney/client privilege preventing you from directly producing the tape (is there?) so you can't just do that. But the fact that you've heard this means as an investigator you'll probably pursue this guy much more aggressively, and perhaps gather other evidence rather than give up.

How does that work?

ealexhudson• 9 years ago

If you gather other evidence, it's called "parallel construction" and it's A Thing. It doesn't just apply to wire-taps; all sorts of evidence would be inadmissible, but of course once investigators know something there are often other ways of figuring out a means to get evidence (or, at least, getting to the point you can justify a warrant).

ascagnel_• 9 years ago

Parallel construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

matthewbauer• 9 years ago

I think the short answer is that they could get away with it if they kept it secret, but if the courts found out about it that alone could be enough to through the entire case.

The N.S.A.’s protections for attorney-client conversations are narrowly crafted, said Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University’s School of Law. The agency is barred from sharing with prosecutors intercepted attorney-client communications involving someone under indictment in the United States, according to previously disclosed N.S.A. rules. But the agency may still use or share the information for intelligence purposes.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/us/eavesdropping-ensnared...

shamwow• 9 years ago

TLDR: use illegal methods to find a crime, use that to make up a way to "discover" it legally. Present to a judge, easy conviction.

wbl• 9 years ago

They hang up the recording when the lawyer calls. Have you watched The Wire? The cops get in trouble because they listen too long to a non-pertinent call which becomes pertinent when a shipment is discussed.

dboreham• 9 years ago

Watch the TV show "The Good Wife" for a detailed treatment of this technique.

caycep• 9 years ago

Dana Priest and William Arkin's project documents a lot of the issues w/ the intelligence bureaucract.... http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

strictnein3• 9 years ago

One feels that Paul doesn't quite have a full grasp of the techniques he's describing (and it sounds like he's conflating a lot of stuff that Snowden leaked), but that headline sure gets the clicks, so let's go with it. Especially since it's Greenwald, who uses Paul's jumbled mess of an explanation to burn everything down.

Doesn't even make sense what he's proposing: Instead of getting a warrant to record the American, the NSA targets the foreigner? But what if they call someone else overseas? Or call people in the US? Seems like a really suboptimal way of targeting someone. And a low-level employee could unmask the caller? Sure, and that could also lead to that employee getting fired and prosecuted. I can access lots of data at work, but I would be shown the door and possibly sued if I did so.

rosser• 9 years ago

Paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, "You spy on your own people within the legal regime you've got, not the one you wish you had."

strictnein3• 9 years ago

You can legally tap phones of Americans in a far less convoluted way than what Rand Paul attempted to describe.

grandalf39• 9 years ago

While this article offers the clearest presentation of the issue I've seen to date, I think the key point (which the article points out halfway in) is that the truth of Trump's claim that he was wiretapped does not depend on the presence or absence of a FISA warrant.

The system is designed to be used without warrant, so those harping on the detail of whether or not a warrant existed that had Trump in scope are not focused on the core issue.

It would be nice if all surveillance could be traced back to FISA warrants, but Snowden's revelations make it clear this is absolutely not the case.

unityByFreedom2• 9 years ago

It would be nice if all surveillance could be traced back to FISA warrants, but Snowden's revelations make it clear this is absolutely not the case

You mean, since the NSA collects data on millions of Americans?

If that's the type of monitoring you mean, Trump's complaint holds no more water than an average Joe claiming "Obama ordered a wiretap on me". More like, "Obama continued policy begun by previous administrations to enable spying to protect national security.". It's the primary function of the NSA.

grandalf39• 9 years ago

If that's the type of monitoring you mean

Not at all. I mean that any number of people inside the intelligence organizations could have opted to "wiretap" Trump and there would have been no audit trail and no warrant.

holds no more water than an average Joe claiming "Obama ordered a wiretap on me"

For what it's worth though, I do think the lowly "average Joe" you mention does deserve to be quite irate about his fourth amendment rights being thrown away.

mason240• 9 years ago

It's extremely disingenuous to characterize his role as "continued policy begun by previous administration" when his Vice President wrote the core legislation of the Patriot Act, he was actively working to expand those policies for 8 years, and one of his very last acts was to issue an EO further entrenching them.

ComradeTaco• 9 years ago

Trump is amusing. He'll say something absolutely obscene, then his surrogates will say that he meant something different and slightly less obscene. Then supporters will go to great lengths to translate his words into an extremely favorable reading that actually isn't obscene at all.

We don't need a Rosetta Stone for it. Trump means exactly what he says.

giardini• 9 years ago

unityByFreedom says: " Trump's complaint holds no more water than an average Joe claiming "Obama ordered a wiretap on me"."

No, because at any time Obama could have terminated the process and asked for legislation to dismantle the means.

yellow_viper• 9 years ago

I've not really been following it but isn't one of the main arguments that Obama would've had to have sign any FISA warrant?

grandalf39• 9 years ago

Obama would've had to have sign any FISA warrant?

No, the straw man argument is that we can tell whether Trump was wiretapped by the presence or absence of a FISA warrant.

The president does not sign FISA warrants, the entire purpose of FISA is to streamline (almost to automate) the issuance of warrants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

cmiles74• 9 years ago

My understanding is that "listening" to communication between Trump and a foreign national would not require a FISA warrant. I say "listening" because, I believe, all communications with foreign nationals are recorded but only some are actually listened to by actual people.

ajross2• 9 years ago

Why, in a thread about unacceptable reach of executive power, is the top comment a defense of the sitting president (the wielder of such power) and a canard about a mostly-unrelated political scandal?

geofft• 9 years ago

Because there are three separate scenarios we could be in: the sitting president wants to get rid of this power, the sitting president wants to abuse this power, and the sitting president does not understand this power.

If the office of the president is saying things like "microwaves that turn into cameras," I'm not confident in the president's ability to understand the problem well enough to solve it effectively (nor, and this is small comfort, to take advantage of it effectively).

As a wise man once said, "Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country." "Now, to solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name."

grandalf39• 9 years ago

a thread about unacceptable reach of executive power

This is true no matter who is in charge.

top comment a defense of the sitting president

It is not a defense, but if you perceive it that way you reveal your own bias. It is merely a point about the relevance of a FISA warrant when reasoning about the issue.

the wielder of such power)

Of course, my caution about the irrelevance of FISA warrants applies equally to the sitting president and to past and future presidents.

a canard about a mostly-unrelated political scandal

I'm not really sure how to respond to your characterization of the Snowden revelations as a unrelated political scandal. If we're talking about "wiretapping", Snowden revealed that there is a vast power of surveillance that can be wielded by a large number of people with little oversight.

While this does not lend credence to Trump's claims, it does reveal that those rebuking Trump for making the claims based on the lack of a FISA warrant are likely attempting to deceive/misdirect the public about how the apparatus actually works.

alasdair_• 9 years ago

For Trump to make such a claim, he would (presumably) need reasons. I would sincerely hope that his reasons are more than simply "I read it on my friends blog"

pharrington• 9 years ago

The current system is worse than being designed to be used without warrant - it's explicitly setup to subvert the warrant process. Remember, FISA court proceedings are secret, and at least as of 2013 (I'm getting this info from Wikipedia), a massive 12 out of 35,529 FISA warrent requests were rejected.

XorNot• 9 years ago

The rate of rejections does not actually tell you anything about the effectiveness of the court.

Related fallacy: there is not a standard ratio of people who should fail school tests.

dragonwriter3• 9 years ago

Remember, FISA court proceedings are secret, and at least as of 2013 (I'm getting this info from Wikipedia), a massive 12 out of 35,529 FISA warrent requests were rejected.

Yeah, that's a much higher rejection rate since 2003 than in the 24 previous years the court existed, when zero were denied. So, if the rate of rejections is a valid metric for how good the court is, with fewer rejections being worse, the process got better during the "War on Terror".

willstrafach23• 9 years ago

It would be nice if all surveillance could be traced back to FISA warrants

However, there is an audit trail in the system. As an investigation will occur on this matter, I am sure that cleared representatives will have access to this for review.

grandalf39• 9 years ago

As an investigation will occur on this matter

What seems odd to me is that this "investigation" takes more than a few minutes. How is a system that allows easy auditing and checks and balances also the same system that takes weeks or months to determine who accessed specific records.

I think it's unlikely we'll see any raw data. Chances are that if there was any investigation going on into anyone on Trump's team (which we know there was), then those individuals showing up at Trump Tower for a meeting creates a metadata correlation to Trump Tower. Hence Trump's claim of "wiretapping Trump Tower" would seemingly be trivially true if even the simplest metadata link between, say, Flynn and Trump Tower were followed or considered potentially relevant by any analyst.

colanderman2• 9 years ago

Why place any weight on Trump's wiretap claim? He was one of the loudest voices in the "birther" movement.

That he's now president doesn't mean his self-serving crackpot conspiracy theories suddenly deserve credit.

555554• 9 years ago

Let me first say that I don't particularly care if Obama was born outside of the US. George Washington, perhaps our greatest president, was obviously an immigrant of sorts. Let me also say that I don't believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Obama wasn't born in America, as there are several other reasons for faking a birth certificate; perhaps the original has been lost and you've decided that it's worth doing in order to satisfy the electorate. But with those disclaimers, as someone who has done a lot of document editing in Photoshop for the past 15 years, I found this video beyond convincing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWmWO18GTc8

Regarding Trump's claim that Trump Tower(?) was tapped, I find it very suspicious that Obama's reaction was a lawyered non-denial-denial relayed by an intermediary. Whenever people are accused of crimes and they do anything other than simply deny it, you should be somewhat suspicious. When they use weasel words or clever phrasing, be suspicious. I predicted Theranos' issues something like 8 months in advance due to this; Elizabeth Holmes never simply said "these reports are wrong because our technology works" (because she knew she would be open to lawsuits after the fact if she said as much). Just my 2 cents; ofcourse nobody knows for sure at this point.

rand777632• 9 years ago

Except multiple leaks have proven this isn't some crackpot conspiracy theory. Whether or not the NSA, CIA, or FBI were specifically targeting Trump, his communications, and ours, ARE intercepted and monitored.

unclebucknasty16• 9 years ago

Do you find anything odd about the timing of the release of this information, which so perfectly overlays with Trump's unverifiable charge and provides ammunition for reaching a conclusion such as yours?

I mean, now there's just enough "justification" to conclude that the illegal wiretap may have been done outside of any traceable process--just as you have done. So, Trump just may be right. How do we know?

There is an over-emphasis on what's possible vs. what the actual evidence says. That is the path to a post fact world wherein literally any conspiracy theory can now thrive. At the end of this path lies the complete obliteration of democracy.

grandalf39• 9 years ago

I think you mistake my intent as being to defend Trump. My intent is only to highlight that a surveillance system that is designed to circumvent accountability is ripe for abuse.

This includes abuse of power, but also abuse such as making a fictitious claim about wiretapping having occurred.

emehrkay2• 9 years ago

Where exactly does Paul stand on issues of privacy like this? You'd think we is against it, but he is also okay with ISPs selling your browsing history.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/gop-senators-new...

mi100hael• 9 years ago

Whether or not you agree, there is a legitimate & legal distinction between a private corporation and a publicly-funded government organization.

newjersey• 9 years ago

So in my mind there are two parts to publicly funded projects. One is whether the spending of funds is worth it and another is whether the people have a choice.

We think that by definition that when private companies have programs, they're not spending public money but I'd argue (somewhat controversial I agree) that any tax break is public money. Also the second part of whether participation is mandatory. I'd say if an ISP has a de facto Monopoly in a market, then we could say participation is mandatory. I hope this part is less controversial.

emehrkay2• 9 years ago

Line gets fuzzy when ISPs, in most part, are government-backed monopolies (I'm "lucky" because both Verion and Comcast covers my area)

danjoc2• 9 years ago

SSL should prevent that. Sadly, SNI leaks the domain name. Hacker News appears in favor of SNI though, because lack of IPv4 address space.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13639112

Oddly, HN is really worried about server privacy. If we shared a single certificate across 20 domains, then people could see all those domains are hosted in the same place.

My point? We are part of the problem.

willstrafach23• 9 years ago

SSL does not really keep the domain name private at all either way though. That is no good solution to this, because your ISP needs to know how to route your request, right? Or, am I misunderstanding your point?

C4K3• 9 years ago

How exactly is one domain per IP better than SNI privacy wise?

If you run one domain per IP, then it's just as obvious who you're connecting to.

linkregister• 9 years ago

The author of this article did a poor job of refuting Susan Hennessey's statement that reverse targeting is unlawful and not practiced. Taking an excerpt of a Hayden speech and then highlighting his statement that "communications with one end in the U.S." are the most interesting doesn't really prove this.

The author would have a stronger argument by sticking to the facts. Searches of U.S. persons without a warrant are directly at odds with the language in the 4th amendment of the Constitution, full stop.

wallace_f2• 9 years ago

The world would be a much worse place without people like Greenwald.

Rand Paul: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communications Without Warrants

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