FOIA release: Completely Redacted Document About Text Snooping

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/13/most-transparent-administration-in-histo

by raverbashing • 13 years ago

161 106 13 years ago

jstalin• 13 years ago

What would that even mean? The title is "Guidance for the Minimization of Text Messages over Dual-Function Cellular Telephones." Any idea what minimization it is referring to?

EDIT -- Found the answer to my question: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/02/minimiza...

3JPLW• 13 years ago

Very informative link, thank you. I was likewise unaware. TLDR: minimization is the act of removing non-relevant personal data from foreign intelligence information.

From the article: "Minimiaztion [sic], in essence, is the legal term for the constraints placed upon the government's ability to retain non-relevant private information collected legally. Here is the technical definition of "minimization," as supplied by 50 U.S.C. 1806 (A):

    Information acquired from an electronic surveillance conducted pursuant 
    to this subchapter concerning any United States person may be used 
    and disclosed by Federal officers and employees without the consent of 
    the United States person only in accordance with the minimization 
    procedures required by this subchapter. No otherwise privileged 
    communication obtained in accordance with, or in violation of, the 
    provisions of this subchapter shall lose its privileged character. No 
    information acquired from an electronic surveillance pursuant to this 
    subchapter may be used or disclosed by Federal officers or employees 
    except for lawful purposes.

"So -- the saving grace for civil liberties is the requirement that the government get rid of the information it accidentally or incidentally collects on people that isn't considered foreign intelligence information."

D9u3• 13 years ago

The best way to beat the censors is for multiple parties to request the same data at different times.

Oftentimes the resulting FOIA documents will be redacted in differing ways, allowing the various parties to "compare notes" and hopefully piece together the complete picture.

pixelcort• 13 years ago

However, in this case, literally the entire text was redacted (sans the title).

D9u3• 13 years ago

From a single source... Perhaps other parties will receive a less censored document? Perhaps the same party will receive such on a subsequent request?

dm213• 13 years ago

Everyone should assume that text messages are analyzed by a computer and flagged as necessary.

Only select people under investigation would have their entire text message conversations read by a human.

Does the NSA store all text messages? Yes, more than likely. Do their employees snoop on US citizens? Nope. Can other agencies have access to this data? Yes, Patriot Act.

There is a very easy way to test their capabilities. Send a text message with keywords involving bombs and political figures and see what happens. I'm not going to do it, but it would be an interesting experiment.

Information is critical in the world we live in. It's troubling that any secretive organizations would be able to have this much power over citizens, but the alternative is much scarier. The US has to maintain information dominance on the internet. Allowing other countries to dominate the internet could tip the scales of power. The US carries the big stick right now, if China gets the upper hand (and they are trying unimaginably hard) then what? What will the sleeping dragon do? I have nothing against China at all, but the unknown is scary and I simply would rather the US maintain indisputable dominance.

defilade5• 13 years ago

I believe the issue is what happens to all the other data that's not related to the intent of the surveillance. For example, if you're talking to your spouse about a health issue, your sex life, etc. If that's not the target of the surveillance, the government shouldn't be retaining it.

dm213• 13 years ago

More than likely they are.

It is never read by humans though unless flagged.

And hopefully there are checks-and-balances in place to alert others if a government employee is accessing data about someone that he personally knows.

It's not as easy as "only save texts with the words bomb and weed in them". It's all saved, then analyzed, then retained a few years, then eventually deleted. Is that acceptable for the US government to do?

jlarocco9• 13 years ago

> Do their employees snoop of US citizens? Nope.

I'm glad you're so certain.

> Information is critical in the world we live in. It's troubling that any secretive organizations would be able to have this much power over citizens, BUT the alternative is much scarier.

That's just scare mongering. As a country we got by for over 200 years without government surveillance, and nothing has changed to make it necessary now.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

> That's just scare mongering. As a country we got by for over 200 years without government surveillance, and nothing has changed to make it necessary now.

I'd argue a lot has changed.

The U.S. has always militarily dominated everything that could hurt it. Soon after our independence, we were intervening in Latin America because in the 1800's, set off from the Old World by two huge oceans, Latin America is what could have hurt us. As the world became smaller, we built a bigger Navy, and by World War I we had the largest in the world. Ever since World War I we have maintained military supremacy in any domain that mattered (naval, air, nuclear, space, etc).

Arguably this is just a continuation of the trend onto the internet, now that the digital sphere matters.

dm213• 13 years ago

I meant malicious snooping, like a husband reading texts from his cheating wife.

It's partial fear mongering, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed.

"Nothing has changed to make it necessary now."

That's pretty naive. If you don't want rampant terrorist attacks and criminal activity, then the government needs to stay one step ahead of the small percentage of citizens who do not want to follow the laws that keep us civil. Yes, some laws were created against the best interests of American citizens, but transparency will only help get those corrected.

saraid216• 13 years ago

> As a country we got by for over 200 years without government surveillance, and nothing has changed to make it necessary now.

I'm glad you're so certain we had no government surveillance.

pilif• 13 years ago

>There is a very easy way to test their capabilities. Send a text message with keywords involving bombs and political figures and see what happens. I'm not going to do it, but it would be an interesting experiment.

See how far "they" have gotten? They made us afraid of texting certain keywords to other people using a medium that's supposed to be usable for private one-on-one communications. In a country that values freedom of speech over nearly everything else.

Free to say what you want as long as no government has an issue with it I guess.

Of course we don't know whether SMSes are actually monitored. Of course it's very well possible that nothing might happen if you text your buddy something involving bombs. But the fact that something might happen was so convincing to you (and me, honestly and I don't even live in the US) that you decided not to do it.

To me, that's greatly concerning as it shows that the oppression is already happening and we are already censoring ourselves even over private media.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

But even if the government does monitor all SMS messages and people do censor themselves out of fear, that does nothing to stop a determined terrorist from communicating over SMS: they just need to devise a code in advance, which is what criminals have been doing for ages. Instead of saying "go ahead and plant the bomb" they could say "my hamster has been feeling very ill".

seyfarth• 13 years ago

Just text someone "Hey, so I'm going to get a pistol, and rob the US Bank on <street> in <my city>. Then I think I'll make a trip to Washington to bomb the white house, maybe send a few ricen-laced letters to US Senators on the way. Wanna tag along? Allahu akbar."

Pretty sure that trips a few flags. I feel sorry for the poor NSA guy having to read through all my texts. Worst. Afternoon. Ever.

stfu2• 13 years ago

Do their employees snoop on US citizens? Nope.

I find it highly ironic that you are making this statement today. Today, where it came out that the IRS leaked confidential infos on one political group to their political enemies [1].

I have no idea how you can make such a statement. Is it just naivety or what are your intentions? If information "is there" it is going to be used. No matter how sophisticated the flagging system is, the data is not stored in some secret vault only accessible to the great inquisitor.

The recent IRS events clearly demonstrate that government institutions are absolutely unafraid to abuse available data for intimidation if necessary. These are no just a rogue employee stalking his ex, but actions on a targeted, ideological level. The only data that can not be abused is the data that does not exist.

[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/irs-office-that-targeted-t...

dm213• 13 years ago

Is that really a broken system or just a few bad apples?

Hopefully we can pinpoint the leaks, identify why they occurred, and develop safeguards to prevent abuses of highly confidential data in the future.

Send the assholes who used their government position for evil to prison and make THAT the top news story.

EDIT: The system will repeatedly be broken in an ever-changing environment. That doesn't mean that we should turn against our government as a whole. Patch the holes, prevent it from happening in the future, do our best to allow the right amount of transparency, and move on.

bobwaycott• 13 years ago

> recent ... events demonstrate ... actions on a targeted, ideological level.

You say that like it is a new development. It is not.

This is not to give it a pass or say it's okay. Just pointing out that there is nothing in recent events that signals a significant departure from what has been happening since the last century and beyond.

moens4• 13 years ago

"It's troubling that any secretive organizations would be able to have this much power over citizens, but the alternative is much scarier. [...] if China gets the upper hand (and they are trying unimaginably hard) then what? What will the sleeping dragon do?"

I guess it would exert secretive power over its citizens? What point are you trying to make? America has finally realized the Maoist ideal it always wanted to achieve?

joshuahedlund• 13 years ago

> Does the NSA store all text messages? Yes, more than likely.

If the NSA is already storing all of the things, why do we keep having scandals about government breaking rules to get records of things? Google publishes specific numbers of requests for records... There was a story a month or so ago about feds reprogramming a guy's smart card specifically to track him... AP just broke the story about the subpoena for two months of phone records... if the NSA already has all this stuff, why doesn't everyone in the government just secretly get it from them instead of going to all this extra trouble to get records from companies all the time? I'm concerned about all the above abusive surveillance stories, but doesn't the fact that we're having all these stories prove that they don't have total surveillance yet?

dm213• 13 years ago

Partially because that kind of information can't be used in court.

The fact is that text messages are extremely insecure. If the US govt is willing to spend hundreds of billions on spy satellites and submarines, isn't it reasonable to assume that they would spend a couple million to gather all text messages? They're not supposed to spy on US citizens, but there are enough loopholes to allow it.

Just because the NSA has huge amounts of data doesn't mean that the FBI has unlimited access to that data.

The NSA historically doesn't share information with other agencies. Many claim that the NSA knew the details of 9/11 but were not allowed to share this information. Then the Patriot act and "secret patriot act" came along and more information is allowed to be shared between agencies, but not unlimited information, as far as the public knows.

newman3147• 13 years ago

Want to lay off the "Fuck Yeah, 'Murica!"?

Because you are laying it on just a little thick along with scaremongering.

Provide proof that China is evil. Different != evil.

"the unknown is scary"

That's just a stupid statement. If all you knew was Nazi Germany, would you maintain the status quo?

dm213• 13 years ago

I have nothing against China. But if the balance of power evens out through electronic warfare, then real and very deadly war might be the end result.

The US doesn't spend half of our GDP on the military for shits and giggles.

Regarding your Nazi Germany comparison, I don't know enough about the holocaust to speculate on the reasons why it happened or what could have been done to prevent it. I wouldn't kill any innocent human, no matter their religion or race. Groupthink, racism, fear, and ignorance might be partially to blame but it would be difficult to be in a position to actually make a difference during those times. Electronic warfare is not comparable to the holocaust. But the potential of power changing hands after 50+ years of control isn't something that shouldn't at least be discussed.

tptacek4• 13 years ago

One way that China is "different" is that the police in China can summarily sentence arbitrary Chinese citizens to "Rehabilitation Through Labor" for as long as a year without trial (trials are available as a formality but are apparently so delayed that their practical impact is negligible). You can be a Chinese citizen and plucked off the street and put into a labor camp for a year with no recourse.

Your call whether that's just a cultural difference. I don't know what "evil" means here.

rhizome• 13 years ago

Does the NSA store all text messages? Yes, more than likely. Do their employees snoop on US citizens? Nope.

Correct. Since the NSA is prohibited from operating within US borders, it's the FBI who snoops on US citizens.

ppod2• 13 years ago

>Does the NSA store all text messages? Yes, more than likely.

Do you have any evidence for this? The Wiretap Act clearly prohibits it, if they are doing it, it's definitely illegal.

dm213• 13 years ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=NSA+wiretap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/04/6585-2/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_L...

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/13164...

Of course, smart criminals would not use unencrypted text messages that could be intercepted. But catching the low-hanging fruit is better than nothing.

jrockway• 13 years ago

I've posted about this before, but I'll post it again. A few months before the first Obama election, there was a thread on Slashdot about things you couldn't say on the Internet. I humorously contributed "I am going to kill the president" to the discussion. A few months later, the Secret Service showed up at my house, with guns, to question me about it. (The agents were quite reasonable about the whole thing, FWIW, but they did need to follow up after reading that comment.)

People are watching you, so be careful what you say.

orblivion• 13 years ago

I'd be worried if I were the president too, if perceived threats are dealt with a few months later.

defilade5• 13 years ago

I'm not sure that the handling of a single document, especially one that happens to be about intelligence gathering procedures, should be THE standard by which we judge transparency.

yew4• 13 years ago

The entire point of FOIA requests is to allow access to previously undisclosed documents that aren't legally considered secret.

The notably weird thing here is that they released a completely redacted document rather than just declining the request. Is there some minimum amount of text required to be considered a response?

Politics aside, this is certainly one of the strangest things I've seen in a while.

defilade5• 13 years ago

Just saying that a single example doesn't prove a pattern.

Yeah it's a little weird, but out of the context of other FOIA requests it doesn't make much of a point.

totalforge• 13 years ago

It's not strange when you are familiar with the behavior of large bureaucracies. In doing this they are able to say they replied to the FOIA request, and satisfied the letter of that law. The request was for a document, and the document was provided.

There was sensitive information in the document that happened to be 100% of the contents, this was redacted. They now cannot be sued for not responding.

axus• 13 years ago

There's some information here. There was a policy sent out for what information to keep from cell phones, to all US Attorneys and Assistant US Attorneys, and it's 15 pages long. It would have been nice if they'd included a date.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

This is not a unique occurrence. Not long ago, the DoJ responded to a Congressional subpoena for "Operation Fast and Furious" documents by delivering some 7000 pages, mostly redacted.

Seems this isn't particularly unusual for the last few years.

This "most transparent administration in history" by far isn't.

a3n• 13 years ago

It's like any other business. If they have a word in their name, or their motto or mission statement, or their talking points, they aren't.

stfu2• 13 years ago

So we are reaching a stage where government is not just dancing around hot issues but by now they apparently don't even pretend to give a crap anymore.

Unfortunately there are still enough people around whos' reaction to this is "let's start and online petition and beg the administration to declassify all the "and"s in the text".

meritt• 13 years ago

We quickly need to reach a point where we encrypt everything we do on the client-side, during transmission and only readable by intended recipients.

moxie2• 13 years ago

We're working on this for text messages with TextSecure (http://www.whispersystems.org). If you've got the time and interest to help contribute, please check it out.

300bps• 13 years ago

The FBI is already whining that default use of HTTPS by Google and Facebook is ruining their snooping:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/propos...

sneak3• 13 years ago

iMessage does this now. The problem is that the UI gives no control over the list of keys it encrypts to, so you can still be wiretapped.

moxie2• 13 years ago

Do you have further documentation of this? There doesn't seem to be anything other than hearsay which demonstrates that they do end-to-end encryption, and some anecdotal evidence that they don't (a new device brought online will receive messages from before it was initialized, for instance).

andyzweb• 13 years ago

iMessage is not Free software so it can always be wiretapped

neeee• 13 years ago

Is there a direct link to the PDF available?

Scryptonite• 13 years ago

Here you go: http://www.scribd.com/doc/141222327/Totally-Redacted-FOIA-re...

fnordfnordfnord3• 13 years ago

Ho ho ho, the gov't discovers blackfaxing! What a merry bunch of pranksters they are. So funny! Seriously though, I'm sure there's nothing to see. Whatever the gov't does they do for our safety, and I feel foolish for suspecting otherwise.

FOIA release: Completely Redacted Document About Text Snooping

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