NSA is buying Americans’ internet browsing records without a warrant::“Web browsing records can reveal sensitive, private information about a person based on where they go on the internet,” said Sen. Ron Wyden.
Sounds like the problem is more that they’re for sale in the first place, not that they don’t have a warrant. They don’t need it because our privacy laws are so outdated and ineffectual(/nonexistent).
Yeah like I feel that the headlines are missing the forest through the streets. If there is enough important information available about individuals that the NSA would find it useful and worth buying, we need to ensure that it’s stopped at the source and not available to anyone.
Do I like this? No. But I also don’t like that any other entity can do this either. But if we’re going to ban the government from doing this, we should also be banning the sale of this data to anybody.
This right here. All the people bitching about wanting to use Opera and wanting to use Chrome and wanting to use Edge and Brave, this is what we’re trying to fight. This is what we’re trying to minimize.
Even though the NSA is probably trying to use this for ‘good’ at the moment, It’s not a hard stretch that a couple of changes in power later that information’s still going to be there.
When the Snowden releases came out the promise was the NSA was only using their massive surveillance machine to hunt down Islamist terrorists.
But since then they’ve passed tips to local precincts regarding loose cash in transit so that it can be seized and used by police departments for margarita ice crushers and other luxuries. The NSA itself gets a cut of the take.
This is to say NSA efforts are being used to rob Americans using asset forfeiture, which is about as far from for good or in support of a good cause as you can get.
The NSA does not need money from asset forfeiture. This is one of the stupidest accusations I’ve heard of NSA. They have to be careful about how they use their intelligence to keep potential targets unaware of what they can or are snooping on. This would be the stupidest and most pointless use of their intelligence. Anyone they would share intelligence with must do so with the most absolute secrecy, and municipal and state law enforcement generally does not qualify. This doesn’t mean they’re not acting unlawfully, but knowing if they are is going to next to impossible.
As with much of the federal government, the NSA’s information security is lax and outdated, and strict records that are supposed to be kept about who looks at what are not actually filed.
We’re pretty sure Russia and China are unofficially privy to any data they want.
NSA was supposed to be an INFOSEC department, making sure that Eve was out of business. That changed after the PATRIOT act (though the movie Sneakers predicted this change in mission). The eliptic curve scandal was a dead giveaway.
That said, at this point NSA leaks stuff to other law enforcement, and fourth-amendment protections are circumvented with parallel construction. Asset forfeiture puts the proof of innocence on the prior owner, so there are no rights to begin with. (Though this is changing state by state.)
Yes. I assumed you were assuming some of us would hold some of the usual centrist justifications for NSA, e.g. there are some serious meanies out there who might want to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor the US again, but risks of this could be drastically reduced by not engaging in military adventurism for sake our our industrialist plutocrats. Essentially, if the US stopped being an outrageous and brutal dick to the rest of the international community, then the numbers who would attack our civilians would be drastically reduced to fringe militant ideologues.
So yes, there are no valid justifications for NSA. It exists because the state and the legal departments of the state regard the US public as an enemy.
This has been commonplace for decades. The government agencies went big into it after 9/11. Funny thing was that I found out about it from a competing company telling me about how the company I worked for at the time was doing it.
I should note that I’m firmly against it, just that it’s not new.
It’s illegal to spy on your own citizens in the US, but completely okay if someone else does the spying and you buy the data.
Hell, Verizon got caught installing spy hardware for the government in phone data centers in the mid-90’s.
There was a brief storm about it, then the news media moved on to something else.
I’m sure it’s still there, at every phone provider, or something like it.
I wonder how much of this is to provide a plausible paper trail for parallel construction to hide illegal signals collection in legal proceedings.
“No your honor, we didn’t find this out because of domestic spying programs, it was from this data we bought from Google.”
