Re: NSA data mining shared with the DEA
The NSA has trashed the Fourth Amendment. Again and again and again.
Whether they were deliberately trying to defy the law or accidentally destroying democracy matters not.
Failure to obey the law is abuse of the law. Failure to carry out their mandate in a legal manner is abuse of their mission.
Abuse
Abuse A*buse", v. t. [imp. & p. p. Abused; p. pr. & vb. n.
Abusing.] [F. abuser; L. abusus, p. p. of abuti to abuse,
misuse; ab + uti to use. See Use.]
1. To put to a wrong use; to misapply; to misuse; to put to a
bad use; to use for a wrong purpose or end; to pervert;
as, to abuse inherited gold; to make an excessive use of;
as, to abuse one's authority.
[1913 Webster]
2. To use ill; to maltreat; to act injuriously to; to punish
or to tax excessively; to hurt; as, to abuse prisoners, to
abuse one's powers, one's patience.
[1913 Webster]
You keep saying they've trashed the Fourth Amendment over and over again yet it's simply not true. Even the single court opinion in which Constitutionality is addressed says that the acquisition of the data wasn't Constitutionally questionable, but the storage and minimization procedures for it were. This came from the NSA's self-reporting of violations and was remedied within a month to ensure their storage and minimization procedures comported with the Fourth Amendment. This tells me that you a) didn't read the actual court opinion and b) you either have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the programs work or you have a fundamental hatred of the government and what it does. A good summary of how this process occurs can be found
here within this article. To quote:
To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.
Computer scientists said that it would be difficult to systematically search the contents of the communications without first gathering nearly all cross-border text-based data; fiber-optic networks work by breaking messages into tiny packets that flow at the speed of light over different pathways to their shared destination, so they would need to be captured and reassembled.
The official said that a computer searches the data for the identifying keywords or other “selectors” and stores those that match so that human analysts could later examine them. The remaining communications, the official said, are deleted; the entire process takes “a small number of seconds,” and the system has no ability to perform “retrospective searching.”
The official said the keyword and other terms were “very precise” to minimize the number of innocent American communications that were flagged by the program. At the same time, the official acknowledged that there had been times when changes by telecommunications providers or in the technology had led to inadvertent overcollection. The N.S.A. monitors for these problems, fixes them and reports such incidents to its overseers in the government, the official said.
So, by your very definition of abuse, this is not a misuse of the system and it doesn't fit into your description of abuse. Abuse indicates intent. As you can see from above, the technical complexities are enormous and the NSA not only takes steps to try and eliminate data they don't need (ex. destroying reassembled data that is purely domestic), but only targets certain data within that set. Abuse would come when they are targeting (via selectors described above) American's communications. They are not doing that. The small amount of American communications they do get into their system via the MTUs described in the court opinion, are stored separately, analyzed to remove any data pertaining to Americans save the exceptions provided for by law, and only then are they moved to the production databases with a permanent indication that it was data that was initially segregated and domestic communications were removed. By actually reading how the process works, it paints a completely different picture from the one you seem to be portraying of the NSA going out and targeting American's communications.
Do mistakes occur? Absolutely (and it has been noted by several anti-NSA posters in this thread) and that is why Congress wrote the laws to account for mistakes via minimization and reporting requirements. The courts also recognize this and it is discussed extensively in the FISC opinion. Again, I would invite you to actually read it.
Except, of course, when they were covering up their activities, as they did with their internal audit (which documented their abuse the law and their own directives thousands of times per year).
Except they didn't cover up their activities. Both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have said they were aware of the information contained in that audit, which didn't document abuse of the law, but compliance issues that were the result of human and machine based mistakes.
In other words, the FISA court does not and cannot monitor or supervise the NSA.
No. In other words, the FISA court can and does monitor and supervise the NSA, just not to the micro level you seem to expect.
Yes, of course it is true of all courts.
So, why did you just complain above that "the FISA court announcement did not say that they didn't monitor or supervise the NSA" when you agree that it does not and cannot monitor or supervise the NSA?
The problem here is that the NSA operates unsupervised. The FISA court is a rubber stamp. And, in those rare instances where it complains, it is ignored.
No. What I said above was that it doesn't supervise and monitor the NSA down to a micro level. No court personally supervises the day-to-day operations and compliance with its orders. The court's job is to interpret the law, issue an order, and then turn it over to the appropriate authorities charged with the day-to-day monitoring and supervision of the operation. They then require reports on compliance with their order in a specified time period. That's how courts work.
So it's funny that only two of those quotes are from people on the Intelligence Committees, the committees that receive these reports from NSA. And the one quote from Wyden and Udall shows very clearly that they knew this and other information, which one can assume they wouldn't know had the NSA not shared it with them. And still, not one of those quotes made the claim that the NSA didn't provide this, or any other compliance information, to Congress. All of it is just politically convenient outrage.
Here is a compliance report that was issued for June 1-November 30, 2012. Notice on page 28 where it states:
The Section 707 report previously provided to Congress and the Court discussed in detail every incident of non-compliance that occurred during the reporting period.
Here's another compliance report that was issued for December 1, 2008-May 31, 2009. In it:
The compliance incidents for the reporting period are described in detail in the Section 707 Report,26 and, as with the prior joint assessment, are analyzed here to determine whether there are patterns or trends that might indicate underlying causes that could be addressed through additional measures, and to assess whether the agency involved has implemented measures to
prevent recurrences.
It seems to me like the Congressional Intelligence Committees regularly gets reports of the details of each of the incidents every reporting period. Now whether they read them or not is an issue to take up with the members who serve on those committees.
You don't seem to get this. The FISC itself is claiming the NSA violated the Constitution!
The Congress itself is complaining that the NSA seems to be breaking the law.
The only person who seems to believe that everything here is just fine is you.
You don't seem to get this. The FISC did claim that a PORTION of the NSA program was unconstitutional, the NSA fixed their storage and minimization guidelines for that part of their collection, and then the court signed off on it as being constitutional. Congress itself is not complaining or accusing the NSA of breaking the law. And I make my judgments based on the information I can research and put together, not on what some news reporter tells me.
I wonder how many copies of the information (which presumably they already have) they need to "recover?"
If we email them another 500 copies of the data, will they have "recovered" what they need? How about 5 billion copies? How about 5 trillion?
Why don't they recover what they "lost" from their own hard drives?
Does British intelligence routinely depend on people leaking their data to external sources for them to keep a copy of what they have? Why don't they just get better hard drives?
They only needed to recover one copy at the time - the copy that Mr. Miranda was traveling through their country with. It's been deemed stolen property by the United States and the UK government, based on their laws, obviously had the ability to recover it. Would I have a right, if I obtained a copy of your social security number, date of birth, mother's maiden name, etc. to keep that information as long as you had a copy with you?
The UK sent government inspectors to supervise the destruction of hard drives containing data which the Guardian maintained at other locations, outside the UK. Data which they can access in Britain by simply sitting down at a computer terminal.
The government accomplished absolutely no destruction of information by this exercise. It never intended to. The motivation was to intimidate the Guardian into not printing information that the USA found embarrassing.
The motivation was to address stolen and classified information (per Greenwald's claim, some of it pertaining to the UK government) wherever it had the ability to do so. If the Guardian gets the information back, I'm sure they'll have another story they can write when they show up to offer them the choice to go to court or destroy it. By the Guardian's own admission, had they been taken to court, they could have been stopped publishing the information (
available here) so they opted to destroy it themselves as a symbolic gesture because the court actions may have seriously stopped their publishing. The UK government didn't make the decision to destroy the computer
The motivation was to make Britain a less democratic and more easily controlled society by suppressing a free press - so that the USA could go on abusing its Constitution.
Exactly. You figured it out. Britain's sole purpose in existing is to allow the US to violate its Constitution. What a smart guy you are.
