The FISA court is already a rubber stamp. Encryption is one of the only ways to non-passively protest.

Edit: Can't reply to my replies, likely because of the down votes on my parent's comment.

Re: FISA, yes to both. That anecdote may be truth but I am still hung up on NSA employee looking up ex-girlfriends' emails the day he got access to do so.

Re: Army, you aren't wrong but that's not encouraging. It's true, at the end of the day the most powerful military will win.

But it's an argument that only wins against those with something to lose, like people who care about their family or nation states with a future. I guess that's why the ultimate response over a long enough timeline to an unbeatable military force is terrorism.

This opinion is just nuts. Trust a court that you were told for years didn't even exist? A secret court? How about no.

Secret courts lead to abuses: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jo-shaw/secret-cour...

What is secret about the FISA Court is its decisions, not its existence (and that should change slightly as a result of the USA Freedom Act's requirement to release "significant" opinions).

Interestingly, regular courts can and do hear cases involving classified information.

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

It's not that cases involving classified information somehow get transferred to the FISA Court; instead, the FISA Court only hears cases involving surveillance requests arising under FISA.

Because the only way to oversee top-secret data is with a top-secret court.

Not only must justice be done but justice must be seen to be done.

If we can't audit or inspect the courts then there is zero assurance they are acting in a lawful or moral manner.

The whole point of courts is so that people can't make shady deals in back rooms.

That army that you keep on claiming is yours is closer politically to libertarian than you are to the army.

Is it the approval rate? Is it the lack of transparency?

If it's the approval rate, in my experience the reason why court warrant approvals are so high is because intelligence / law enforcement are very risk adverse and will not submit requests that are likely to be rejected. Anecdotally, the officers I talked to considered it career poison to submit a request that got rejected by a court.

In a way I'm heartened by stories about NSA employees acting inappropriately, it means that they're being caught and disciplined and the Office of the Inspector General is doing its job. If it was routine and accepted it wouldn't be a newsworthy story and the inspector general.

That said, I don't think employee abuses have much bearing on the effectiveness of the FISA court as a source of judicial oversight for intelligence operations inside the United States.

Either the NSA is really accurate or something smells.

It also reflects that unlike other types of warrants the court can request revisions or additional information before making a decision and requests can be withdrawn before a formal rejection can take place.

Some estimates put the reject/withdrawal rate closer to 25%

Some more information: https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants-court-t...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscour...

If the data is not used in a criminal case, then there is no mechanism for 4th amendment protection and the spied-upon has no recourse.

2. Time passes and government policies change

3. Information that was previously inadmissible, and which should have never been collected in the first place, is now admissible.

When we talk about law, we can't just consider how the current government will use it. We need to restrict how a future government could abuse it. You see the same pattern all the time in software: Some assumption is made in an earlier version. The basis of that assumption becomes invalid after further development. Now the thing that didn't matter before gets a bug added to your queue.

Ostensibly, but in reality the FBI or local agency will use parallel construction to find another way to introduce evidence without even mentioning the NSA.

This is the problem Snowden exposed. There is not enough transparency to verify judicial processes.

Secondly, it's seems that if information collection, safety, and exchange were working well, the FBI wouldn't be asking for more.

Obama's ability to unite and create dialog is welcomed. However, I don't think phones are fetishized. There's simply a lack of education everywhere. As Jobs said, “Privacy means people know what they are signing up for”.

The Snowden leaks have shown the NSA's system-wide abuse and sealed courtroom judgements allowing rampant abuse and overreach by the NSA where they're able to operate free from oversight where even most of Congress had no idea what they were doing.

> If not, then you really can't function in a normal society. Good luck building your own army.

This ridiculous conclusion tantamounts to we either have to trust the US Govt or we need to build a private army. We are already functioning in a society without the need of a private army. We also live in a time where we can protect our sensitive information from the US Govt with readily-available strong encryption. Do I trust the US Govt with my most sensitive information? No I don't. Do I need a private Army? No, no I don't.

I can have trust in a government, but not in some of the individuals that make up that government. And I would want necessary protection from said individuals.

Enter: encryption.

Trust but verify, for the record I don't place any trust in any part of government I and others can't audit in some way.

This is an extreme statement and a false dichotomy. I think there's plenty of room between "completely trust government" and "unfit for society". If I'm uncomfortable with the potential for abuse of monitoring (which has already happened plenty of times), that means what exactly? I should remove myself from public discourse?

And the voters have decided that the courts should be trusted.

Your argument would hold more weight if the people voting were actually well informed and educated about what the implications of their votes would be. If the government came out and said "everything you do, say, click and load will be saved for latter analysis" do you think they would vote the same way?

(Not that I'd accept building a backdoor just because 50%+1 people wanted access to my users' data, either, but at least then the argument made in the post you replied to would have any meaning at all.)

I would like to hear your definition of normal society. I personally feel that there are thousands of unique societies in the world.

Considering that technology knows no borders, I hope you and the "society filled with other people" have normal society figured out for us all.

That argument had weight pre-Snowden. It carries no water now.

B. "Filtered". Do you really believe that? Considering it's coming from the same government that also uses the words "enhanced interrogation"?

C. The US seems to consider the rest of the world people with no rights at all. People understand spying on other countries, not spying on every other single person in the world with a phone and/or an internet connection.

D. Your reasoning is faulty:

> If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed good reason, as determined by a judge.

Just because an "authority" says/does something does not mean it is right. It should be expected to explain its reasoning, openly and transparently. Then I can trust it. The current programs do not do that and have no intention of doing that.

E. Random US government employees are literally reading your communications.

We are talking about introducing back-doors to what essentially already is an extension to our brains. If you understand computers, you know that analogies between the "real world" and our abstract world of modern information systems usually don't hold well.

Please try to think through all the subtleties, you clearly don't have to be labeled "libertarian" to foresee a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our civil liberties (as with democracy, the US still sets global trends btw).

That's an interesting question to evaluate by analogy, though.

Suppose you could, relatively easily, build a safe that nobody can enter without the combination (including the safe manufacturer). The government could serve a warrant to the person who has the combination, and you might even have to choose between opening the safe or going to jail, but if they chose the latter, they still can't get into the safe. They could point a camera at the safe, or rig the dials, so that the next time you open it you get the combination and can open it themselves; however, if you know or suspect they've done so, you can avoid ever touching the safe again, and they still don't have access. And serving a warrant to the safe manufacturer does no good at all, because everyone already knows everything about the safe except the combination.

With that statement of mine I was mostly trying to convey how some things shouldn't be easy.

Let me try to paraphrase:

I'm sure that Sherlock would find a way to open that safe without a computer doing it for him!

To a certain degree I can understand the frustration of executive agencies over their apparent missing-out on all the shiny low-hanging fruit - but they shouldn't worry so much as the promises of most tech be it the use of "big data" or accessing our all-encompassing "personal assistants" ultimately won't free them of doing their jobs.

I agree completely. I think attempts to paint this as a "reversal" of hundreds of years of governmental warrant procedure is ignoring that these new devices and this new data didn't exist hundreds of years ago. If we're going to put a huge amount of valuable data about our lives in one place, we'd better protect that place better than we've ever protected anything before.

Beyond that:

> If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed good reason, as determined by a judge.

Not even close to true. We have documented evidence at this point that the government is monitoring all communications. They have no discretion.

For the moment, I trust that the government has not yet descended so far that it will arbitrarily arrest or detain everyone who attempts to maintain the security of their information. That doesn't mean I trust the government to unilaterally decide whose information it can access.

Government brokenness is not binary. There's a spectrum from "theoretical perfection" to "absolute tyranny". The US and UK governments are currently attempting to take a step in the wrong direction; that doesn't immediately imply that anyone opposing that step "ceases to be able to function in a society". Or are you seriously attempting to suggest that the government is entirely infallible and incorruptible?

The safeguard for privacy isn't just the court system. That provides a modest amount of protection against abuse of information that was left insecure to begin with, such as information left unencrypted with a third party. However, for information that truly needs security, the privacy of that information is maintained by the system holding it; that system neither has nor needs any concept of "a user other than the owner who somehow has access".

Let's ignore the Apple case for a moment, since Apple fundamentally does have access to the device. Even additions like the more recent security chip have potential ways to bypass security, albeit by dissecting a tamper-resistant chip; that's a tradeoff for supporting insufficiently long user PINs, and wouldn't be needed with a secure passphrase. Whether Apple wins or loses, the much more interesting question is whether challenges arise to the construction of devices that genuinely cannot be accessed by anyone other than the device owner.

As a simple example, consider an encrypted device, using a key and passphrase, where the passphrase uses an appropriate strengthening technique to make it computationally intensive to test a single possibility. Easy to get in if you know the passphrase, but if done right, computationally infeasible to brute force even with NSA-level computing resources and centuries of time.

Laptops regularly use that level of security today (modulo the user's chosen passphrase). Phones should as well.

If I had a perfect eidetic memory, I could memorize huge volumes of information and keep no records of them; in that case, that information is completely secure (against anything except rubber-hose). Encryption provides an amplification mechanism there: instead of memorizing gigabytes of data, I can instead memorize a passphrase, and gain access to arbitrarily large amounts of information that nobody else can access (modulo security bugs, or physical device compromise followed by my continued access).

Isn't this true about traditional wiretaps as well? Yeah, a corrupt agent could illegally wiretap anyone's phone, but that certainly won't hold up in court.

And for private comms, they have filters that filter them out for US citizens, as the Snowden leaks show.

LOL when people find out that the Snowden leaks actually show the NSA protecting privacy rights of US citizens, in a top-secret program.

You seem to be taking government descriptions at face value, despite documented evidence to the contrary.

Consider the possibility that the government you seem to place absolute trust in is not, in fact, perfect.

So we make an agreement and build a third-party that has oversight over both of us.

Or do you expect me to trust you?

Let's make this concrete, instead. Anyone can, today, using off-the-shelf software, store information such that only someone with a passphrase can access it, and such that all the computing power in the world would take centuries to access it without the passphrase.

In such a scenario, I don't expect anyone to "trust" anyone, or to need to. (Modulo the issue of trusting the software to be properly implemented, which is a separate discussion but has some plausible solutions.) Instead, I expect that the software in question will prevent unauthorized access, as it was designed to do.

Note that "most incidents are self reported" kinda sounds good, but really means "we don't have any good systems for finding it", and probably means many incidents are never discovered.