Re:Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
by Bartweiss on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @01:28PM
(#12645865)
I'd actually be interested to see examples. Most of the ones I know are of courts and Congress ordering three letter agencies to stop doing things, and being lied to and ignored.
The infamous one: in its early days, the NSA was ordered to stop surveillance of US citizens. It went before the Church Committee and testified that the relevant sites had been closed for more than a year. This was a lie, bottom to top. The sites were actively operating as those words were spoken, and they weren't closed down until whistleblower James Bamford exposed the lie. https://theintercept.com/2014/10/02/the-nsa-and-me/
There's a list a mile long of similar stories. Court decisions, executive orders, and acts of Congress have bounced off these agencies without result.
I'd like to see examples, but I agree that you're not wrong in general. The agencies do respond to court decisions sometimes. My point is that when legal compliance is a coin flip and there's no way to check for results, you can't be sure that legal decision has changed anything at all.
The infamous one: in its early days, the NSA was ordered to stop surveillance of US citizens. It went before the Church Committee and testified that the relevant sites had been closed for more than a year. This was a lie, bottom to top. The sites were actively operating as those words were spoken, and they weren't closed down until whistleblower James Bamford exposed the lie. https://theintercept.com/2014/10/02/the-nsa-and-me/
There's a list a mile long of similar stories. Court decisions, executive orders, and acts of Congress have bounced off these agencies without result.
I'd like to see examples, but I agree that you're not wrong in general. The agencies do respond to court decisions sometimes. My point is that when legal compliance is a coin flip and there's no way to check for results, you can't be sure that legal decision has changed anything at all.