Re:Twitter discloses national security letters
by losteric on Friday January 27, 2017 @06:46PM
(#13503819)
That's certainly the intent, but at this point NSL's are more of a drag-net approach. Rampant abuse is undermining it's legitimacy.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters
by imglorp on Friday January 27, 2017 @07:09PM
(#13503944)
We should be totally okay with court ordered records requests against specific accounts. That's LEO doing his job. It doesn't look like these two letters were court ordered however. Even so, it was bounded time against two accounts and of course you don't want to tip them off.
It's the bulk tap rooms, such as the AT&T one, that ARE the dragnet and highly abusive of our rights. I feel like this whole NSL release program of late is a distraction tactic to take our attention away from the real abuse.
Re:Twitter discloses national security letters
by mindslight on Friday January 27, 2017 @07:55PM
(#13504124)
Except for 1. the extreme secrecy and 2. the matter being policed is essentially speech.
If a crime has been committed for which Twitter is evidence, then arrest the perpetrators and collect the evidence with a standard public search warrant. There isn't even an argument to be made that uncaught co-conspirators could preemptively destroy evidence, as Twitter has it all recorded! But the war on drugs has established this philosophy of cultivating ongoing crime in order to catch ambiguous "higher ups". That kind of "ongoing threat" is only compatible with a totalitarian society.
Re:Twitter discloses national security letters
by brokenmachine on Saturday January 28, 2017 @05:16AM
(#13505687)
And hence all the gag orders so nobody can determine how rampant the abuse is.