Handling over a mountain of secrets to journalists and let them sort out the illegal from the rest of it, (and trusting them not to publish things that are newsworthy/salacious but legal) is completely irresponsible
You should ask yourself more often “is there a reason they did it they way they did” before offering smug suggestions.
If you are incapable of reading the documents yourself: if the company receiving the wiretap order has any reason to believe that an account belongs to a US citizen or a non-US citizen living in the US, they challenge the order. No warrant is needed in the US legal system or that of any other country in the world to wiretap a foreigner who is outside of the country requesting the data. The fact that the US requires a court order is rare, and by all accounts, including Snowden's documents, that procedure is followed.
There is so much you got wrong here, that it's hard to figure out where to begin.
1. Apple did not have any data to wiretap until people started using iCloud mail. Microsoft ran Hotmail since time immemorial. That's why they prioritized the integration of wiretap data from Microsoft first.
2. There are plenty of examples of companies challenging government orders that came from the Snowden leaks themselves. The Twitter thing is just that the government reported TOU violations to Twitter, and Twitter decided if they were violations and took action if so. The government did not have unilateral control over Twitter.
> It is followed in the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law, by a court that rubber stamps 99.97% of requests
What percent of warrants do you think are approved? You clearly have no idea how the world works. The government wouldn't waste its time asking for a court order unless it thinks the court order will be granted. If it wastes the judge's time by filing lots of requests that are illegal, the judge will punish the government for doing so.
"We've conducted an internal investigation proving no malfeaseance took place. We will not be releasing any data on our usage of the tool. Trust us."
> The leaked information came after the revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls to the NSA.
That's not what PRISM was. PRISM was a data integration project to ingest wiretap data from the FBI. That wiretap data came from court orders for specific accounts belonging to non-US citizens living outside the US.
Can you explain why there are countless stories such as this:
NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...
You keep writing they were not spying on US citizens, but clearly they were or NSA employees would not be using it to spy on friends/family would they?
Did they coin the term "LOVEINT" because this was a one-off situation?
Either way, it's clear they're not coming from a place of promoting transparency or a critical perspective of the government's actions. There's nothing wrong with being a patriot but this is a conversion about government misbehavior, not a loyalty contest.
It's probably best to just ignore them, which is what I'll be doing going forward.
The leadership of these agencies and the congressmen that enabled them on the intel committee are traitors to the republic, plain and simple.
Note to mods: I understand HN isn’t for “waging ideological debate”, but this is an inherently political topic and the discussion is on-topic
Also, what is up with your note to mods? This discussion isn't about politics but about understanding what is real and what isn't.
You can’t sue because you have no standing, because you can’t prove you were spied on, and proving it would be illegal so… checkmate. :)
PRISM is a clear violation of the 4th, and if we had supremes that were worth a damn all bulk collection programs would be prohibited.
That doesn't mean it's ethical or should be hidden from the American public.
No, phone metadata collection was ruled illegal. Ingesting court ordered FBI wiretaps on foreigners living outside the US who are of interest to national security has never been illegal in the US or in any other country.
> That doesn't mean it's ethical or should be hidden from the American public.
It isn't hidden from the American public. The documents describing the data ingested into PRISM have been declassified.
It wasn't illegal, therefore going through the proper channels wouldn't have exposed it.
It is only by going through alternative/leaking means that the program could have gotten exposed to the public.
This is the government's job. Why do you feel it needed to be exposed?
Well because it is basically at scale warrantless wiretapping, of almost every major communication platform(technically its on the internet, and not the phone system, I know).
You can feel free not to care if the government has backdoor access, without a warrant, to every major US tech company, I guess.
But a lot of people did not know that the government had this, and thus why they are glad that it was exposed.
If you don't care about at scale warrentless wiretapping, feel free to just say so. Just say "I don't care if the government has a warrant or not, before they spy on every major communication platform".
Other people, though, actually care about warrants and privacy protections, from the government.
How many ways do people need to tell you that it doesn't? It can send wiretap requests for specific accounts to tech companies, which needs to approve each individual request.
> But a lot of people did not know that the government had this,
It doesn't.
> and thus why they are glad that it was exposed.
Where? Which document says they have backdoor access to the tech companies. I'll give you a hint: none of them do. Snowden and Greenwald were both too stupid to read the documents they had obtained and claimed otherwise, but all the rest of the tech media, like CNET and the NYT, reported it correctly.
> Other people, though, actually care about warrants and privacy protections, from the government.
This is something I care deeply about. That's why I'm glad Snowden's documents and the declassified documents both agree it's being followed.
> both agree the law is being followed.
Notice how I didn't say that anything was illegal. The fact that it was legal, is entirely the problem!
I think it is very important for the government to get a warrant, before making these requests.
You can feel free to not care about warrants for these types of requests, but I care about them.
Not for people who aren't US citizens who live outside the US, no. Is this really news to you? Do you know of any country in the world that requires its intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant for surveilling non-citizens outside its borders?
Ok, well a lot of people care about warrants.
You can feel free to not care! But a lot of other people care about warrants.
Therefore, it is good that this stuff was exposed, according to the people who care about warrants.
Including me.
> Therefore, it is good that this stuff was exposed, according to the people who care about warrants.
Once again, no country in the world requires its intelligence agencies to get a warrant to surveil a foreigner outside its borders who has information relevant to national security. This is both legal and something we all expect, and we already knew this before Snowden's leaks. To reveal the code names of systems that ingest this data, Snowden also leaked compromised Chinese computer systems. Is that something we should celebrate?
Even Snowden (and probably 99.9% of all people) would disagree with your position. His statements show he thought he was revealing something other than what his documents actually said.
Apparently not for this situation. Because in this case, no warrants are required, and you don't care about that.
So the point stands. For a situation like this, there are people who care about getting warrants. And for this situation, you don't care that it does not require a warrant.
You can feel free to not care about warrants for this situation. But a lot of people do. So thats why they care.
> This is both legal
once again, the fact that it is legal is exactly the problem, and why exposing it with leaks was the only solution, if you care about the fact that no warrants were required.
Well, you don't for this specific circumstance.
So then you concede that for this specific circumstance, you do not care about getting a warrant.
You can have this opinion, but for people who care about getting a warrant, for this situation, those people would be glad that this stuff was revealed.