House Votes to Renew Surveillance Law, Rejecting New Privacy Limits

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Do...

The NSA play(ed) a very large role in modern military deployments overseas, especially in the middle east and africa with their targeting systems.

The best counterpoint is the bill Obama passed before leaving office, expanding the data sharing between agencies and the more general significant expansion of scope of the NSAs activities in recent years to involve plenty of domestic and civilian issues (beyond politics) including supporting the efforts on the War on Drugs, DHS, and FBI activities.

I can understand that you don't like ambiguity in my reply, that is fully understandable, but it is not very reasonable to discard it wholesale. I am happy to elaborate.

First, "preliminary, basic information on the impact of this program" is your interpretation, and is a generalization. There are very specific and valid questions Wyden has. Not only that, but he might know the answers to some, as you can see that some in the linked source are "The public doesn't know" whereas others are "No one knows" the answer. For the record, I do agree that the public (beyond cleared reps) should have a whole lot more information to review on these matters for the sake of transparency, but that is not relevant to this current claim of cleared representatives allegedly not getting information.

Now the precise issues at hand:

> Who can be targeted by 702 spying?

> A: The public doesn’t know. If you listen to intelligence agency leaders, you would think only foreign terrorists could be targeted for spying under Section 702. But when Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and I asked Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats what broad categories of people could be targeted by this program, he refused to answer the question publicly.

The Snowden leaks additionally showed that beyond counter-terrorism, 702 is used for counter-proliferation, counter-intelligence and tracing cyber attacks as well. Additionally, due to the nature of how every intel agency in every country in the world operates, one can reasonably assume it is probably also used to assess the intentions of foreign government/military leaders, as that is a very basic reason for nation-state level spying.

His use of "the public" implies there is a classified answer given in closed session, in the same manner I described in my previous comment. I agree with him, there is probably little reason to keep this list classified. I am also personally curious if it has changed since the Snowden leaks (Worth noting, if it didn't, the leaks did not de-classify this list so answer would still be "classified" thus the uncertainty).

> How many emails and other communications from Americans are collected by the government under Section 702?

> A: No one knows, because the government refuses to count.

I think it would be great to have the answer to this one as well, but I cannot think of any non-invasive manner this could be achieved technically.

I will use X-Keyscore an example here. According to the Snowden leaks, X-Keyscore is a unified search interface for a 5 day rolling content buffer (30 days for metadata) containing traffic from different points of accesses around the world (Whether it be a dish pointed at a satellite used as a data link used for embassy comms, "CNE"/hacked router in a middle eastern ISP, a tapped cable connecting traffic between countries, or otherwise). Lots of traffic is going to be "collected" and is subsequently purged. Based on my understanding of how traditional firewalls work, I don't see how any sort of deep packet inspection could be used on the subnets/IPs "selected" for collection without maintaining a large internal buffer or choking on all the intake, so that is likely why there is no decision logic at this point and thus there will be incidental collection of US Person Information if you are communicating via e-mail with someone in a target country, for example.

The fix for this now is prohibition of queries on US Person selectors. This is not hard to impose for US IP addresses and US phone numbers. However, e-mails are murkier, as the originator's location is not going to be clear based on the e-mail address alone. In order to try to identify a communicant, they would need to read the message content in order to try making a determination on this.

I am aware that, again according to the Snowden leaks, this can happen when pursuing legit targets, requiring US identities to be "masked" when found and I believe all such incidents are reported. However, I am personally far less comfortable with the idea of that determination being done at scale in order to get a proper count of US Person communications which have been collected on. Right now, the majority of incidentally collected communications will be discarded. If the IC was required to produce this count though, it means each communication would actually need to be analyzed to make the USPI determination, thereby ensuring US Person communications would actually be read. Again, to me, this seems far more invasive.

I don't see a better way to solve this issue. I am looking forward to your feedback on this aspect, because perhaps there is a non-invasive way to determine which comms are US/non-US that I have not thought about.

Based on the above logic, I think it would be better for him to push the IC to publicly release counts of incidentally collected US Person communications which have actually been viewed, because (again to my understanding - based on Snowden leaks), the USP determination has to be made anyway when analyzing traffic as they wade through to write their reports and such. So such counts must informally exist in some manner due to the need to make this foregin-ness determination, there should be no technical or personnel issues in producing an answer to this question, nor should there be classification issues due to the fact that it is just a number.

> How many times does the government search for Americans’ communications without warrants?

> A: No one knows, because only some government agencies count. The National Security Agency and the CIA both conduct warrantless backdoor searches of communications collected under Section 702. There are thousands of such searches for the content of communications and tens of thousands for communications records. But the FBI searches Americans’ information so frequently, it does not bother to count.

Not keeping a count is a logical answer for the question, and is different from a refusal to answer.

That said, at least in my view, the count is not relevant. It does not make sense for a domestic law enforcement agency such as the FBI to have any sort of access to American data without a warrant, full-stop. Even if the specific details of their access to 702 data made it technically in compliance with the law, the optics of the blurred foreign/domestic separation are very problematic.

> Can the government use Section 702 to collect communications it knows are entirely domestic?

> A: The public doesn’t know the answer to this fundamental question. When I asked the DNI at a hearing, he first replied no, which was reassuring. Later, he said he was answering a different question. Then he said it was classified.

I'm glad he gave Wyden a classified answer to this, and I would very much be interested in that answer being declassified. However, again, the point in question was keeping cleared representatives in the dark (The non-cleared public being kept in the dark is a very different discussion, one which I assume we would probably both be more agreeable).

One more thing to address:

> If the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence gets nothing

What do you think they discuss, then, if the allegation is that no information is given to them? As shown with the above "public" versus "no one" phrasing, is it your belief that Wyden was lying about receiving classified answers of which he would like the public to know?

[0]: http://obamaspeeches.com/041-The-PATRIOT-Act-Obama-Speech.ht...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla...

Also, it's quite conceivable that a government considers surveilance "patriotic" or necessary to defend "freedom", but I don't feel the same about "Rapid DNA".

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2018/roll014.xml

From my comment down thread

>Unfortunately Obama almost quadrupled funding to these agencies[1]. Throughout his administration he allowed the Alphabet boys to try and steal more american's data without warrants (See FBI v Apple and the FBI attempting to get access to your browser history with out warrants)[2][3]. Obama even EXPANDED surveillance on his way out of office[4]. Obama also said he was pro whistle blowers we all know what happened to Chelsea.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/surveillance-in-the-obama-era-1... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/29/apple-vs-fbi-all-you-need-to... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-w... [4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveill...

If you don't like blacks, browns and gays but DO like privacy were do you go? Exactly. There is no alternative to the Republicans.

If the US had 15 parties in Congress the game would be a LOT more interesting. Half of America has no choice to support Trump because the alternative is literally Satan.

So here we are: the endless stalemate.

Democrats had plenty of opportunity to strengthen privacy laws during the previous administration, but they didn't. Instead they strengthened the surveillance powers of the government. Now that a Republican controls the executive branch and all of these agencies, they want those powers weakened.

The US is experiencing the terrible pitfalls of a two-party system, just as the founding fathers warned. Instead of making progress, the parties mostly just fight each other, at our expense.

But for the bigger issue, yes it is a thing that needs to be controlled.

This is a big part of the difference between traffic cameras and unchecked surveillance of individuals.

Yes, a pile of articles, stating without proof, the same thing, all coming out at the same time .. almost as if they were coordinated. When specific facts of said articles are proven to be incorrect, small retractions that never make the news cycle are issued.

  > the only reason his "associates" were caught up in 
  > surveillance reports is because they called criminals 
  > who were already under surveillance. It's like if the 
  > FBI is wire-tapping Al Capone, and you called Al Capone. 
  > Sure, you'd get listened to, but they aren't tapping YOU.

"For the record, Trump's administration supports full reauthorization. In fact, the White House issued a statement on Wednesday evening — hours before Trump's tweet — restating its call for members of Congress to vote for its continued use."