NSA watchdog finds 'concerns' with searches of Americans' communications

The whole approach is “concerning.” The agency is still collecting everyone’s communications and then it’s supposed to be enforcing rules about queries run after the collection. The statute[1] requires that only foreign persons are “targeted”. Until this basic problem (untargeted initial collection) is fixed the whole program is still illegal.

I get that the idea of being able to search communications for a person of interest after the fact is a powerful investigative tool, but the 4th Amendment and the FISA statute are supposed to limit the communications that the government can intercept in the first place, not just to limit what they do with their bulk collection.

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a

Deaths of chickens 'concerning,' says fox

This article made me curious how independent the NSA inspector general is. According to https://oig.nsa.gov/About-Us/A-Brief-History/, since 2018 they are appointed by the president/confirmed by the senate. Prior to this the NSA director had power over the IG.

There are VPS/VM/cloud selection galore, DNS-over-HTTPS, private Signal Server, ownCloud, Tailscale, IPFS, and the fading Tor network to choose from (or use all of them).

Until these are outlawed, we would be consider good netizen to use them … until they say otherwise.