The FBI proves again it can’t be trusted with Section 702
eff.org
eff.org
Ironically, it seems that a significant chunk of the progress FBI has made in terms of 702 compliance comes from a pretty trivial "paper reform": changing the default in their search portal to have 702 be defaulted to "off".
> In June 2021, the FBI changed the default settings in the systems where it stores unminimized Section 702 information so that FBI personnel with access to unminimized FISA Section 702 information need to affirmatively “opt-in” to querying such information. This system change was designed to address the large number of inadvertent queries of unminimized Section 702 information DOJ had identified in its reviews, in which FBI personnel did not realize their queries would run against such collection. Historically, users were automatically opted-in to querying unminimized Section 702 information in these databases if they had been authorized to access unminimized Section 702 information.
https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2023/03/03/rece...
Josh Geltzer (a deputy DHS advisor) said on Lawfare that this probably alone dramatically reduces the number of noncompliant FBI 702 searches:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-lawfare-podcast-jos...
Section 702 looks to be expiring at the end of this year, although the Biden admin has expressed intention to renew it[1][2].
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/section-702s-unconstit...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164724089/in-fight-over-key-...
It will be renewed.
"You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you"
- Chuck Schumer
Yet time and time again we see these orgs are full of corrupt, evil people.
> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.[1]
Definitely. I think this very well explains how we got to this position.
[1]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
They probably think that they do love their country more than their power, while believing they need the power to protect their country. This may be a sort of 'moral corruption', though not the conventional sort. It doesn't seem 'evil' to me.
I've known a few people involved in intelligence, and they absolutely believe they were serving and loving their country. It reminds me a bit of being an infrastructure person where when you mess up, everybody knows, but when you're doing your job well, nobody knows you exist. They see a constant and non-stop stream of threats that outsiders don't see, and when a threat is stopped nobody knows about it. I would bet it's not too hard to justify the intrusive capabilities and any "mistakes" made with them when you have that visibility into the successes. Humans are wonderful at justifying what they want to believe is true, and intel is no exception.
The individual intel person is not the problem here. It's a systemic problem enabled by legislation that needs to be addressed at the legislative level.
CIA director admitted to interferring in elections. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/374372-ex-...
Have you ever seen how the bottom-level of people in a huge bureaucratic organization behave? They're not evil, they're just being human. Unless you're prepared to say that at least 65% to 95% of humans are evil[1].
I'm not sure what kind of freedom you advocate for Ben, it certainly doesn't seem to jive with the notion of We the People.
So is the large majority of the population.
- C.S. Lewis
> It’s only habit, you know. I’m not mad anymore, really.
> It wasn’t as though she wanted her mother’s keys, nor her mother’s life that went with them. She scarcely knew what she wanted. She knew what she feared—to be locked up in some dark, narrow place by people who loved her. An enemy might drop his guard, weary of his task, turn his back; love would never falter. Her fingers rubbed restlessly on the stone.
-- Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
Unchallenged idealism is the root of many evils. If you are convinced of your own righteousness, its very easy to “ends justify the means” almost anything. Its the danger of even a well-motivated person ending up with a cultivation or otherwise in an ideological echo chamber.
Is it theoretically possible to stop terrorism/catch and guys to the same extent without breaking the constitution? I think so, but it would probably require a lot more boots on the ground, and a lot of creativity and smart thinking from individuals to be able to get as good outcomes as you’d get from just looking at data when you aren’t supposed to.
Any system of governance that depends on an unbroken chain of good people is bound to fail, and fail much sooner rather than later. The only sustainable safeguard against it is to make sure that said system of governance is limited in what it can do.
> because the framers knew that every organization eventually becomes run (at one point or all subsequent points) by corrupt, evil people.
That doesn't logically follow, given that the state governments can exercise more than just enumerated powers. And at the moment, quite a few of them are really, really fucking evil, with a few more being highly corrupt.
It makes a lot more sense when you view that separation of power as a compromise made to deal with the problem <one 'evil, corrupt'[1] federal organization in conflict with another 'evil, corrupt'[1] state organization>[2] as opposed to some weird conflict between <'evil, corrupt' federal government versus the people (but the 'evil, corrupt' state governments get a free pass or something..?)>.
The question of 'who gets residual powers' isn't some 250 IQ bit of brilliant statesmanship and foresight, it's a just a decision that quite honestly, has gone either way in plenty of different countries, and none of them are in any quantifiable way worse off for it.
[1] Your words, not mine. I think it's a pretty childish moniker devoid of all nuance, but when in Rome...
[2] Which is actually the lens through which the founders viewed things. [3]
[3] And they have been proven so, so wrong by history. As it turns out, in a high-speed communication society, party unity tends to override these kind of extra-organizational struggles. It's why the party of states rights complaints incessantly about federal tyranny, but only when it doesn't control the presidency.
Because it's happy with that state of affairs, and you keep voting them in.
> There is recourse at the state level.
No, there isn't. Not at the state level, nor at a more local level. We're at a point where even municipalities aren't able to rein in their police departments!
All it will take is an embarrassing data breach like Bork's video rental records and they'll pass legislation to cover their asses.
The thing with being shameless is that scandal rolls off you like water off a duck's back.
I do not keep voting these people in.
> municipalities aren't able to rein in their police departments
Where are you seeing this? Seems like there's been fairly significant changes and individual officers are being held accountable. I'm genuinely curious if you have examples.
I believe you can more easily push change at the local level. Our federal government is a monstrous, unstoppable force.
This is false.
America was reconceived as a country where the federal government had enumerated powers because it started as one where the federal government had no powers and could only act by ad hoc unanimity of the constituent states, and that failed hard, and the particular idea of, and particular set of, enumerated powers chosen was a compromise among the Framers who were called to fix the failing system, and whose preferences ranged from a much more powerful central government (the Hamilton and, less extremely, Pinkney plans) to a vastly less powerful one (the New Jersey plan), and did not represent a shared common vision, contrary to the later-constructed mythology.
Taking this mythological common vision, and then constructiong a rationalization for it, and then presenting it as the original plan of government for America falsely projects into a hotly debated contentious compromise created to deal with particular exigencies arising under the earlier plan into a kind of perfect divine revelation of government, which it very much was not and was not viewed as by participants in the process.
Though, among those regarded as Founding Fathers, that might be most particularly the view of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: “On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.” (Letter to James Madison, Paris, Sep. 6, 1789)
No, that was Thomas Jefferson saying that.
I’m saying asking “what would the founders think?” is asking an irrelevant question, as well as an unanswerable one.
It was drafted to be binding with 9 out of the 13 states signing on in direct Defiance of the unanimity required by the previous Constitution. It was somewhat a moot point because all 13 colonies ended up eventually signing,
New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
<https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312605-schumer-t...>
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>
I was curious about the quote: was it in fact legitimate, and when and in what context did it originate. And shared what I found.
Otherwise my comment stands for itself.
But thanks.
The Court concludes that the targeting, minimization, and querying procedures, as written, meet statutory requirements.
In Part V, the Court finds those procedures, as written, to be consistent with Fourth Amendment requirements.
Particular attention is paid to FBI querying practices, which have been of substantial concern in prior reviews under Section 702(j). 1 The Court finds that the agencies' likely implementation of their procedures is consistent with applicable statutory and Fourth Amendment requirements
"At home, however, the favored weapon employed is ignorance rather than fear. Like NSA headquarters itself, the United States is surrounded by barriers -- barriers of ignorance that keep its citizens prisoners of the cold war. The first obstacle is formed by the myths propagated about communism and about its aggressive designs on America. The second, and dependent for its rationale on the first, is the incredible barrier of governmental secrecy that keeps most of the questionable U.S. aggressive activities hidden nor from our "enemies," who are the knowledgeable victims, but from the American people themselves. The final barrier is perhaps the highest and is barbed with the sharpest obstacles of all. It is nothing less than our reluctance as Americans to confront what we are doing to the peoples of the world, ourselves included, by organizations like the National Security Agency." [0]
[0] U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir, Ramparts, Vol. 11, No. 2, August, 1972, pp. 35-50 https://cryptome.org/jya/nsa-elint.htm
The FBI is collecting, aggregating, and indexing massive amounts of U.S. citizen’s communication data without a warrant? And the question at hand is whether they followed proper procedures in accessing that data?
Yes, they searched the database. But I’d ask how you got the data into the database originally without conducting a search?
It’s like if you told me you’d record everything I say just in case it’s a crime, but promise not to listen to it unless you think I committed a crime. Or, if once a day, you came into my home and inventoried everything promising only to make use of that dataset if you have reason to believe it’s relevant to a crime. And then the topic at hand was whether you incorrectly accessed that dataset?
It feels like we’ve slid right to the bottom of a slippery slope argument about privacy in the 90s. And one of the senators we were worried about back then [1] is now president, and is probably going to keep the program running. How did we get here?
9-11
Between that and 'think of the children' we've given authoritarians all the tools they need to destroy us.
1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Four_Horsemen_of_...>
Fear, an otherwise slothful and infantilized electorate, concentrated interests, and diffuse costs.
Even domestically, there was a tradition of gathering large databases to be queried when the need arose.
Read “Main Justice” by James Mcgee. Published in 1997, it describes anti-terrorism techniques that are pretty familiar.
This isn’t correct AFAICT. This is the justification they give.
This was one of the arguments put forward in 2017 after the Supreme Court ruling on the presidential surveillance program. A huge amount of international telecommunications traffic flows through the systems they’re trying to harvest data from and they have a hard time differentiating foreign communications from domestic communications. So they slurp it all up.
But they also intentionally slurp up (or at least during the PSP did slurp up) “metadata” of U.S. citizens.
And they don’t seem to have a problem querying these databases for U.S. citizen’s communications data from “the database” if they feel it’s relevant to crime. Something that they could just say is off limits and taints all downstream evidence.
There are a lot of legal and mental gymnastics at play with these programs. But it does seem like the end goal is to get access to domestic communications content.
Back in the dark ages, I did a small amount of consulting work for the feds (not the FBI, but a similar agency). Total disregard for rules of evidence, or for legal processes. Shocking arrogance, including flashing badges at women in bars, to - I suppose - impress them.
I never sought to work with them again...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/in-a-first-...
> Jail time. Violating the law should result in criminal prosecution.
Addressing the failures of one corrupt institution by having them reviewed by...another one? The DoJ's track record is even more hilarious than the FBI's.
Nobody's ever been wrongfully convicted, and those that might have been were immediately released and made whole once exonerating DNA evidence surfaced. Especially if the convicted has run out of appeals-- the DoJ is all about adherence to rules of evidence and legal process. /s
We have seen overwhelming evidence in the US for years that our police forces are not worthy of broad trust, and that they need aggressive oversight and much clearer and surer accountability.
This is just one more example.
Haha! If only that were true, it took the riots during COVID (often regarded as BLM but was at it's core were really about rampant Police abused and corruption as seen erupt in France) and an immense amount of backlash on Gov. Poli-- he seriously risked not being re-elected--and having it's major cities (Denver, Boulder) be lit on fire like lots of the US before that happened [0].
As a person who wished that would have been retroactively applied to my own encounter with police misconduct, I can assure you it is far from simple and took a lot of effort that was paid in blood; but so far it is the only State in the US that has removed protected immunity and made police personally liable for any crimes/injries they commit while on duty. This is the only deterrent that works, I would go so far as to say that if they refuse to terminate them (as it's common to just remove them from their precinct to another) that after so many complaints their pension should be reduced for every infraction.
My experience is that Police and Sheriff's office are still as arrogant as ever but are notably more tame towards civilians than they were before COVID in my interactions with them since, they are not only being constantly recorded which can and will be used against them in court but they were humbled by being restrained and forced to utilize deescalation and communication after a long history of Police abuse being the default mode of operation in what is mainly a predominately White and Hispanic population.
This is a very controversial point to remark here for some reason, but it must be noted as the criminal justice system was not swayed by Black Lives at tall because they comprise a small number of the population (who are disproportional profiled for sure) but rather push back from the abuse that even white women were subject to while being illegally arrested and then repeatedly tased whil ebeing forced and restrained to a chair (viewer warning: its pretty grim) and somehow still had to go to the Supreme Court for it to be properly judicated (settlement reached for the plaintiff with some token reform that just added another footnote to a long list of police misconduct in CO) because Colorado Law exempted police from obvious wrong doing [1]. And I know from personal experience that at least 2 of those officers present in that footage were still kept on the force.
The US is in major needs of a re-vamp to it's criminal justice system and how police should operate (starting by de-militarizing them) and we in Colorado led the way in that regard but it's still not enough, and most importantly is far from a 'simple fix' given the entrenched relationship between Police and politics as well as the strong might of the Police Lobby/Unions that protect 'their own' at all costs in what is still a rather rural and mainly conservative State.
0: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-colora...
1: https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/boulder-county-sett...
The FBI cannot act. Only it's members can act. And there's no reason to suppose that their malfeasance will stop if it isn't punished.
It is kind of interesting to trouble that a pronoun can bring, isn't it?
"To reward" is similar.
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
They are scared shitless that their currency will lose value and they lose favor on the world stage.
It would be easy to keep this position by just being a good country that respects the human lives of its citizens. But for some, with lacking morality, that's a bridge too far.
E2EE will never be totally broken. They'll attack it at weak points where data is unencrypted. You can't beat math, boys!
No, but they can introduce backdoors to cryptographic algorithms that are difficult to detect.[1]
[1]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-the...
[citation needed]
The FBI is principally a national security and counterintelligence agency and secondarily a law enforcement agency.
702 is expressly for the counterintelligence and national security function, limited to foreign targets (non-US persons believed to be outside of the US), and if used properly will only incidentally and occasionally result in information related to persons practically able to be subjected to US law enforcement jurisdiction, whether or not they might in theory be committing US crimes.
Lots of indictments or other criminal process tied to 702 surveillance would actually be a sign of something unusual happening (of which “abuse of 702 for purposes at odds with its express terms” would be high on the list.)
It's about Intelligence, not Evidence. Intelligence (like anonymous tips) is what you use to find the Evidence, which is what you reference in the affidavit. Much Intelligence is speculative and/or bullshit and wastes everybody's time. Publishing Intelligence tips off associates of the adversary and betrays what you know and what your capabilities are, and possibly who you learned it from.
One would assume that a useless programs should be discontinued, simply because it’s not free to continue them.
https://www.propublica.org/article/whats-the-evidence-mass-s...
> In 2013, the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies analyzed terrorism cases from 2001 on, and determined that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records “was not essential to preventing attacks.”
> The NSA has publicly discussed four cases, and just one in which surveillance made a significant difference. That case involved a San Diego taxi driver named Basaaly Moalin, who sent $8,500 to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab. But even the details of that case are murky. From the Washington Post:
> In 2009, an FBI field intelligence group assessed that Moalin’s support for al-Shabab was not ideological. Rather, according to an FBI document provided to his defense team, Moalin probably sent money to an al-Shabab leader out of “tribal affiliation” and to “promote his own status” with tribal elders.
It's been long enough that if this shit actually worked, there'd be plenty of success stories that could be disclosed without harming confidential interests. They'd be trumpeting them to the heavens to attempt to justify reauthorization. Instead, we get taxi driver man and a whole lot of "just trust us".
I do acknowledge that ProPublica article is dated, but AFAIK no counterexamples have emerged since - which is kind of the whole problem.
The government should not give up powerful intelligence tactics, techniques, and procedures solely because the general public has a want to know. We have elected representatives with clearances for those purposes.
That aside, relying on "well, it's classified" is an extra lame excuse in a period of broad bipartisan agreement around the problem of rampant overclassification: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/17/1149426416/the-u-s-has-an-ove...
e: deleted unnecessary swipe
[0] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-udall...
[1] inb4 "but unclassified programs" - he's talking about unclassified programs on the basis of classified info, as is made doubly clear by the request to share further examples with the SIC
I’m sure it feels good to you to feel close to power, but those feelings are because you feel powerful by association. It does not mean what you are doing is right or just.
I was raised in this country post-9/11 and was taught to fear the FBI. I grew up strongly critical of our surveillance state and the overreach of power that was reported upon. The FBI hosting a deeply critical voice inside to help provide insight to their processes seems like a pretty just thing to me.
If you have better ideas, then I invite you to help change the institution. Come “be in on the secret” (a security clearance to guard national intelligence?) and do the right thing.
I’m quite familiar with security clearances from close contacts. It’s also inevitable to run into controlled information in the types of work people like me do.
The real secret is that there is no secret worth keeping. Secrets are a way to cover for incompetence - it’s the same mindset as “security by obscurity.” Even the most secret information regarding nuclear weapons has mostly been leaked. The main thing that prevents nuclear proliferation isn’t secrets; it’s international pressure plus tight controls and monitoring of materials.
The only way to fix the FBI is to dissolve the institution- and even that would be an extraordinary challenge because the criminal networks the agency possesses would still operate, just as the networks built by secret police in other countries persisted post dissolution.
Somehow, that doesn't sit well with me.