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Comment by rsanders | Hacker News Reader

What does "cannot" in the quote from Rep. Nadler mean?

  “I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, 
  as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the 
  content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific 
  warrant.”

I hesitate to draw any conclusions from that statement given the administration's secret lingo and willingness to make the "least untruthful" statements they can conveniently make.

Are we to assume that all the concerned agencies and courts have no secret interpretations of the laws to mean otherwise? That they are not technically capable? (I've implemented CALEA in a VoIP network, so I'm quite sure they can.) That there are actual technical barriers implemented within the agencies which prevent its personnel from doing so without specific legal oversight?

Or maybe it's just soothing noise with no specific or verifiable meaning.

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I think "cannot" can easily mean that they are not permitted to according to their internal policies and procedures, even if they might have the technical ability to do so.

"Listen to" is something a human being does, requires a warrant. "Record/capture" is something that a computer does, does not require a warrant. This would be consistent with what parties inside and outside the government have been saying. Until now, no government rep has yet said that calls are not being recorded; they are simply saying that they are not being listened to.

The fact is, being able to get a warrant to listen to a recording that you made two years ago of someone, before they were under suspicion, is a very different thing than being able to get a warrant to begin recording and listening to someone. I think the government would assert that the former is equally permitted under the fourth amendment as the latter, although I would bet that most Americans would disagree.

If "listen to" is something that a person does, does that allow that "speech recognition/transcription" is something a machine can do? If I were servailing en masse, I'd prefer to start with some machine learning filters against all that audio. Is it legally a search if a human didn't do it? What if it's meant to establish "foreignness" percentage? I've noted a lot of "no one's listening to your phone calls," and it seems the sort of "least untruthful" denial a clever government might use.

I would interpret this to mean "does not" rather than "is not technically capable of".

It's a game of morph. "Does not listen" becomes "records but cannot have a person listen" which then becomes "records, listens but cannot take action" which then becomes "records, listens, takes action but cannot tell a judge about it" which becomes "records, listens, does what he wants but prohibets you from taking action"

Let's be clear though: "cannot" for the government has always meant "legally not allowed to" and not "technically not allowed to". The FBI was technically able to wiretap phones even after it was banned, for example, and you've already mentioned CALEA.

It's possible there are technical software restrictions within NSA and not just "analysts are trained to comply with policy". I would like to think those technical backups are in-place, but I don't know if anyone from NSA has confirmed that.

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