Irish public rather blasé about PRISM?

Permabear

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Cody Pomeray

Permabear wrote: »

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To be clear, obviously nobody believes the Garda intelligence budget resembles the budget of an intelligence service mainly characterised by extensive resources and national paranoia. That is not particularly relevant.

However, even if they're not quite as well funded, the surveillance provisions in this jurisdiction could still do a heck of a lot of interference in a small country like ours - as they did prior to the 1993 Act regarding the tapping of journalists' telephones.

The Interception Act in Ireland has a British equivalent in RIPA. There has scarcely been a miog out of anyone since either piece of legislation came into effect. In the UK, the Home Office even issue guidelines on security surveillance, which goes almost totally un-remarked. There is a similar set-up in most European countries, if not all of them. Arguably, it was only CALEA in the US which caused an ongoing debate, most notably from outraged European Law Journals (and probably The Guardian)

Yet the underlying principles in all of these seem indentical to PRISM, if not actually suffering from less independent oversight in some jurisdictions (Ireland, the UK, in particular).

So yes, this story is sensationalism. We do need a debate about privacy, but I have a feeling we're all going to be too busy being outraged by this relatively minor addition to the surveillance landscape to start re-examining our interactions with the State in a more comprehensive way. Until we have that latter conversation, outrages will keep outraging and nothing will keep happening.

Permabear

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KyussBishop

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

The point of the analogies is simply to illustrate the extent to which great powers are already available to law enforcement agencies both here in Ireland and in the USA, and to place PRISM in its proper context.

You're ignoring my entire point multiple posts in a row now, to repeat the same thing again: you are not putting it 'in its proper context', you are making false analogies, which (by comparing abuses limited to an individual level, to abuses on a national/international level affecting everyone at once) is wrong by at least 8 orders of magnitude.

It's turning into an exercise in whataboutery now, where people complaining about massive abuses in the US, are 'unconvincing' because they don't complain about similar abuses elsewhere.

When there is outrage at an abuse like this, you don't have to simultaneously express outrage at any and every other similar thing going on in the world, in order to have a valid point; that is not a double standard (since the much more obvious explanation, is that people aren't sufficiently aware of the other abuses), and even if it were, that does nothing to invalidate the arguments against the abuse (which stand on their own merit regardless).

That there are absues going on elsewhere (even here), is not a reason to be any less outraged at this, and it does nothing to reduce the validity of the outrage.

Jonny7

Most rational people know this program is for security. Both prevention and prosecution.

The problem is, most people don't particularly like being spied on in that process, they don't like being lied to, and they don't fully trust the government and it's future incarnations.

It's only a harmful program in the wrong hands, but then again, so are any faucets of the state.

I think Obama should either drop it entirely, or hold a meeting with the heads of the privacy groups most concerned and hammer out some agreement on the nature and transparency of such a surveillance mechanism.

Cody Pomeray

Permabear wrote: »

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Yeah, sure, there is definitely an issue there, although it seems to me that any jurisdiction is perfectly entitled (and often ought to be capable of) intercepting internet traffic as it enters and exits its own 'e-borders'.

So, although I welcome PRISM in principle, I would prefer to see an international system of overview and monitoring which would operate similarly to the IAEA and report to the United Nations. I don't think that's contentious at all.

KyussBishop wrote: »

You're ignoring my entire point multiple posts in a row now, to repeat the same thing again: you are not putting it 'in its proper context', you are making false analogies, which (by comparing abuses limited to an individual level, to abuses on a national/international level affecting everyone at once..

Then you're misunderstanding it.

Targeting, in the sense of sourcing data from individuals web histories and so on does only affect an individual at once, and is the subject of a court order issued by a Federal Judge.

You seem to believe there is, or ought to be, a right to privacy which is, or can be, an absolute right. You don't appear to object to the principle of search warrants and warrants that deprive criminal suspects of their actual liberty, yet you vehemently protest the authorities' right to know a suspect's Farmville activities and skype history... information that is eligible to be discovered in a search warrant anyway!

When there is outrage at an abuse like this, you don't have to simultaneously express outrage at any and every other similar thing going on in the world

No, again this is a misunderstanding.

I keep having to repeatedly return to the point that my placing PRISM in its proper context and arguing that there is an inconsistency is not, in itself, a justification for PRISM.

All I am doing by placing PRISM in its context against other police powers is suggesting 1. that there is nothing particularly new about telecommunications interceptions OR the ability to access an individual's browsing history (just ask many of the suspects who were convicted of child pornography operations) and 2. suggesting an inconsistency among the recreationally outraged which, I think, undermines their credibility on this matter.

KyussBishop

You're misrepresenting PRISM again. The program is not "get a warrant and then tap a persons Internet connection", it is "indiscriminately intercept and store traffic from everybody going back multiple years, and have a court automatically grant 99% of warrant requests, and keep the entire program secret so government can block all opposing court action" (among much much more).

I think you fully knew you weren't representing it accurately as well (every stretched/fallacious analogy so far, seems to be aimed at the same purpose as well), so I'm going to leave it at that.

Scofflaw

Cody Pomeray wrote:

Targeting, in the sense of sourcing data from individuals web histories and so on does only affect an individual at once, and is the subject of a court order issued by a Federal Judge.

No, this is again incorrect. FISA requests are not restricted to individuals, and do not "only affect one individual at once". What has been said by the companies affected is that they have not (yet) been asked to hand over all the data relating to a particular country at once. There is no requirement at all for the process to be limited to an individual:

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.

By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.

While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Cody Pomeray

KyussBishop wrote: »

You're misrepresenting PRISM again. The program is not "get a warrant and then tap a persons Internet connection", it is "indiscriminately intercept and store traffic from everybody going back multiple years

That part of PRISM I was referring to is analogous to search warrant (i.e. the collection of data from private corporations' servers).

That part of PRISM that you are now referring to is actually, in essence, a cleaned up version of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which has been a matter of public record for some years, and is now subject to FISC oversight.

Again - wheres the consistency?

Where do you stand on Operation Amethyst?

hatrickpatrick

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

You seem to believe there is, or ought to be, a right to privacy which is, or can be, an absolute right. You don't appear to object to the principle of search warrants and warrants that deprive criminal suspects of their actual liberty, yet you vehemently protest the authorities' right to know a suspect's Farmville activities and skype history... information that is eligible to be discovered in a search warrant anyway!

I'm not sure if you fully understand the implications of PRISM and Room 641A (google it if you haven't heard of it). It is implied that the NSA now indiscriminately intercepts ALL internet traffic which goes through the US. They may need a court order to actually peruse it, but they would appear to be collecting all of it, with or without a warrant, and that's something I have a serious problem with. To use your search warrant analogy, imagine if the cops could come in to everyone's house and set up live video streams, but just not look at them without a warrant? Would you be ok with that? I most certainly wouldn't be. Imagine if photos of the inside of EVERYONE'S house were on file in a gigantic data centre, indiscriminately? Sure, you can say "they need a court approved warrant to actually browse them", but this would be the same court (FISA) which approved the indiscriminate harvesting of the data in the first place, so forgive me if I have absolutely no trust in them whatsoever.

Scofflaw

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

I'm not sure if you fully understand the implications of PRISM and Room 641A (google it if you haven't heard of it). It is implied that the NSA now indiscriminately intercepts ALL internet traffic which goes through the US. They may need a court order to actually peruse it, but they would appear to be collecting all of it, with or without a warrant, and that's something I have a serious problem with. To use your search warrant analogy, imagine if the cops could come in to everyone's house and set up live video streams, but just not look at them without a warrant? Would you be ok with that? I most certainly wouldn't be. Imagine if photos of the inside of EVERYONE'S house were on file in a gigantic data centre, indiscriminately? Sure, you can say "they need a court approved warrant to actually browse them", but this would be the same court (FISA) which approved the indiscriminate harvesting of the data in the first place, so forgive me if I have absolutely no trust in them whatsoever.

The FISA court, mind you, operates somewhat in the dark, according to previous NSA whistleblowers:

Q: Does Congress provide effective oversight for these programs?

Radack: Congress has been a rubber stamp, basically, and the judicial branch has been basically shut down from hearing these lawsuits because every time they do they are told that the people who are challenging these programs either have no standing or (are covered by) the state secrets privilege, and the government says that they can't go forward. So the idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth.

Binney: But the way it's set up now, it's a joke. I mean, it can't work the way it is because they have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing. And as long as the agencies tell them, they will know. If they don't tell them, they don't know. And that's what's been going on here.

And the only way they really could correct that is to create billets on these committees and integrate people in these agencies so they can go around every day and watch what is happening and then feed back the truth as to what's going on, instead of the story that they get from the NSA or other agencies. ...

Even take the FISA court, for example. The judges signed that order. I mean, I am sure they (the FBI) swore on an affidavit to the judge, "These are the reasons why," but the judge has no foundation to challenge anything that they present to him. What information does the judge have to make a decision against them? I mean, he has absolutely nothing. So that's really not an oversight.

Radack: The proof is in the pudding. Last year alone, in 2012, they approved 1,856 applications and they denied none. And that is typical from everything that has happened in previous years. ... I know the government has been asserting that all of this is kosher and legitimate because the FISA court signed off on it. The FISA court is a secret court — operates in secret. There is only one side and has rarely disapproved anything.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/

And, again, none of these checks and balances mean anything to us. We are legitimate targets of the system because we're foreigners.

cordially,
Scofflaw

jmcc

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

So, although I welcome PRISM in principle, I would prefer to see an international system of overview and monitoring which would operate similarly to the IAEA and report to the United Nations. I don't think that's contentious at all.

Forgive me for laughing at your absolute cluelessness but do you have any idea about intelligence and communications? Do you even realise that some of those in the UN are the (undeclared) enemy? To quote from one of the greatest hacker movies ever: "There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information! "

Regards...jmcc

KyussBishop

Here is a good article from Glenn Greenwald again, on the FISA issue, which clears stuff up quite well:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/19/fisa-court-oversight-process-secrecy

KyussBishop

Another good article here, which tackles a range of things:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/06/techies-efforts-to-own-snowdennsa-surveillance-narrative-fail.html

An interesting point raised part-way through, is that some companies can legally provide the US with data from offshore locations, that would be illegal to do domestically.

Considering the ease with which companies can operate internationally, what is to stop just about any company from transferring data for 'backup' at a location with lax laws regarding surveillance and data protection, and then sharing that with whomever they like, without repercussions? (including doing that, to aid the US government in sidestepping legal restrictions)

I'm sure there are at least some laws in place against this kind of stuff, but is interesting to think about given the complex legal issues that multinationals, located across many different legal jurisdictions, can raise.

Some U.S. telecommunications companies willingly provide intelligence agencies with access to facilities and data offshore that would require a judge’s order if it were done in the U.S., one of the four people said.

In these cases, no oversight is necessary under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and companies are providing the information voluntarily.

The extensive cooperation between commercial companies and intelligence agencies is legal and reaches deeply into many aspects of everyday life, though little of it is scrutinized by more than a small number of lawyers, company leaders and spies. Company executives are motivated by a desire to help the national defense as well as to help their own companies, said the people, who are familiar with the agreements.

Most of the arrangements are so sensitive that only a handful of people in a company know of them, and they are sometimes brokered directly between chief executive officers and the heads of the U.S.’s major spy agencies, the people familiar with those programs said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

Pretty enormously big deal really...haven't been really keeping track of all this.

Cody Pomeray

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

I'm not sure if you fully understand the implications of PRISM and Room 641A (google it if you haven't heard of it). It is implied that the NSA now indiscriminately intercepts ALL internet traffic which goes through the US. They may need a court order to actually peruse it, but they would appear to be collecting all of it, with or without a warrant, and that's something I have a serious problem with. To use your search warrant analogy, imagine if the cops could come in to everyone's house and set up live video streams, but just not look at them without a warrant? Would you be ok with that?

The critical aspect is that the general trawling - the internet traffic that is generally intercepted (this does not include rifling through an individual's gmail account, for example) has been going on for years and is nothing new. Earlier, I linked to a public document explaining it in detail, that document was publicly available since 2006 and has largely been ignored in the interim.
All that's changed under PRISM is that it has become subject to judicial review on an annual basis, similar to our own legislation in respect of communications interceptions in this jurisdiction. So I don't understand what the sudden, or new outrage is in terms of that side of PRISM.

The contention surround that aspect of PRISM that relates to applications to examine an individual's online activity is even more perplexing.

When a district court judge agrees to a warrant to search an individual's property, this warrant extends, among other things, to the examination of a suspect's harddrive and his or her web history, if necessary. The Gardaí can also gain access to an inividual's Facebook and Gmail accounts - this is happening in the case of that Lithuanian lady who was killed alongside her daughter in Killorglin over the weekend. Police interception of facebook accounts has been used in the United Kingdom in respect of suspects of crime - notably, in the detection of child pronography rings.

So I really don't see the stretch in moral permissibility of the NSA applying to a FISA court for permission to examine things that are examinable in the course of a normal search warrant or in the normal course of police investigations on this side of the world. It's just not that extraordinary as is bing made out - this story is sensationalism.

KyussBishop

Your entire set of assertions about the limitations of the program is wrong. Read this Glenn Greenwald article (he's the guy who Snowden leaked to, and who wrote the whole story), on FISA and why your presentation of the limitations is completely wrong:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/19/fisa-court-oversight-process-secrecy

hatrickpatrick

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

The critical aspect is that the general trawling - the internet traffic that is generally intercepted (this does not include rifling through an individual's gmail account, for example) has been going on for years and is nothing new. Earlier, I linked to a public document explaining it in detail, that document was publicly available since 2006 and has largely been ignored in the interim.
All that's changed under PRISM is that it has become subject to judicial review on an annual basis, similar to our own legislation in respect of communications interceptions in this jurisdiction. So I don't understand what the sudden, or new outrage is in terms of that side of PRISM.

The contention surround that aspect of PRISM that relates to applications to examine an individual's online activity is even more perplexing.

When a district court judge agrees to a warrant to search an individual's property, this warrant extends, among other things, to the examination of a suspect's harddrive and his or her web history, if necessary. The Gardaí can also gain access to an inividual's Facebook and Gmail accounts - this is happening in the case of that Lithuanian lady who was killed alongside her daughter in Killorglin over the weekend. Police interception of facebook accounts has been used in the United Kingdom in respect of suspects of crime - notably, in the detection of child pronography rings.

So I really don't see the stretch in moral permissibility of the NSA applying to a FISA court for permission to examine things that are examinable in the course of a normal search warrant or in the normal course of police investigations on this side of the world. It's just not that extraordinary as is bing made out - this story is sensationalism.

Three very legitimate differences:
One: A search warrant is against specific individuals suspected of specific crimes, and one needs "probable cause" in order to get one. Neither of these is true of the NSA's programs.
Two: A search warrant is needed before you can collect this information from someone in a government database, in the NSA's case it's needed to look at specific data, but all the data is being harvested in the first place, apparently, for storage.
Three: The FISA court operates in secret and looks more and more like a toothless rubber stamp with each passing revelation.

In light of these three factors, I'm not sure the NSA's activities are in any way comparable to a police officer getting a warrant to search somebody.

KyussBishop

KyussBishop wrote: »

...
Not only that, but it has been suspected (but totally unconfirmed) that the NSA don't just stop here, but that they may have negotiated taps on some major international fibers as well; it's incredibly easy to setup such a tap for duplicating fiber traffic.
...

Christ...hate to be right about this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa

This almost certainly means Ireland's Internet data has been tapped by the NSA, since it routes through the UK I believe.