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Indiscriminate dragnets are essentially standard tools, possibly the primary tools, of signals intelligence these days. They’re, well… indiscriminate. Since in

Indiscriminate dragnets are essentially standard tools, possibly the primary tools, of signals intelligence these days. They’re, well… indiscriminate. Since intelligence operates in secret, I think it’s fairly disingenuous to consider their use governed by guidelines about who can be spied on. You don’t even know who the person is, until you’ve already spied. All oversight will be conducted in secrecy, and we already know that in the US, the NSA they made a mockery of the concept. We could ban the dragnets entirely, but I can’t see many militaries agreeing to handicap themselves relative to adversaries who will continue to use them. The very best a Norwegian could hope for at a long shot is that Norway won't spy on them, but Norway's allies will and share the intelligence. Also, every other country in the world (and private companies) will be spying on them. I think this may be a lost fight.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
That argument is weak. It's equivalent to saying I should kill some people because my adversaries kill people. That's nonsense because the situation isn't symmetrical. It's not the adversaries who are getting killed.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  I'm not sure I'm following, at least one of us is misunderstanding the other. I'm not making a normative statement. I'm saying that [1] (for example), Russia will not deny itself a tool that China pocesses and [2] when it comes to dragnets, I have very little confidence in mechanisms to separate citizens from foreigners. Even if I'm wrong and it is possible to regulate dragnets in this way, you are then spied on by everyone but your own government (which is better than nothing, but not exactly inspiring).
  - schoen 9y ago
    People making normative statements managed to get governments to agree to ban landmines, torture, and chemical and biological weapons. It seems like there's a whole lot of potential upside in also being willing to entertain normative statements about military tactics.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
I have no problem with using dragnets to identify and disrupt activities that threaten national security. I have a very big problem with the use of dragnets to get convictions in court by circumventing people's rights. I don't see the need banning dragnets as a realistic option. We need is a much stronger interpretation of fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. FWIW a metadata dragnet/haystack can be used to search for parallel construction needles the same way it's used to search for terrorist or insider trading needles, all three are just varying types people working together to get something done in secret. I'm not sure how to make incentives align so that actually works out in practice but it's technically feasible.
- testvox 9y ago
  But governments have shown they cannot be trusted to do this. One of the big arguments on favor of allowing mass surveillance was that it was only to be used for foreign intelligence purposes, which quickly got expanded to domestic terrorism purposes and today data gathered from dragnet programs is accessable and used in the investigation and sometimes even prosecution of normal domestic crimes in both the US and UK.
  - Chriky 9y ago
    > "data gathered from dragnet programs is [...] used in the [...] prosecution of normal domestic crimes in both the US and UK." I don't think this is true - sigint is not admissable in the UK (or US afaik).
    - mtgx 9y ago
      The latest FISA law made FISA spying admissible in court. The FBI (and IRS, and SEC, and DHS, and other agencies) only needs to get a warrant after already seeing the data, at which point I'm not even sure what the purpose of the warrant is. The Fourth Amendment warrant was supposed to stop fishing expeditions.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      In the US, there's the long-standing SOS program:[0] > The unit of the DEA that distributes the information [from NSA] is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred. > "Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD." Which is aka "parallel construction". Also, there's a great history of SOD online at the DEA Museum.[1] 0) http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130... 1) https://www.deamuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/042215-DEAMuseum-LectureSeries-MLS-SOD-transcript.pdf https://www.deamuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/042215-...
fyrstenberg 9y ago
Dragnets is a huge problem for analysts. Traditional analysis is based on a certain amount of "degrees", 1. degree would persons/network directly associated with a target, then usually would never exceed 2. or 3. degree. Now that everything is collected it causes problems with the amount of data which causes quality data to drown in the amount. You basically don't get to pick up anything of worth before it's too late. This again (the perceived lack of finding "terrorists") is used to argue for more budgets and "tools". Some say this is on purpose and I wouldn't disagree. My 2 cents.

fjsolwmv 9y ago

That argument is weak. It's equivalent to saying I should kill some people because my adversaries kill people. That's nonsense because the situation isn't symmetrical. It's not the adversaries who are getting killed.

dalbasal 9y ago
I'm not sure I'm following, at least one of us is misunderstanding the other. I'm not making a normative statement. I'm saying that [1] (for example), Russia will not deny itself a tool that China pocesses and [2] when it comes to dragnets, I have very little confidence in mechanisms to separate citizens from foreigners. Even if I'm wrong and it is possible to regulate dragnets in this way, you are then spied on by everyone but your own government (which is better than nothing, but not exactly inspiring).
- schoen 9y ago
  People making normative statements managed to get governments to agree to ban landmines, torture, and chemical and biological weapons. It seems like there's a whole lot of potential upside in also being willing to entertain normative statements about military tactics.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

I have no problem with using dragnets to identify and disrupt activities that threaten national security. I have a very big problem with the use of dragnets to get convictions in court by circumventing people's rights. I don't see the need banning dragnets as a realistic option. We need is a much stronger interpretation of fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. FWIW a metadata dragnet/haystack can be used to search for parallel construction needles the same way it's used to search for terrorist or insider trading needles, all three are just varying types people working together to get something done in secret. I'm not sure how to make incentives align so that actually works out in practice but it's technically feasible.

testvox 9y ago
But governments have shown they cannot be trusted to do this. One of the big arguments on favor of allowing mass surveillance was that it was only to be used for foreign intelligence purposes, which quickly got expanded to domestic terrorism purposes and today data gathered from dragnet programs is accessable and used in the investigation and sometimes even prosecution of normal domestic crimes in both the US and UK.
- Chriky 9y ago
  > "data gathered from dragnet programs is [...] used in the [...] prosecution of normal domestic crimes in both the US and UK." I don't think this is true - sigint is not admissable in the UK (or US afaik).
  - mtgx 9y ago
    The latest FISA law made FISA spying admissible in court. The FBI (and IRS, and SEC, and DHS, and other agencies) only needs to get a warrant after already seeing the data, at which point I'm not even sure what the purpose of the warrant is. The Fourth Amendment warrant was supposed to stop fishing expeditions.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    In the US, there's the long-standing SOS program:[0] > The unit of the DEA that distributes the information [from NSA] is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred. > "Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD." Which is aka "parallel construction". Also, there's a great history of SOD online at the DEA Museum.[1] 0) http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130... 1) https://www.deamuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/042215-DEAMuseum-LectureSeries-MLS-SOD-transcript.pdf https://www.deamuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/042215-...

fyrstenberg 9y ago

Dragnets is a huge problem for analysts. Traditional analysis is based on a certain amount of "degrees", 1. degree would persons/network directly associated with a target, then usually would never exceed 2. or 3. degree. Now that everything is collected it causes problems with the amount of data which causes quality data to drown in the amount. You basically don't get to pick up anything of worth before it's too late. This again (the perceived lack of finding "terrorists") is used to argue for more budgets and "tools". Some say this is on purpose and I wouldn't disagree. My 2 cents.