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The authority of an agency to track criminal targets is well established by law and accepted by American citizens. That concept is not the issue. Using wide sc
by buildbuildbuild 9y ago
The authority of an agency to track criminal targets is well established by law and accepted by American citizens. That concept is not the issue.
Using wide scale warrant-less data collection with an unspecified secret sauce, however, is questionable in its legality. Is this what voters intend their government to be able to do?
Any time one agency wields immense undocumented powers of surveillance and another agency has a big question mark on a case, humans will be tempted to go the route of parallel construction. That under-table information sharing, to me, is a debate the American people need to be considering.
- ttul 9y agoWe aren’t talking about domestic surveillance here. The supposed privacy tool was foreign-targeted. This is NSA’s legit mission.
- coldacid 9y agoAre you really so innocent as to believe that the NSA was _only_ targeting foreign Bitcoin holders, or that they made effort at least to avoid capturing info on Americans?
- ttul 9y agoPerhaps back in 2013 they were not so careful to avoid collection on Americans. But now they certainly are. Nobody wants to go to jail.
- marssaxman 9y agoWhy would they be afraid of going to jail? None of them have gone to jail so far. You only face consequences for reporting misbehavior, not for engaging in it.
- willstrafach 9y agoThat's the law, no reason to think otherwise without evidence. I assume the story would be very different if there was any indication this was used on US citizens.
- imustbeevil 9y agoNo. We've been through Prism. We know the NSA is doing this. You are not allowed to be this naive anymore.
- willstrafach 9y agoActually no. I read all 300+ documents leaked by Snowden independent of the news coverage in order to determine if the media narrative was true, as that would be absolutely enraging to me and I needed to decide if I would need to be calling and mailing my representatives/senators daily about this. I was not able to find evidence in the leaks to substantiate any claims of improper use on everyday citizens. I like to operate on facts, so if there was a leaked document I somehow missed, you can provide a link and I would be happy to review it.
- ttul 9y agoI concur. The purpose of Snowden’s leaks was to educate the masses that mass surveillance is a thing, and privacy should be taken seriously. He did not suggest the government was breaking the law, just that the law permitted surveillance on a scale that the average person probably wasn’t aware of. As a result, we gained things like GDPR, which will revolutionize privacy worldwide because of its extra-jurisdictional effects. And think about how much more SSL is happening now. Http:// is mostly gone. We have letsencrypt. Google is encrypting all traffic between datacenters. Etc... But no, Snowden did not reveal anything suggesting widespread illegal surveillance of Americans.