3 ms·

If you had shown me this article in the 90s, it wouldn’t have made a lick of sense. The FBI is collecting, aggregating, and indexing massive amounts of U.S. ci

If you had shown me this article in the 90s, it wouldn’t have made a lick of sense. 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? [1] https://www.eff.org/pages/decrypting-puzzle-palace https://www.eff.org/pages/decrypting-puzzle-palace

pixl97 3y ago
>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.
- teddyh 3y ago
  The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse¹ have come. And Hell followed them. 1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse&oldid=1143880960 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Four_Horsemen_of_...>
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nyokodo 3y ago
> How did we get here? Fear, an otherwise slothful and infantilized electorate, concentrated interests, and diffuse costs.
pyuser583 3y ago
The answer is that they are spying on other countries. That usually hasn’t required warrants. 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.
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  They also have friendly foreign countries spy on each other and exchange data
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  > The answer is that they are spying on other countries. That usually hasn’t required warrants. 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.

pixl97 3y ago

>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.

teddyh 3y ago
The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse¹ have come. And Hell followed them. 1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse&oldid=1143880960 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Four_Horsemen_of_...>

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nyokodo 3y ago

> How did we get here? Fear, an otherwise slothful and infantilized electorate, concentrated interests, and diffuse costs.

pyuser583 3y ago

The answer is that they are spying on other countries. That usually hasn’t required warrants. 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.

inemesitaffia 3y ago
They also have friendly foreign countries spy on each other and exchange data
r3trohack3r 3y ago
> The answer is that they are spying on other countries. That usually hasn’t required warrants. 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.