7 ms·

Rep. Nadler now saying CNET story (NSA recording calls) is not true.

64 points by teawithcarl 13y ago

derrida 13y ago
"Not true" makes an unwarranted assumption. Watch the video, he has one story from the NSA in a classified hearing and the opposite story from the FBI in an unclassified hearing. Nadler is pleased with the report the FBI gave (requesting tapping for an individual from a court). There's still the case of what the NSA said at the classified hearing.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 13y ago
  Nadler was at the classified hearing, and confirmed to BuzzFeed that he believes NSA is using specific warrants to capture phone content.
  - sillysaurus 13y ago
    Interestingly, the CNET article said exactly that. "If they're targeting anyone within mainland USA, then that triggers the system to require a warrant." But everybody ignored or didn't read that part of the article.
    - DennisP 13y ago
      If they capture everyone's calls, they're not targeting anyone until someone listens to one.
    - brown9-2 13y ago
      The key word in that sentence being "targeting". A lot of the discussion is on what happens when the NSA targets a non-American overseas and that person calls or communicates with someone in the US. If you can listen to a large amount of an overseas target's communications, it's inevitable that some of what you pick up will be communications with Americans. The questions, and confusion, is what happens and what should happen when that occurs. The problem is that so much of the reporting around this gets things confused that it is hard to understand what everyone is talking about, and a lot of people are walking away with the assumption that analysts in the NSA are regularly listening to US-to-US phone calls or emails for shits and giggles.
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    Well... What he actually is quoted as saying is "...the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant." Listen to, not capture. He says nothing about capturing the data. There have been indications that they capture massive amounts of data, but they believe it's legal to do so, as long as they don't listen to it until they have a warrant.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Sure. But the revelation from the CNet story was Nadler's apparent belief that no warrant was required for them to listen to calls. It's also worth knowing that the USG flatly denies that they're using any authority that allows them to acquire information without calling it "collection" until an analyst accesses it. They used to, but officials now say they no longer rely on that authority; if they have the information, says the USG, they have it, full stop.
      - zb 13y ago
        if they have the information, says the USG, they have it, full stop. Everybody hopes that that's true, but there is a problem with this story. The Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the NSA hadn't "collected" information that it did, in fact, have. When this came to light he, instead of admitting that he lied to Congress and resigning, announced that he was actually using the newspeak definition of "collect" - you know, the one where it has literally no meaning. This is the problem with lying to the public and getting caught. There is no way to tell if anything else you say contains any meaning at all, let alone the truth, even if it happens to be the truth. This goes triple if you happen to have sworn on penalty of perjury that said lies were the truth and still get away with it.
        tptacek 13y ago
        Regardless of the definition of "collect" that Clapper used, he needs to go.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  There appears to be a lot of confusion, even from the experts, on what this exchange between Nadler and Mueller was all about: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...
tzs 13y ago
Is there anyway to view that on mobile without being logged in to Twitter? It briefly shows the tweet, then it looks like it decides that since I'm on iPad I should be on their mobile site and goes to the mobile login page.
- tptacek 13y ago
  The nut of the story, and its entire newsworthy factual content, is that Nadler is pleased to have been informed by the administration that the NSA cannot in fact listen to the contents of phone calls without a specific warrant.
teawithcarl 13y ago
I believe the NSA scandal is horribly wrong. However, this link shows Trevor Timm's latest tweet, which is very important, and supports reporting by Julian Sanchez, where he started to notice the misinterpretation. Accuracy matters. http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...
- eli 13y ago
  Lots of people thought the CNet piece was fishy. I asked Declan about it after I saw his post here yesterday but nobody noticed :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5887443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5887443
downandout 13y ago
I don't think it matters what the government says about this from here on out. They've shown the depth of their ambitions; they want and will get records about every communication we have. They've been caught in multiple lies, and we can expect that we will never hear the whole truth on this issue. They are doing whatever they want to do, legal or not, and we can't stop them. We can all now safely assume that if we have unencrypted electronic communications (phones included), the full contents of those communications will be stored somewhere and made available to government agents should we come under suspicion for anything. Plan accordingly.
- pvnick 13y ago
  I think we can stop them if we stand united in defiance. Look what we accomplished with SOPA/PIPA - they were on the verge of passing and we demolished those bills. Just some efforts off the top of my head: -Restore the Fourth (reddit.com/r/restorethefourth) is a planned nationwide mass demonstration to protest privacy encroachments -Mozilla/Reddit/EFF/etc - http://stopwatching.us http://stopwatching.us is going to be sending hundreds of thousands of emails to representatives on citizens' behalf over the next couple weeks. In fact I'm currently contributing dev time to this one, and we really could use some more developers to do everything we want to do. If anybody wants to help "code for freedom" (I just made that up) please email me at pvnick@gmail.com Don't make the mistake of thinking you're powerless because you're not. We still live in a representative democracy, and most of our leaders do actually care what their constituents think, it just doesn't seem that way sometimes.
  - ihsw 13y ago
    The difference is there wasn't a decade of infrastructure built around SOPA/PIPA (technological, social, political, economic, etc) however now there is -- the Obama Administration's staunch resistance and the mainstream-media's support is evidence of this. Even now the UK Government is seeking to duplicate the NSA's efforts because they see the writing on the wall that things may go south, so even if we act now then it'll effectively be a whack-a-mole game that will last for a long time coming. We can stop them now in the US but we'll have to expand our efforts globally.
mpyne 13y ago
The big question I would think is whether or not the NSA can capture a phone call (without an analyst listening to it) with a warrant or not. On the one hand that's a phone call which has its own specific wiretap requirements. On the other NSA has been capturing things elsewhere that they need a warrant to look at, so the logic would be similar. And given that most phone calls are probably routed over a computer network by now the wiretap law may not apply directly in NSA's view. I said yesterday that it Nadler probably understood "we can capture but not listen to calls" as "we can tap into calls (i.e. eavesdrop)" and so the message the NSA rep delivered is not the one Nadler understood. But that still leaves open the question of whether phone calls can be recorded in NSA's view, or whether it's just the metadata.
DennisP 13y ago
If they can't "listen to" a call without a warrant, can they record the call without listening to it, and get a warrant later?
rsanders 13y ago
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.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  I would interpret this to mean "does not" rather than "is not technically capable of".
  - joe_the_user 13y ago
    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"
- legutierr 13y ago
  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.
btilly 13y ago
OK, I've finally been motivated to go read the law itself. You can find it at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a. There are a lot of interesting things in there. For instance g.1.B allows wiretapping BEFORE they get the FISA rubber stamp. (But the warrant is still required to be sought. Whether this is done in practice is another question, but the warrant is still needed.) However to me the single biggest red flag is g.4 which reads, A certification made under this subsection is not required to identify the specific facilities, places, premises, or property at which an acquisition authorized under subsection (a) will be directed or conducted. Why is this interesting? Well compare with the 4th amendment, with the important bit highlighted by captitalization, The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, AND PARTICULARLY DESCRIBING THE PLACE TO BE SEARCHED, and the person or things to be seized. How can anyone pretend that this law is constitutional???
- brown9-2 13y ago
  Is g.4 specific to an "acquisition" within the United States, or is it discussing authority to do so anywhere in the world?
  - btilly 13y ago
    I do not know the answer to that.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Yes. The FAA "Certification" scheme documented in this part of the law is like an SQL stored procedure. If NSA wants, instead of obtaining individualized authorizations from the FISC to surveil individual foreign targets, the DNI and Attorney General can together sign off on a "Certification" documenting the type of surveillance and the measures taken to ensure that such surveillance doesn't target Americans. The FISC reviews that Certification, and the NSA can reuse its structure multiple times by issuing "Directives".
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I started a blog a while back because I do not expect this long-running story of freedom and privacy to move in a straight line from point A to point B. As this story shows, there'll be a lot of steps forward, then a couple of steps back. It's something that will require chronicling. I won't debate the veracity of Congressman's Nadler's comments either a couple of days ago or today. I'll just assume his first comments were correct and unguarded. (They say the definition of a gaffe is when somebody in Washington DC tells the truth) What interests me is this: who got to him? We'd all like to assume it was some kind of nefarious government source, but my instincts say it was somebody in a leadership position in his own party. We won't know, though, either which statement was correct, and if the first one was true, how he was "adjusted" by some external force. Bet it's a fascinating story. My money says leadership in both parties are really busy cracking the whip over this behind the scenes.
- rtpg 13y ago
  If you actually look at the CSPAN segment upon which the piece is gased, you can see that there is legitimate confusion between the FBI Director and the Congressman during the exchange. That could have been a ruse, or the Congressman could have legitimately misunderstood something previously, and thus tried to clear everything up after it blew up. Not everything is a fucking conspiracy.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    The story I read said that Nadler received one answer one day, and another answer during the closed-door, classified briefing. Didn't know they put those things on CSPAN. And nobody's implying a conspiracy. I specifically said as much. My point was that leadership had a vested interest in keeping the troops marching in line -- much more than with your normal poicy issues. Also that the Nadler thing is a tiny piece of a much larger tapestry. Doesn't matter much one way or the other how this specific story turns out. I was just assuming his first words were accurate for purposes of having a starting point in the discussion.
    - eli 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ganeumann 13y ago
Obama says the congresspeople are all briefed up. They say they aren't. So they brief them up. Then they're confused. The NSA would have been better off not trying to keep the whole program secret, since no one in Washington seems to be able to figure out what's going on even when they're told. The whole thing has gone from shocking to sad to just plain pathetic.

64 points by teawithcarl 13y ago

"Not true" makes an unwarranted assumption. Watch the video, he has one story from the NSA in a classified hearing and the opposite story from the FBI in an unclassified hearing. Nadler is pleased with the report the FBI gave (requesting tapping for an individual from a court). There's still the case of what the NSA said at the classified hearing.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 13y ago
Nadler was at the classified hearing, and confirmed to BuzzFeed that he believes NSA is using specific warrants to capture phone content.
- sillysaurus 13y ago
  Interestingly, the CNET article said exactly that. "If they're targeting anyone within mainland USA, then that triggers the system to require a warrant." But everybody ignored or didn't read that part of the article.
  - DennisP 13y ago
    If they capture everyone's calls, they're not targeting anyone until someone listens to one.
  - brown9-2 13y ago
    The key word in that sentence being "targeting". A lot of the discussion is on what happens when the NSA targets a non-American overseas and that person calls or communicates with someone in the US. If you can listen to a large amount of an overseas target's communications, it's inevitable that some of what you pick up will be communications with Americans. The questions, and confusion, is what happens and what should happen when that occurs. The problem is that so much of the reporting around this gets things confused that it is hard to understand what everyone is talking about, and a lot of people are walking away with the assumption that analysts in the NSA are regularly listening to US-to-US phone calls or emails for shits and giggles.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Well... What he actually is quoted as saying is "...the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant." Listen to, not capture. He says nothing about capturing the data. There have been indications that they capture massive amounts of data, but they believe it's legal to do so, as long as they don't listen to it until they have a warrant.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Sure. But the revelation from the CNet story was Nadler's apparent belief that no warrant was required for them to listen to calls. It's also worth knowing that the USG flatly denies that they're using any authority that allows them to acquire information without calling it "collection" until an analyst accesses it. They used to, but officials now say they no longer rely on that authority; if they have the information, says the USG, they have it, full stop.
    - zb 13y ago
      if they have the information, says the USG, they have it, full stop. Everybody hopes that that's true, but there is a problem with this story. The Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the NSA hadn't "collected" information that it did, in fact, have. When this came to light he, instead of admitting that he lied to Congress and resigning, announced that he was actually using the newspeak definition of "collect" - you know, the one where it has literally no meaning. This is the problem with lying to the public and getting caught. There is no way to tell if anything else you say contains any meaning at all, let alone the truth, even if it happens to be the truth. This goes triple if you happen to have sworn on penalty of perjury that said lies were the truth and still get away with it.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        Regardless of the definition of "collect" that Clapper used, he needs to go.
brown9-2 13y ago
There appears to be a lot of confusion, even from the experts, on what this exchange between Nadler and Mueller was all about: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...

tzs 13y ago

Is there anyway to view that on mobile without being logged in to Twitter? It briefly shows the tweet, then it looks like it decides that since I'm on iPad I should be on their mobile site and goes to the mobile login page.

tptacek 13y ago
The nut of the story, and its entire newsworthy factual content, is that Nadler is pleased to have been informed by the administration that the NSA cannot in fact listen to the contents of phone calls without a specific warrant.

teawithcarl 13y ago

I believe the NSA scandal is horribly wrong. However, this link shows Trevor Timm's latest tweet, which is very important, and supports reporting by Julian Sanchez, where he started to notice the misinterpretation. Accuracy matters. http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...

eli 13y ago
Lots of people thought the CNet piece was fishy. I asked Declan about it after I saw his post here yesterday but nobody noticed :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5887443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5887443

downandout 13y ago

I don't think it matters what the government says about this from here on out. They've shown the depth of their ambitions; they want and will get records about every communication we have. They've been caught in multiple lies, and we can expect that we will never hear the whole truth on this issue. They are doing whatever they want to do, legal or not, and we can't stop them. We can all now safely assume that if we have unencrypted electronic communications (phones included), the full contents of those communications will be stored somewhere and made available to government agents should we come under suspicion for anything. Plan accordingly.

pvnick 13y ago
I think we can stop them if we stand united in defiance. Look what we accomplished with SOPA/PIPA - they were on the verge of passing and we demolished those bills. Just some efforts off the top of my head: -Restore the Fourth (reddit.com/r/restorethefourth) is a planned nationwide mass demonstration to protest privacy encroachments -Mozilla/Reddit/EFF/etc - http://stopwatching.us http://stopwatching.us is going to be sending hundreds of thousands of emails to representatives on citizens' behalf over the next couple weeks. In fact I'm currently contributing dev time to this one, and we really could use some more developers to do everything we want to do. If anybody wants to help "code for freedom" (I just made that up) please email me at pvnick@gmail.com Don't make the mistake of thinking you're powerless because you're not. We still live in a representative democracy, and most of our leaders do actually care what their constituents think, it just doesn't seem that way sometimes.
- ihsw 13y ago
  The difference is there wasn't a decade of infrastructure built around SOPA/PIPA (technological, social, political, economic, etc) however now there is -- the Obama Administration's staunch resistance and the mainstream-media's support is evidence of this. Even now the UK Government is seeking to duplicate the NSA's efforts because they see the writing on the wall that things may go south, so even if we act now then it'll effectively be a whack-a-mole game that will last for a long time coming. We can stop them now in the US but we'll have to expand our efforts globally.

mpyne 13y ago

The big question I would think is whether or not the NSA can capture a phone call (without an analyst listening to it) with a warrant or not. On the one hand that's a phone call which has its own specific wiretap requirements. On the other NSA has been capturing things elsewhere that they need a warrant to look at, so the logic would be similar. And given that most phone calls are probably routed over a computer network by now the wiretap law may not apply directly in NSA's view. I said yesterday that it Nadler probably understood "we can capture but not listen to calls" as "we can tap into calls (i.e. eavesdrop)" and so the message the NSA rep delivered is not the one Nadler understood. But that still leaves open the question of whether phone calls can be recorded in NSA's view, or whether it's just the metadata.

DennisP 13y ago

If they can't "listen to" a call without a warrant, can they record the call without listening to it, and get a warrant later?

rsanders 13y ago

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.

brown9-2 13y ago
I would interpret this to mean "does not" rather than "is not technically capable of".
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  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"
legutierr 13y ago
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.

btilly 13y ago

OK, I've finally been motivated to go read the law itself. You can find it at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a. There are a lot of interesting things in there. For instance g.1.B allows wiretapping BEFORE they get the FISA rubber stamp. (But the warrant is still required to be sought. Whether this is done in practice is another question, but the warrant is still needed.) However to me the single biggest red flag is g.4 which reads, A certification made under this subsection is not required to identify the specific facilities, places, premises, or property at which an acquisition authorized under subsection (a) will be directed or conducted. Why is this interesting? Well compare with the 4th amendment, with the important bit highlighted by captitalization, The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, AND PARTICULARLY DESCRIBING THE PLACE TO BE SEARCHED, and the person or things to be seized. How can anyone pretend that this law is constitutional???

brown9-2 13y ago
Is g.4 specific to an "acquisition" within the United States, or is it discussing authority to do so anywhere in the world?
- btilly 13y ago
  I do not know the answer to that.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Yes. The FAA "Certification" scheme documented in this part of the law is like an SQL stored procedure. If NSA wants, instead of obtaining individualized authorizations from the FISC to surveil individual foreign targets, the DNI and Attorney General can together sign off on a "Certification" documenting the type of surveillance and the measures taken to ensure that such surveillance doesn't target Americans. The FISC reviews that Certification, and the NSA can reuse its structure multiple times by issuing "Directives".

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I started a blog a while back because I do not expect this long-running story of freedom and privacy to move in a straight line from point A to point B. As this story shows, there'll be a lot of steps forward, then a couple of steps back. It's something that will require chronicling. I won't debate the veracity of Congressman's Nadler's comments either a couple of days ago or today. I'll just assume his first comments were correct and unguarded. (They say the definition of a gaffe is when somebody in Washington DC tells the truth) What interests me is this: who got to him? We'd all like to assume it was some kind of nefarious government source, but my instincts say it was somebody in a leadership position in his own party. We won't know, though, either which statement was correct, and if the first one was true, how he was "adjusted" by some external force. Bet it's a fascinating story. My money says leadership in both parties are really busy cracking the whip over this behind the scenes.

rtpg 13y ago
If you actually look at the CSPAN segment upon which the piece is gased, you can see that there is legitimate confusion between the FBI Director and the Congressman during the exchange. That could have been a ruse, or the Congressman could have legitimately misunderstood something previously, and thus tried to clear everything up after it blew up. Not everything is a fucking conspiracy.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  The story I read said that Nadler received one answer one day, and another answer during the closed-door, classified briefing. Didn't know they put those things on CSPAN. And nobody's implying a conspiracy. I specifically said as much. My point was that leadership had a vested interest in keeping the troops marching in line -- much more than with your normal poicy issues. Also that the Nadler thing is a tiny piece of a much larger tapestry. Doesn't matter much one way or the other how this specific story turns out. I was just assuming his first words were accurate for purposes of having a starting point in the discussion.
  - eli 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ganeumann 13y ago

Obama says the congresspeople are all briefed up. They say they aren't. So they brief them up. Then they're confused. The NSA would have been better off not trying to keep the whole program secret, since no one in Washington seems to be able to figure out what's going on even when they're told. The whole thing has gone from shocking to sad to just plain pathetic.