5 ms·

19 Groups Sue NSA Over Data Collection

252 points by techinsidr 13y ago

igravious 13y ago
Metadata collation as impinging on freedom of association. Brilliant! Of course these concepts are very US-centric so we need to package these ideas up and sell them globally, adapt them to local markets if you will. What we need to build is a website based off of Google Maps which allows us to drill down and wiki style tabulate the social and tech systems that individual nations are pursuing at the expense of citizen's privacy. The key players and enablers of these programs need to be highlighted. Questions need to be asked of our politicians globally exactly when they were thinking of consulting us about this growing global dragnet, this Leviathan as some have called it, Panopticon as others have called it.
foresterh 13y ago
In simple terms, what do the people in the lawsuit hope to gain from the lawsuit? If they won, would the NSA have to stop the program, or would the government have to pass laws saying it was allowed? I'm just trying to figure out what the end-game is and/or if there is any way to stop something as powerful and uncontrollable as the NSA (government in general?) appears to be.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  The goal would be to get a permanent injunction barring the activity until such time as laws were passed making it legal. In the US system of laws its the way folks force someone to stop doing something when that someone is more than an individual (you can't put a corporation in jail but you can tell them that if they do something you will put their leadership in jail [an imperfect analogy])
  - davvolun 13y ago
    And if such laws do get passed, the people who wrote and supported them would be open to voter backlash, which is why they were done using secretive "guidelines."
  - bmelton 13y ago
    If the suit succeeds, wouldn't ratifying the Constitution be the only way to actually make it 'legal'? A law the infringes on the rights of the people without due process cannot be remedied by any other number of laws except where those laws reduce the scope to those wherein more narrow warrants are granted (I think).
  - foresterh 13y ago
    "you can't put a corporation in jail but you can tell them that if they do something you will put their leadership in jail [an imperfect analogy])" Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though? It seems like after the banking industry was pretty much caught red-handed breaking all kinds of laws and/or causing all kinds of programs to end or start, none of them ended up behind bars. I have to think the NSA would be better at avoiding jailtime than bankers... Maybe I'm just pessimistic but it seems more like the best this could hope for is the NSA stopping Prism and then finding out 5-10 years later (or never) that they started Diamond or some other program that does the same thing except doesn't record the first 5 seconds of phone calls, or something else that "obeys the new rules"...
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though? Yes. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling
- rayiner 13y ago
  The end-goal is to get the government to stop. The government is not uncontrollable. Litigation has stopped many government practices, historically. For example, originally the Bush administration tried to hold Yaser Hamdi (a U.S. citizen who had left the U.S. as a child and had been captured in 2001 in Afghanistan) as an enemy combatant. The Bush administration tried to claim that enemy combatants did not have habeas corpus rights. The Supreme Court disagreed. Hamdi was released and deported to Saudi Arabia on condition of renouncing his U.S. citizenship. Since then, dozens of detainees have won their habeas petitions and been released: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-habeas-results-the-definitive-list http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-habeas-results-t....
unreal37 13y ago
I think this has a strong chance of succeeding, eventually. It does seem that PRISM is building a list of who people associate with - through email and phone communications, or various chat programs. Through this list of who you associate with, you can certainly start to label people and deny them rights based on their membership in various groups. Back in the 1950s, the State Department was asking people to promise they weren't communists before granting them a passport so they can travel abroad. The amount of information they can get on people has grown exponentially since then - and that doesn't mean we have to be less careful with it. First amendment - freedom of assembly - grounds is a brilliant way to argue this.
- jivatmanx 13y ago
  "Back in the 1950s, the State Department was asking people to promise they weren't communists before granting them a passport so they can travel abroad. The amount of information they can get on people has grown exponentially since then - and that doesn't mean we have to be less careful with it." We do have a disadvantage this time. Prior to the internet era nearly anyone could easily understand exactly what was being done, as wiretapping was the most complex instrument used. This time, one can attempt to abstract this as far as possible, and bury arguments with technical jargon. "Metadata isn't data", etc.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > "Metadata isn't data", etc. The argument isn't that metadata isn't data. It's that metadata isn't "yours." It's AT&T's observations and records about your use of their system. That's not "technical jargon." It's a relevant distinction when discussing the scope of a privacy right: whose information is protected? If it's not just information generated by you, but also information relating to you, how closely does it have to relate? Etc.
    - mtgx 13y ago
      Even if that's so, there is still the issue of "expectation of privacy". If the customer buys AT&T's service and expects a certain degree of privacy (meaning no one can just try and locate where he is with that data, or with who he is talking to, etc), then I think he deserves that kind of privacy. Ultimately, the citizens can demand laws that state that fact explicitly. There are countries where collection of metadata by authorities in this way is illegal - and not because they didn't try to collect it. They did. It's just that "the people" won the argument, and now they aren't allowed to use the metadata (or at least not in this sweeping way).
insickness 13y ago
It's smart of them to include a variety of groups across the political spectrum, both left and right. It's interesting how this issue is positioned and who supports the fight.
- igravious 13y ago
  I don't think smart has anything to do with it. I believe that this issue transcends normally antagonistic parties. This is something most of us can agree on. Left/right/liberal/conservative/anarchist/socialist/capitalist/whatever - we all expect a certain base level of privacy w.r.t. our private communication, both contents and metadata.
kooker_spooker 13y ago
I really don't mind these data collections if it indeed can thwart terror attacks & can provides an adavtange over China/Russia/Iran, BUT I wish I had access to the data- like being able to see your own FBI file Imagine, the NSA for "free" (kinda) has created "Dropbox++"- all your online content indexed & backed up
babesh 13y ago
Hooray.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

252 points by techinsidr 13y ago

Metadata collation as impinging on freedom of association. Brilliant! Of course these concepts are very US-centric so we need to package these ideas up and sell them globally, adapt them to local markets if you will. What we need to build is a website based off of Google Maps which allows us to drill down and wiki style tabulate the social and tech systems that individual nations are pursuing at the expense of citizen's privacy. The key players and enablers of these programs need to be highlighted. Questions need to be asked of our politicians globally exactly when they were thinking of consulting us about this growing global dragnet, this Leviathan as some have called it, Panopticon as others have called it.

foresterh 13y ago

In simple terms, what do the people in the lawsuit hope to gain from the lawsuit? If they won, would the NSA have to stop the program, or would the government have to pass laws saying it was allowed? I'm just trying to figure out what the end-game is and/or if there is any way to stop something as powerful and uncontrollable as the NSA (government in general?) appears to be.

ChuckMcM 13y ago
The goal would be to get a permanent injunction barring the activity until such time as laws were passed making it legal. In the US system of laws its the way folks force someone to stop doing something when that someone is more than an individual (you can't put a corporation in jail but you can tell them that if they do something you will put their leadership in jail [an imperfect analogy])
- davvolun 13y ago
  And if such laws do get passed, the people who wrote and supported them would be open to voter backlash, which is why they were done using secretive "guidelines."
- bmelton 13y ago
  If the suit succeeds, wouldn't ratifying the Constitution be the only way to actually make it 'legal'? A law the infringes on the rights of the people without due process cannot be remedied by any other number of laws except where those laws reduce the scope to those wherein more narrow warrants are granted (I think).
- foresterh 13y ago
  "you can't put a corporation in jail but you can tell them that if they do something you will put their leadership in jail [an imperfect analogy])" Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though? It seems like after the banking industry was pretty much caught red-handed breaking all kinds of laws and/or causing all kinds of programs to end or start, none of them ended up behind bars. I have to think the NSA would be better at avoiding jailtime than bankers... Maybe I'm just pessimistic but it seems more like the best this could hope for is the NSA stopping Prism and then finding out 5-10 years later (or never) that they started Diamond or some other program that does the same thing except doesn't record the first 5 seconds of phone calls, or something else that "obeys the new rules"...
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though? Yes. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling
rayiner 13y ago
The end-goal is to get the government to stop. The government is not uncontrollable. Litigation has stopped many government practices, historically. For example, originally the Bush administration tried to hold Yaser Hamdi (a U.S. citizen who had left the U.S. as a child and had been captured in 2001 in Afghanistan) as an enemy combatant. The Bush administration tried to claim that enemy combatants did not have habeas corpus rights. The Supreme Court disagreed. Hamdi was released and deported to Saudi Arabia on condition of renouncing his U.S. citizenship. Since then, dozens of detainees have won their habeas petitions and been released: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-habeas-results-the-definitive-list http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-habeas-results-t....

unreal37 13y ago

I think this has a strong chance of succeeding, eventually. It does seem that PRISM is building a list of who people associate with - through email and phone communications, or various chat programs. Through this list of who you associate with, you can certainly start to label people and deny them rights based on their membership in various groups. Back in the 1950s, the State Department was asking people to promise they weren't communists before granting them a passport so they can travel abroad. The amount of information they can get on people has grown exponentially since then - and that doesn't mean we have to be less careful with it. First amendment - freedom of assembly - grounds is a brilliant way to argue this.

jivatmanx 13y ago
"Back in the 1950s, the State Department was asking people to promise they weren't communists before granting them a passport so they can travel abroad. The amount of information they can get on people has grown exponentially since then - and that doesn't mean we have to be less careful with it." We do have a disadvantage this time. Prior to the internet era nearly anyone could easily understand exactly what was being done, as wiretapping was the most complex instrument used. This time, one can attempt to abstract this as far as possible, and bury arguments with technical jargon. "Metadata isn't data", etc.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > "Metadata isn't data", etc. The argument isn't that metadata isn't data. It's that metadata isn't "yours." It's AT&T's observations and records about your use of their system. That's not "technical jargon." It's a relevant distinction when discussing the scope of a privacy right: whose information is protected? If it's not just information generated by you, but also information relating to you, how closely does it have to relate? Etc.
  - mtgx 13y ago
    Even if that's so, there is still the issue of "expectation of privacy". If the customer buys AT&T's service and expects a certain degree of privacy (meaning no one can just try and locate where he is with that data, or with who he is talking to, etc), then I think he deserves that kind of privacy. Ultimately, the citizens can demand laws that state that fact explicitly. There are countries where collection of metadata by authorities in this way is illegal - and not because they didn't try to collect it. They did. It's just that "the people" won the argument, and now they aren't allowed to use the metadata (or at least not in this sweeping way).

insickness 13y ago

It's smart of them to include a variety of groups across the political spectrum, both left and right. It's interesting how this issue is positioned and who supports the fight.

igravious 13y ago
I don't think smart has anything to do with it. I believe that this issue transcends normally antagonistic parties. This is something most of us can agree on. Left/right/liberal/conservative/anarchist/socialist/capitalist/whatever - we all expect a certain base level of privacy w.r.t. our private communication, both contents and metadata.

kooker_spooker 13y ago

I really don't mind these data collections if it indeed can thwart terror attacks & can provides an adavtange over China/Russia/Iran, BUT I wish I had access to the data- like being able to see your own FBI file Imagine, the NSA for "free" (kinda) has created "Dropbox++"- all your online content indexed & backed up

babesh 13y ago

Hooray.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]