5 ms·

The President is still speaking so I don't know what he is going to announce, but as an american, I don't like the concept of citizens and non-citizens being tr

The President is still speaking so I don't know what he is going to announce, but as an american, I don't like the concept of citizens and non-citizens being treated differently when it comes to their rights. The distinction is difficult to make anyway, but the declaration of independence says "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." and does not make a distinction - I don't think we should be able to spy on someone in another country without a warrant any more than we can spy on citizen.

philwelch 13y ago
It's not a question of rights. Every country engages in foreign espionage and treats foreign espionage as a different category of activity from domestic espionage. Things are slightly different when you're spying on private citizens rather than just foreign governments, but then again the whole point of terrorism is that it involves private citizens instead of governments.
- zorked 13y ago
  Are "foreign espionage" and "mass surveillance" the same thing? I am more willing to accept the former as unfortunately unavoidable than the latter.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    That's the real question, and the distinction is that mass surveillance doesn't distinguish between legitimate foreign targets and everyone else.
- arrrg 13y ago
  That doesn't really answer why it's not a question of rights. Everyone else doing it is not really a valid argument that counters rights.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Thirty years ago, the US didn't spy on the Kremlin because people working in the Kremlin had fewer rights than your local plumber, the US spied on the Kremlin because they had a legitimate strategic interest in knowing what was happening in the Kremlin. But the government has no legitimate interest listening to me talk to my wife on the phone. It just so happens that foreign vs. domestic is an easy dividing line between cases where the government could conceivably have a legitimate interest in spying on people and cases where they almost certainly do not.
    - arrrg 13y ago
      But we were talking about spying on private citizens.
      - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
        Any spy might appear as a private citizen.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Obviously they can technically, just like the Army could in theory shoot private citizens. The NSA has claimed throughout that this is not what they're trying to do. Even their "untargeted" programs (when they can get authority to intercept data without a selector, such as overseas) are not to be used willy-nilly, and even their untargeted programs still seems to involve selectiveness from what I can tell. E.g. the "200 million SMS messages per day" story from the other day represents ~3.3% of SMS traffic, despite not having selectors attached to that data interception. Now I don't know that literally every program they have is never being used against private citizens. I would agree strongly with you that they should not be. But the Internet is packet-switched, not virtual circuits, which means you can't simply install one tap for one IP address. The data needs to be seen before the event, not after it. Sometimes it's not possible to do the right filtering at the selection point itself (I would imagine this is the case with SMS), so you have to do the big data equivalent of map/reduce, and grab everything, collate it, and then filter it to see what comes up. The problem is that it's a hard problem, with long-standing recriminations when they get it wrong (such as with the 2009 underwear bomber in the USA, who NSA had got shit on for missing completely; it was only luck that his mission hadn't succeeded).
pekk 13y ago
This concept is international and it is not new. It's really puzzling why Obama is specifically singled out for criticism about this general principle.
- netcraft 13y ago
  I don't intend to single him out - I had the same concern when Bush was president, and one of the biggest and most selfish reason I have this opinion is because I don't want other countries to spy on my any more than I want my own to spy on me. I direct this criticism at my government, not the President. And I think this should apply to lots of things, not just surveillance.
eric_cc 13y ago
You are entitled to your opinion and I do not entirely disagree. However, I do believe that the US should not be the only powerful nation that does not engage in foreign spying. That puts us at a disadvantage in today's world. Other countries are spying on the US and the US is spying on other countries - that's the state of things right now. Let's not pretend the US is doing something other nations are not.
- linuxhansl 13y ago
  There is a difference between targeting spying and collecting data indiscriminately just because it happens to be routed through a server within US jurisdiction.
  - eric_cc 13y ago
    Okay but what does that have to do with what I said? Again, this is not something that only the United States is doing.
    - linuxhansl 13y ago
      It related (IMHO anyway) in the sense that the amount of energy, paranoia, and money poured into this is fairly unique to the US.
Asparagirl 13y ago
"When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I the Lord am your God." (Parasha Vayikra (Leviticus) 19:33-34)
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Non citizens living and visiting the US have the same protections as US citizens. US citizens only get special protection when outside of the country; the NSA still isn't really supposed to spy on them then, though technically and legally they probably could.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Technically they obviously could, legally the Fourth Amendment does apply, but for that case the FISC is used to obtain warrants if needed, instead of the normal law enforcement warrant pipeline. The larger concern is probably simply that as long as any party to a communication is a non-U.S. person outside the U.S., that communication is fair game for the NSA under EO 12333 authority alone.
    - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
      >legally the Fourth Amendment does apply Legally the Fourth Amendment probably does not apply. Constitutional protections are provided only within US jurisdiction. If you are a US citizen outside of US jurisdiction, then the government isn't required to extend those protections to you. The lack of spying on US citizens outside of US borders is more of a courtesy - the government doesn't yet consider it worth rolling the Supreme Court dice.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Thanks for making me double check, seems you're right. The most restrictive requirement seen in courts appears to be a "reasonableness" requirement judging by the totality of the circumstances involved: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1227548515.shtml http://www.volokh.com/posts/1227548515.shtml
srl 13y ago
While that's a nice sentiment in principle, it falls apart in fairly obvious ways. Do we enforce our laws on citizens of other nations? When other governments act in ways inconsistent with our constitution, do you think we should use our military to force them to do otherwise (as we have done with our own states)? Of course not. Our government's first responsibility is to the security and liberties of its citizens and (legal[1]) residents. As much as possible, I'd want it to protect those in ways that also help the security and liberties of those in other parts of the world, but those are not equal obligations. In any case, being spied on by a foreign country is considerably less bad than being spied on by your own. In the wet dreams of conspiracy theorists, our government spies on its citizens to discover their political views, and then imprisons those with views it doesn't like. There's no equivalent evil that France's government could pull off. [1] In my view, "legal" shouldn't need to be there, but that's not very realistic.
- malandrew 13y ago
  One of the biggest problems with this view though is intelligence sharing policies among nations. Even if the US can't spy on American, but the French can, you still have the possibility that some politically connected multinational organization can get information about American political adversaries through their French intelligence connections.
- dictum 13y ago
  > In any case, being spied on by a foreign country is considerably less bad than being spied on by your own. In the wet dreams of conspiracy theorists, our government spies on its citizens to discover their political views, and then imprisons those with views it doesn't like. There's no equivalent evil that France's government could pull off. Arresting you when you have to enter France for business or personal reasons is one possibility. EDIT: If France has some agents in your country there's a lot of evil they could pull off even without you leaving the country.
  - srl 13y ago
    I really don't agree that that's equivalent, but I understand your point. Certainly if the power balance were different, it might be a legitimate fear. (If the french government gave me problems, it would be pretty easy for me to find protection from my own government. Wouldn't be so easy if I was in Pakistan, looking for protection from the US, I suppose.) I do agree we should refrain from mass surveillance on non-US citizens, but I don't think that achieving that is realistic at this juncture. The intelligence community is in excited-puppy mode about all the cool things they can do with the internet[1], and it'll be a bit before they and their elected overlords figure out what's useful, what's not, and how surveillance can be better performed without playing godzilla to the city of rights. For now, what I think is reasonable is a more straightforward, open disclosure of what and how the NSA monitors. And now I need to stop commenting on this article until I've actually read the proposed reform in its entirety. (And you all should too. Hah.) [1] Calling it an "insurance policy", really? "We've never had to use it, but it's too cool to give up."
rayiner 13y ago
The declaration of independence isn't a legal document. Treating it as such results in facial contradiction, because the Constitution embraces the idea that black slaves are not in fact equal. It's generally a good idea to just ignore the declaration of independence as what it is: idealistic rhetoric. In any case, it's not a distinction between citizens and non-citizens, but the territorial scope of the Constitution. Just as the Constitution can't create obligations that apply to say the French in France, it can't create rights that apply to them.
adestefan 13y ago
And then the Constitution begins with "We the People of the United States..." While the Declaration of Independence is a nice little document about why you should be able to blow up someone else, the Constitution is the one that really matters.
- cma 13y ago
  Yeah, "all men are created equal" ... except "the merciless Indian savages" Britain is keeping us from exterminating (also in the declaration).

philwelch 13y ago

It's not a question of rights. Every country engages in foreign espionage and treats foreign espionage as a different category of activity from domestic espionage. Things are slightly different when you're spying on private citizens rather than just foreign governments, but then again the whole point of terrorism is that it involves private citizens instead of governments.

zorked 13y ago
Are "foreign espionage" and "mass surveillance" the same thing? I am more willing to accept the former as unfortunately unavoidable than the latter.
- philwelch 13y ago
  That's the real question, and the distinction is that mass surveillance doesn't distinguish between legitimate foreign targets and everyone else.
arrrg 13y ago
That doesn't really answer why it's not a question of rights. Everyone else doing it is not really a valid argument that counters rights.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Thirty years ago, the US didn't spy on the Kremlin because people working in the Kremlin had fewer rights than your local plumber, the US spied on the Kremlin because they had a legitimate strategic interest in knowing what was happening in the Kremlin. But the government has no legitimate interest listening to me talk to my wife on the phone. It just so happens that foreign vs. domestic is an easy dividing line between cases where the government could conceivably have a legitimate interest in spying on people and cases where they almost certainly do not.
  - arrrg 13y ago
    But we were talking about spying on private citizens.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      Any spy might appear as a private citizen.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Obviously they can technically, just like the Army could in theory shoot private citizens. The NSA has claimed throughout that this is not what they're trying to do. Even their "untargeted" programs (when they can get authority to intercept data without a selector, such as overseas) are not to be used willy-nilly, and even their untargeted programs still seems to involve selectiveness from what I can tell. E.g. the "200 million SMS messages per day" story from the other day represents ~3.3% of SMS traffic, despite not having selectors attached to that data interception. Now I don't know that literally every program they have is never being used against private citizens. I would agree strongly with you that they should not be. But the Internet is packet-switched, not virtual circuits, which means you can't simply install one tap for one IP address. The data needs to be seen before the event, not after it. Sometimes it's not possible to do the right filtering at the selection point itself (I would imagine this is the case with SMS), so you have to do the big data equivalent of map/reduce, and grab everything, collate it, and then filter it to see what comes up. The problem is that it's a hard problem, with long-standing recriminations when they get it wrong (such as with the 2009 underwear bomber in the USA, who NSA had got shit on for missing completely; it was only luck that his mission hadn't succeeded).

pekk 13y ago

This concept is international and it is not new. It's really puzzling why Obama is specifically singled out for criticism about this general principle.

netcraft 13y ago
I don't intend to single him out - I had the same concern when Bush was president, and one of the biggest and most selfish reason I have this opinion is because I don't want other countries to spy on my any more than I want my own to spy on me. I direct this criticism at my government, not the President. And I think this should apply to lots of things, not just surveillance.

eric_cc 13y ago

You are entitled to your opinion and I do not entirely disagree. However, I do believe that the US should not be the only powerful nation that does not engage in foreign spying. That puts us at a disadvantage in today's world. Other countries are spying on the US and the US is spying on other countries - that's the state of things right now. Let's not pretend the US is doing something other nations are not.

linuxhansl 13y ago
There is a difference between targeting spying and collecting data indiscriminately just because it happens to be routed through a server within US jurisdiction.
- eric_cc 13y ago
  Okay but what does that have to do with what I said? Again, this is not something that only the United States is doing.
  - linuxhansl 13y ago
    It related (IMHO anyway) in the sense that the amount of energy, paranoia, and money poured into this is fairly unique to the US.

Asparagirl 13y ago

"When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I the Lord am your God." (Parasha Vayikra (Leviticus) 19:33-34)

alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Non citizens living and visiting the US have the same protections as US citizens. US citizens only get special protection when outside of the country; the NSA still isn't really supposed to spy on them then, though technically and legally they probably could.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Technically they obviously could, legally the Fourth Amendment does apply, but for that case the FISC is used to obtain warrants if needed, instead of the normal law enforcement warrant pipeline. The larger concern is probably simply that as long as any party to a communication is a non-U.S. person outside the U.S., that communication is fair game for the NSA under EO 12333 authority alone.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    >legally the Fourth Amendment does apply Legally the Fourth Amendment probably does not apply. Constitutional protections are provided only within US jurisdiction. If you are a US citizen outside of US jurisdiction, then the government isn't required to extend those protections to you. The lack of spying on US citizens outside of US borders is more of a courtesy - the government doesn't yet consider it worth rolling the Supreme Court dice.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Thanks for making me double check, seems you're right. The most restrictive requirement seen in courts appears to be a "reasonableness" requirement judging by the totality of the circumstances involved: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1227548515.shtml http://www.volokh.com/posts/1227548515.shtml

srl 13y ago

While that's a nice sentiment in principle, it falls apart in fairly obvious ways. Do we enforce our laws on citizens of other nations? When other governments act in ways inconsistent with our constitution, do you think we should use our military to force them to do otherwise (as we have done with our own states)? Of course not. Our government's first responsibility is to the security and liberties of its citizens and (legal[1]) residents. As much as possible, I'd want it to protect those in ways that also help the security and liberties of those in other parts of the world, but those are not equal obligations. In any case, being spied on by a foreign country is considerably less bad than being spied on by your own. In the wet dreams of conspiracy theorists, our government spies on its citizens to discover their political views, and then imprisons those with views it doesn't like. There's no equivalent evil that France's government could pull off. [1] In my view, "legal" shouldn't need to be there, but that's not very realistic.

malandrew 13y ago
One of the biggest problems with this view though is intelligence sharing policies among nations. Even if the US can't spy on American, but the French can, you still have the possibility that some politically connected multinational organization can get information about American political adversaries through their French intelligence connections.
dictum 13y ago
> In any case, being spied on by a foreign country is considerably less bad than being spied on by your own. In the wet dreams of conspiracy theorists, our government spies on its citizens to discover their political views, and then imprisons those with views it doesn't like. There's no equivalent evil that France's government could pull off. Arresting you when you have to enter France for business or personal reasons is one possibility. EDIT: If France has some agents in your country there's a lot of evil they could pull off even without you leaving the country.
- srl 13y ago
  I really don't agree that that's equivalent, but I understand your point. Certainly if the power balance were different, it might be a legitimate fear. (If the french government gave me problems, it would be pretty easy for me to find protection from my own government. Wouldn't be so easy if I was in Pakistan, looking for protection from the US, I suppose.) I do agree we should refrain from mass surveillance on non-US citizens, but I don't think that achieving that is realistic at this juncture. The intelligence community is in excited-puppy mode about all the cool things they can do with the internet[1], and it'll be a bit before they and their elected overlords figure out what's useful, what's not, and how surveillance can be better performed without playing godzilla to the city of rights. For now, what I think is reasonable is a more straightforward, open disclosure of what and how the NSA monitors. And now I need to stop commenting on this article until I've actually read the proposed reform in its entirety. (And you all should too. Hah.) [1] Calling it an "insurance policy", really? "We've never had to use it, but it's too cool to give up."

rayiner 13y ago

The declaration of independence isn't a legal document. Treating it as such results in facial contradiction, because the Constitution embraces the idea that black slaves are not in fact equal. It's generally a good idea to just ignore the declaration of independence as what it is: idealistic rhetoric. In any case, it's not a distinction between citizens and non-citizens, but the territorial scope of the Constitution. Just as the Constitution can't create obligations that apply to say the French in France, it can't create rights that apply to them.

adestefan 13y ago

And then the Constitution begins with "We the People of the United States..." While the Declaration of Independence is a nice little document about why you should be able to blow up someone else, the Constitution is the one that really matters.

cma 13y ago
Yeah, "all men are created equal" ... except "the merciless Indian savages" Britain is keeping us from exterminating (also in the declaration).