This makes me think back to all of the debate over needing more power than was granted in FISA and the hand wringing that FISA was so limiting and we were all gonna die because of those limits. Doesn't look so limting now, huh?
I'm not sure there is anything wrong with the collection of the meta-data. We really need a definition of what we are protecting (and why) before we can measure the reach of any action and say "that is excessive".
This is more invasive than a pen register for every person in the country. It's a big deal.
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Calling it metadata makes it sound so soft and friendly. Its not real data, its only metadata. George Carlin could have had fun with that.
I think the better way of thinking of it is imagine that someone is following you around and writing down the name of every one you talk to in your day. How often, how long, where and when. Don't worry though, they just know who you talk to, but not what you say.
Nah, this is at its core wrong. And I don't buy the anonymity of crowds or the "don't worry, it isn't bad unless you're doing something wrong" arguments.
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And that has always been legal in the US. Private Investigators as well as the police or any private citizen is empowered to do that. You need to go to court to prove that you are being injured by such activity.
We really need a definition of what we want to protect and why it is important to protect it.
It's most certainly not legal to perform a pen register without a court order. Following someone and writing down who they talk to is a bad analogy because you can't tell who someone on the phone is talking to and you can't follow someone into a private area and see who they are talking to. What this FISA order mandates is a pen register on everyone talking on Verizon's US based network.
For me it is the right analogy. I'm not a suspect in any way shape or form in a particular investigation yet given the breath of the subpoena, by simply having a mobile phone I get the electronic equivalent of someone following me around.
First, the FBI/NSA did get a court order and second, you don't always need a court order:
18 USC § 3121 - General prohibition on pen register and trap and trace device use; exception
(a) In General.— Except as provided in this section, no person may install or use a pen register or a trap and trace device without first obtaining a court order under section 3123 of this title or under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.).
(b) Exception.— The prohibition of subsection (a) does not apply with respect to the use of a pen register or a trap and trace device by a provider of electronic or wire communication service—
(1) relating to the operation, maintenance, and testing of a wire or electronic communication service or to the protection of the rights or property of such provider, or to the protection of users of that service from abuse of service or unlawful use of service; or
(2) to record the fact that a wire or electronic communication was initiated or completed in order to protect such provider, another provider furnishing service toward the completion of the wire communication, or a user of that service, from fraudulent, unlawful or abusive use of service; or
(3) where the consent of the user of that service has been obtained.
And that is legal unless you can prove harassment to a court. We need a definition of what we want to protect and why we want to protect it. Say explicitly why we want to protect whatever it is we are protecting allows that shield to be extended to new and novel circumstances.
With out detailed principals to define what is private, we are reduced to subjective criteria what is different for just about everybody.
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Why Verizon? Or have they all been monitored?
I'd bet big money (as much as $3) that they all have active subpoenas but they didn't all leak.
But is it good?
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Nobody's arguing that it was illegal. The fact that it IS legal is the scandal. Such broad surveillance orders should not be.
And if you are saying that once you specify what particular thing you want to protect, then anything you decide you need to do to protect it is allowed, I cannot agree with you there. There are, and must be, limits to what the government is allowed to do to protect the public interest.
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Verizon is just the one that we have found out about. I would bet that it's not the only one.
Funny, I get a statement from Verizon every year concerning their privacy policy. It makes it abundantly clear that they share data with any number of 3rd-party businesses and organizations. What data, exactly, do you think they are sharing, if it's NOT individual or aggregate call metadata? Look at the ads right here on TPM. Ever wonder how it is they reflect things you might have purchased. or searched for? That's Google, TPM and who knows how many others "sharing" your search data and online behaviors.
As others have described, NSA will scan the data looking for key indicators or words, perhaps correlating specific data which might indicate a pattern of behavior. Everything else is ignored. Why after the fact? simple...looking for accomplices. They know who the brothers talked to, now they want to know who THOSE people are talking to..
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The level of surprise and outrage coming out of this seems misguided to me. The amount of data that's constantly transferred in any modern digital communication is fairly easily retrieved by the NSA. So they wanted to ease the process a bit by getting some preliminary data en masse... big deal. Even if they didn't make this move it wouldn't make our calls much more private.
A cell phone call is a fascinating thing. I'll share a joke I told some honors students once:
I got an automated phone call that said "We are calling regarding the status of your account. There is currently no problem with your account." So that got me thinking... They recorded this message, it gets digitized into a bit-stream and encrypted, then redundancy gets added into the bit-stream for error correction, then it gets modulated and transmitted through the air to the tower in North Carolina, then sent to space and bounced off a satellite to the tower here in Ohio, gets transmitted through the air from the new tower, received by my phone, redigitized into a bit-stream, the redundancy is reversed to hopefully correct errors in the signal, encryption is undone, the bit stream is modulated back into analog, amplified, and played through a speaker so I finally hear their message. And all of this happened just so they could tell me that they have nothing to tell me!!!
There's plenty of opportunities there for an outsider to grab your convo. And when it comes to the DoD, they're pretty damned good at it. I should know. As a lowly undergrad four years back I helped write an error correction decoding scheme that would clean up the signal better than the original code is designed to do, essentially letting them make up for usually getting a weaker signal than the intended receiver (not my favorite thing I've worked on but I had to pay for school somehow).
Digital communications are never safe and @vinny had it pretty much right: "by simply having a mobile phone I get the electronic equivalent of someone following me around."
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The move to a police state gathers steam.
Are you trying to be a thread killer? Please don't do that.
This is the message board equivalent of stamping your feet and walking away (next up, a Godwin event). The term police state conjures images that are emotionally charged but not terribly informative. Clearly, the wholesale gathering of intelligence is a necessary step on the way to such a place, but it isn't close to being sufficient. Even a culture that accepts this level of data mining is insufficient to bring about a police state.
I think at the heart of this is an inability for our elected leaders to explain exactly why the tradeoff between my desired level of privacy and anonymity vs. my safety is a good one. I can't think of any of them that have really tried in a serious and thoughtful way.
I suspect its because they would have to be honest that they trust us as little as we trust them. People in government lose their careers over optics. So from a bureaucrat or elected official's viewpoint more security theater is better than less security theater.
And in a country where a handful dying in a singular event is more important than thousands dying in individual events (gun control?) we really have theater as the only available option.
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Jonknee did above.
What do you mean by "broad surveillance orders" and why shouldn't they be allowed.
Did you mean "There are, and must be, ways the government is allowed to protect the public interest."?