It is good to see some people coming around. It's as if they had their heads in the sand, or were just too conservative in their wisdom. The facts having been evident for quite some time, the rest of us have been laboring to educate and inform against all the vicious attacks and just plain hard-headedness. It has been a real pisser at times.

On the other hand, WSJ and WaPo did some independent reporting that verified the extent of the surveillance exceeds what is allowed by law, viz:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324108204579022874091732470.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23790912

Now, this same reporting also said the FISC ruling has led to some changes, so it is no longer as extensively in violation as it was, but Wyden (whom by default I would believe) says it is still not fully enforced. (I read that as "they fixed some but not all of the problem&quot .

As an aside, this also demonstrates the FISC system is not fundamentally broken, if it can identify and partially remediate problems like this. It just needs more teeth; declassifying the majority of its proceedings would probably be a good start.

found a problem, reported it, and changed their behavior. Still see no evidence of abuse.

WSJ's reporting shows that 75% of US citizens have had their communications tracked; whether that's abuse or just poor program design is to some extent beside the point.

And, yes, we're seeing checks and balances acting, if slowly. (And, as I've said before, I'm not convinced the leaks make this process work better, though since that's where we are now, there's little sense whining about it.)

I've got some swampland in Florida, real good price.

Do you still think that the majority of the information that Snowden leaked was not true?

You're only admitting to what the government has admitted to already. Not much of a change of mind or heart.

Yes, obviously that's not true; it's contradicted by all the hard evidence that's come out since then.

Do you believe that they are accessing and storing almost all of our communications?

WSJ has run that 75% of Americans have had some of their traffic analyzed, and since NSA (as far as we know) analyzes stored rather than live data, that means 75% of us have had some traffic stored. How much "some" is is an important question, and we don't know the answer to that.

Either that, or you don't believe it's happening, right?

Let me ask you this: Do you think that capturing and STORING 75% of Ameicans' data is okay? No matter what they do with it, in the end, after analyzing it. You think that's okay?

If there were a law that simply said "the US Government will take every phone company's LUDs at the end of every month" that wouldn't set my hair on fire. Since there are statutes giving these data protections, they should be followed.

How much of that is actually stored is not known, but it's prudent to act as if all 75% is. At any rate, my main complaint is along the lines of the FISC decision that they were looking at stored data they shouldn't have been. That's more worrisome to me than the storage itself.

They can take that data and target you in the future, should you become a thorn in their side.

I don't know about you, I don't want my data stored OR looked at. It's called spying.

I have done the math here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3438829

There are over 144 billion emails sent every day. If what you say is correct (and that's a big "if" in my book, I personally think it's probably a lot higher) then that's 3,600,000 that are stored every day. Now, even taking a fraction of that as the actual number, that's still a gross invasion of privacy and an assault on the Constitution.

http://mashable.com/2012/11/27/email-stats-infographic/

My original statement is "monitored traffic."

However, in the thread where I did the math it was pretty clear that the data they were storing was of form posting in nature, like the text box you're typing in now (it's called a form). Or emails, or chats. So basically that 1.6% of all internet traffic is probably going to be focused on emails and chat data anyway.

Just did the math on all that data being stored. 160 petabytes per year would be 15% of all human storage ever in the history of human civilization, so they're probably not storing it all long term, but they're likely building serious profiles on a few million people on the internet. Every leftist, every activist, every critic of the government, they could store that trivially.

Also, isn't all that math based on the initial claims of monitoring 1.6 percent of internet traffic, which sounded horrifying enough once you considered what a tiny portion of "internet traffic" personal data really is....but *still* turned out to be a lie of mammoth proportions?

We are now told they monitor *75 percent* of internet traffic, which is jaw dropping, given that huge, huge portions of "internet traffic" consists merely of ads and bots and streaming of TV shows and music that they cannot remotely be interested in. Remember the links from my post: MORE THAN HALF of internet traffic is bots and ads and automated crap. HALF of North American internet traffic is Netflix alone. Personal information of interest to the NSA is a very tiny, tiny portion of "internet traffic."

Therefore, admitting that they are monitoring *75 percent of internet traffic* pretty much guarantees that they are monitoring essentially ALL of our personal information.

And storing ".025 percent of internet traffic" is going to sound like hardly any personal information at all to most people, when in actuality it probably means most of it.

Am I missing something here?

Since US traffic is around 15% of all internet traffic their original number was off by, what, over 2 orders of magnitude? (15% - 75% = 3.75% of all internet traffic, not the original contention of 1.6%.)

However, the new number seems to be conditioned on how much they "see" (75%) while the other number (1.6%) was how much they "touched."

It's definitely weasel wording to be sure, because I don't see how mathematically you can prove how much they "touch" of US internet traffic. They've admitted that they can see everything but they touch only a little and don't leave a way to determine how much of US data is touched. It's sorta clever.

is an exceptionally charitable word for it.

Oh, I see. Thanks - I keep messing up with the units and assuming the US is the entire world. I guess I've been well-trained to think that way.

Given the serial lies, crushing numbers they give us is probably a fool's errand, anyway. I don't believe a word they say.

"the US Government will take every phone company's LUDs at the end of every month" that would set my hair on fire and probably some members of the Supreme Court's too.

The fact that the president and his staff could know the opinions of people would cause people to be very careful about the opinions they expressed. Even though the president would not be interested in what most people say or to whom they say it, people would never know when what they might say could get them into trouble.

That would interfere with our First Amendment rights. It is not the government's place to put itself into a position in which it can know what we think about things. It is not the government's place to put itself into a position in which it can know who our friends are or with whom we meet. It is not the government's place to put itself in a position in which it can know what religion we have.

Read the First Amendment.

Read this.

United Nations General Assembly

April 17, 2013

GE.13-13303
Human Rights Council
Twenty-third session
Agenda item 3
Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights,
including the right to development Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue

http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session23/A.HRC.23.40_EN.pdf

Communications logs (who called whom) are not subject to Constitutional protection. If Congress wanted to pass a statute that simply said "these records are not private and will be furnished to USG monthly", that would be allowable under Smith. However, Congress has passed laws protecting those data, and the NSA and FBI's activities have violated those laws.

The internet has changed the meaning of a pen register in terms of the data that can be obtained just from reviewing and analyzing metadata and also in terms of the ability to read every text message, every e-mail and every writing, every opening of an e-mail, every Google search of a single individual or a group of individuals.

It would be fairly easy to determine which individuals, for example, support a particular cause or have formed a particular support or political or religious group just from the e-mails that they send and receive. You would not even have to read the e-mails. You could simply connect lists of names and the groups and topics they are interested in.

Guns would be an obvious one. Drugs another. But then there are gay and lesbian groups, civil rights groups, peace groups, etc.

But when you think of the information that can be obtained just from lists of names on the e-mail account of someone who handles a lot of matters for, say, political organizations or for organizations with political-sounding names or Alcoholics Anonymous or a group of psychologists or lawyers, then collecting metadata has a very different meaning than it did back in the 1970s when Smith v. Maryland was decided.

That law needs to be reviewed. It will take many tries to change it, in my opinion, but in this time, it is far more intrusive than it was then.

If you have an actual crime and collect the metadata of the suspects in that case, you will not be reviewing a lot of information like lists of members of political organizations, etc. And if you do run across such lists, you probably won't spend much time on them because they won't be relevant to the criminal investigation you are trying to wrap up. That is very different from the NSA surveillance which is ongoing and is capturing millions and millions of communications and searches if the reports are correct.

The opinion doesn't mention the particular technology of pen registers. It says (accurately) that routing data is by its technical nature so non-private that it can't be afforded Constitutional protection, anymore than where you tell a cab driver to take you is private.

You're not ceding a thing, and you know it.

I'm sick of it. It's as if there is no Snowden in your world.

Go talk to someone who believes the bullshit. I don't.

Intellectual honesty is appreciated, especially since it is rare.

Call this extremely old news to those of us that aren't so naive and childish as to possibily think that our government would set up this massive multi-billion dollar spy system and then totally behave itself.

Glad you got your evidence and have come around, but really. People have been writing books and doing pieces on the NSA for years about how its abusing its power, and its only gotten worse since 9-11. The evidence has been there for years. If it really took you this long, next time don't be such a sheep.

That is consistent with what has been reported about the violations.

Wyden's statement addresses two issues.

I have now seen evidence of misuse, and evidence that the court made at least partial remediation of that misuse.

I also take Wyden's point that the loophole in FISA is big enough to drive a truck through, at times. Ultimately, this oversight system needs to be better and more transparent, as President Obama himself said.

"I also take Wyden's point that the loophole in FISA is big enough to drive a truck through, at times. Ultimately, this oversight system needs to be better and more transparent, as President Obama himself said."

...there needs to be FISA reforms.

Still, what the release shows is the back-and-forth between the NSA and the FISA court in addressing compliance issues.

There is no point. Welcome to the other side.

At the end of the film it said "X people were murdered, Y people raped, Z people robbed the year following the end of the Pre Cog Program."

What I fear is that FISC is going to be "enough" for the American people and they will simply allow the program to continue. Just as the public accepts the data mining by massive corporations (Google, Yahoo!, FaceBook, etc).

You may be more of an optimist about that than I am.

Look at the UK's surveillance state.

that will actually serve to entrench the spying and legitimize it, rather than what needs to happen, which is to END IT ALL.

The Amash vote in the House scared them I think. They can't understand why we don't want to be spied on, or collected on, whatever someone may call it.

They are going to be working overtime to make us comfortable with it, to confuse people, to spread false information, character assassinate opponents, and all that.

As others have said in this thread, I'm eager to find out exactly what and how much is actually stored. The monitoring is bad enough, but the storage is the really bad part.

My recollection is the NSA can store data for up to 5 years.

It's absurd to insist on "proof" of abuse before denying government access to powers that are patently ripe for abuse.

The Founders knew this. That's why the Bill of Rights focuses on what the government may NOT do. History is exceedingly clear that offering opportunities for abuse of power inevitably, eventually, leads to abuses of power.

This situation is not analogous to a human defendant in court who deserves the presumption of innocence until proof of guilt is determined and corrective action may be taken. This is about creating governmental structures that wield power over millions of human lives. The presumption and the bias should always go toward limiting highly "abusable" powers from the start, and maintaining constant vigilance, transparency, and skepticism to ensure that abuses do not begin to grow.

A voice of reason in the den of sickening nonsense.

to stay out of the dens of sickening nonsense.

The evidence so far shows that the NSA itself decided it was collecting too much, reported it to the FISA court and found a way to correct the problem.

Where is the misuse?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]I'm always right. When I'm wrong I admit it.
So then I'm right about being wrong.[/center][/font][hr]

Ding.

and then the DEA was falsifying investigations with the "parallel construction"

THANK YOU.

I see ProSense isn't convinced she has seen evidence as yet.

You on the other hand are willing to try and see and I thank you for that.

Personally, I think that there are many abuses of the NSA corpus by contractors that the NSA and the NSA's IG have no clue about. Their claims that it is all auditable are laughable at this point.

I hope someone is held in contempt of Congress over this.

Read the open letter on slate today. That is who I thought the NSA was. Maybe they can be again now that we are talking about this. Stranger things have happened.

Making lemonade.