The NSA Needs To Go: It's Been Doing What It Explicitly Was Told Not To Do

[n2doc]

One of the key things that people quickly realized after last week's revelation about the NSA putting backdoors into encryption, was that this was exactly what the federal government had tried to do with the Clipper Chip back in the 90s, and after a public debate, it was rejected. The battle over the Clipper Chip was one of the key legal/tech battles of the 1990s.

And then the NSA went and did it anyway.

Jack Shafer, over at Reuters, points out that there's this pattern of the NSA not taking no for an answer, discussing the attempts to stop PGP and also the infamous Total Information Awareness program:

Zimmerman and his allies eventually won the PGP showdown, as did privacy advocates in the mid-1990s, defeating the government’s proposal for the “Clipper chip,” which would allow easy surveillance of telephone and computer systems, and again after 9/11, when Congress cut funding for the Defense Department office in charge of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a massive surveillance database containing oceans of vital information about everybody in the United States.

But the journalistic record proves we can’t trust government’s white flag of surrender. In the case of TIA, the government abandoned the program’s name but preserved the operation, as Shane Harris and others reported seven years ago, giving it new code names and concealing it in places like the NSA. The documents Snowden stole from the NSA show the government capturing and analyzing much of what TIA sought in the first place.

Basically, this suggests that even if the NSA is told to stop doing the various things it's doing, it's only a matter of time until they do them anyway. One response to this -- which many are taking seriously -- is to look into re-architecting the internet to see what can be built, ground-up with security in mind, specifically making sure that the NSA can't weasel its way in.

more
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130907/23234124441/another-reason-nsa-needs-to-go-its-been-doing-what-it-explicitly-was-told-not-to-do.shtml

[NYC_SKP]

1. Agree, but when was the last time we extinguished a Federal Agency?

As opposed to just renaming it?

[randome]

2. So you are against LE agencies unencrypting child porn files.

Money laundering documents. Organized crime documents. Human trafficking schedules.

You know there is nothing to prevent any LE agency from tapping your phone today. Except those pesky things called laws.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers. It's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

[questionseverything]

4. if we stand for the bill of rights

we are against stopping child porn?///////////////////

The court decision allowed the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Bates’s opinion. The queries must be “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.” And the results are subject to the NSA’s privacy rules.

The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the government’s request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction “to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities,” he said.

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

[randome]

9. The OP is about encryption. It even goes into 'woo' territory when talking about 'back doors'.

As if that's an accepted fact.

You're talking about something else. And I don't see the difference between a computer scanning a database and a cop standing on the corner scanning faces looking for a suspect. I see no difference at all in that.

As for querying its e-mail and phone call databases, what makes you think those databases contain anything but suspect data (and foreign data, at that) in the first place? Do you really think the NSA has databases full of...everything?

And asking the court to lift the ban is not the same thing as the NSA 'doing it anyways'.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers. It's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. That's what proper warrants are for.

[randome]

10. Warrants are not required for foreign data.

I'm sure there are many non-Americans who would resist being forcibly placed under our laws.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers. It's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

[questionseverything]

12. according to fisa court neither do US communications

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

[hootinholler]

13. Really??

This is a new low for you. It gives me a sad.

[randome]

14. The OP is about encryption. Of course LE agencies want the ability to unencrypt stuff.

It's kind of LE 101, wouldn't you say?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers. It's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

[hootinholler]

15. Since when is the NSA law enforcement?

Like I said, a new low for you.

[HooptieWagon]

3. I agree, its too far gone to be reined in.

There is a need for electronic surveillence of our enemies, and I suggest a department within an existing agency. But the NSA should be broken up, all employees fired, and all contracts cancelled. Too many repeated intentional violations of the law....by any definition, they've gone rogue.

[jsr]

5. They're out of control.

They really think they're above the law and above the Constitution.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. "Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrpts absolutely." Lord Acton

[mindwalker_i]

8. What are the consequences for breaking the law?

If the banks break the law, steal 10s of thousands of houses from people, avoid filing papers to track ownership of mortgages then forge the documents, and aren't held accountable (no, a $50 fine doesn't count for accountable), what are they going to do next?

If the government, and specifically the NSA, routinely violate the constitution in terms of unreasonable searches and are not held accountable for it, what do you think is going to happen?

Remember the border searches to get around laws about unreasonable searches and stuff?

[dkf]

11. Who would trust us to build that structure? Maybe the Swiss need to do it.

The government has been making its way into everything. They would no doubt force whoever may build a better Internet into creating a back door under some secret decree punishable with jail. This is coercion under punishment of jail.