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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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UK Spin Doctors are also in over drive now... | 135 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
UK Spin Doctors are also in over drive now...
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 09 2013 @ 02:34 PM EDT
Margaret Thatcher wanted to find out which of her cabinet ministers was plotting
against her and which ones were loyal. Tapping their phones would be an obvious
way to find out, but it would be illegal.

Instead, she called the Canadian government, had *them* (via the Canadian
equivalent of GCHQ) tap the phones, and send her the transcripts. That was
perfectly legal.

There are lots of ways around wiretap laws, and a lot of "intelligence
sharing" between allies is directed towards doing exactly that.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Spy vs Spy
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 09 2013 @ 05:10 PM EDT
For those not already choked by the Newspick column here's a few more paraphrased picks,
New Zealand's GCSB, already in trouble for leaks and unauthorised spying on its own citizens, may be going round the block to get data from NSA NZ Herald

If it's good enough for China is it good enough for US? Telegraph Group

Spying is so beyond criminal that it cannot be dealt with in ordinary courts, but talking about it is a matter for an ordinary "hangin' judge" Telegraph

Edward Snowden, el nuevo Bradley Manning diariovasco.com

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Diaspora Doomed
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 09 2013 @ 05:24 PM EDT
Newspick
It may create an impression that Diaspora pods are not reliable and have no guarantee to run for ever
Perhaps someone can correct me if I've got it wrong, my understanding was that Diaspora absolutely depends on the existence of pods, whereas a truly distributed system such as Bittorrent runs better with trackers but can still run without them. Diaspora is thus not sufficiently distributed, and needs some re-engineering to avoid the current problem.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • Diaspora Doomed - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 10 2013 @ 01:18 PM EDT
News Picks Threads
Authored by: dio gratia on Sunday, June 09 2013 @ 08:58 PM EDT

Why the NSA Needs Your Phone Calls….

I've been a fan of Stewart Baker's for a lot of years, having been a cypherpunk in the era of the Clipper Chip. Unfortunately this article seems to gloss over Fourth Amendment issues.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
As we have seen recently the Supreme Court has held the people asserts an individual right for the Second Amendment, how can it do any less for the Fourth Amendment?

Let's be clear, the order Mr. Baker refers to is on collecting call records ("telephony metadata") from Verizon for "communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

Mr. Bakers describes minimization, which appears to be a John Yoo-ism, requiring probable cause, the issue I have with the court order under the Fourth Amendment is exactly that - probable cause ("As long as the minimization rules require that all searches of the collected data must be justified in advance by probable cause, Americans are protected from arbitrary searches.").

By googling the question 'How many customers does Verizon have?' we find an estimate of 144.8 million customers as of 10 September 2012 and can use this as a ball park estimate of how many people are affected by these trimonthly recurring court orders.

These recurring court orders would seem to imply Verizon's more than 140 million customers be suspects in terrorist activities involving foreign nationals (the domain of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - FISC).

It doesn't seem likely the government can prove probable cause to suspect 140 million people on an on going basis of aiding and abetting foreign nationals involved in terrorist or other activities inimical to the laws of the United States, while it does appear inimical to those 140 million peoples rights against unreasonable searches, supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing...the persons or things to be seized.

The reasoning can be demonstrated by breaking the circular logic used to support minimization. For example following the first order of a duration for 3 months, some number approaching the unity number of Verizon customers would not be implicated.

Why aren't these customers excluded from any future order, lacking probable cause?

This point is revealed in the PBS video Spying on the Home Front originally broadcast on May 15 or 16 2007.

The FBI collected records from every Casino in Las Vegas following a terrorist alert and after extensive searching found no guests or customers were implicated in any terrorist threat.

In this particular case the video reveals that the terrorist threat was not valid, the result of misinterpretation and the FBI didn't repeat the effort of getting a warrant with no actual probable cause.

As a minimum means testing of the results should be performed by the FISC court determining whether this massive intrusion treating 140 million people as suspects is justified.

This is all a horse and pony show targeted at giving this massive intrusion of privacy the general garment of legality without the consent of the people and cloaking the lack of results under the aegis of national security in a war on terrorism with no end in sight.

Note the lack of specificity on how the use of this seized data will be used, instead relying on rules made in secret and denied oversight of "the people" ("The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Perhaps we'll see a Ninth Amendment case?).

The secrecy appears essential to preventing this house of cards reasoning from collapsing under it's own weight.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Any Twitter or Facebook accounts purporting to be Edward Snowden are fake.
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 10 2013 @ 01:10 AM EDT
That proves to me that he is real.
and it makes three of us now, PJ.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • Er... - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 10 2013 @ 12:25 PM EDT
Never ask which government ministers are plotting against you
Authored by: Ian Al on Monday, June 10 2013 @ 03:19 AM EDT
It's all of them!

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

(OT) Why shorten URL?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 10 2013 @ 04:28 AM EDT
This is one of my pet peeves. Why shorten a URL in HTML (as opposed to
text-email or something like twiter)? When a URL is shortened it requires more
steps by they user to find out where the URL goes before following it and for a
normal HTML link it doesn't really accomplish anything. Unless the whole goal
is to obscure where the URL leads. (I probably ought to install and use the
browser add-on that prevents automatically following redirects.)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

UK Spin Doctors are also in over drive now...
Authored by: PJ on Monday, June 10 2013 @ 07:31 AM EDT
Please do not use shortened urls on Groklaw.
It is possible to set them up, without any
notice to the user, in such a way that they
arrive at the person's server before arriving at
the destination, allowing them to collect
info that they have no entitlement to.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

UK Spin Doctors are also in over drive now...
Authored by: PJ on Monday, June 10 2013 @ 07:37 AM EDT
I've removed the comment with the shortened url. Please don't use them on Groklaw. They can be used to collect IP addresses by inserting a silent middle stop at a server before arriving at the destination.

Here's what the comment said, with the correct url:

Foreign Secretary William Hague: Law-abiding Britons have nothing to fear from GCHQ

William Hague has insisted the law-abiding British public has “nothing to fear” from GCHQ, and denied the eavesdropping agency has been using a controversial US internet monitoring programme to dodge tough legal checks on their activities.

Source - The Independent
Foreign Secretary William Hague: Law-abiding Britons have nothing to fear from GCHQ

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

A Must Read: ""I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy"
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 10 2013 @ 09:10 AM EDT
Link - Free paper download

"'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" by Daniel J. Solove, George Washington University Law School.

For those that haven't read it yet,well..., now it's your chance.
Think twice before saying that your life is an "open book" and you have nothing to hide.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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