Category Archives: Law: Privacy

The Criminal N.S.A., is an important NYT op-ed today by Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman, explaining the errors of the Obama Administration’s claim that the NSA’s mass surveillance programs are legal.

Here are a few key paragraphs, but read the whole thing,

The government claims that under Section 215 it may seize all of our phone call information now because it might conceivably be relevant to an investigation at some later date, even if there is no particular reason to believe that any but a tiny fraction of the data collected might possibly be suspicious. That is a shockingly flimsy argument — any data might be “relevant” to an investigation eventually, if by “eventually” you mean “sometime before the end of time.” If all data is “relevant,” it makes a mockery of the already shaky concept of relevance.

And,

Like the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government very broad surveillance authority. And yet the Prism program appears to outstrip that authority. In particular, the government “may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.”

The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.

If the surveillance is not authorized by law, then the surveillance is criminal. Not that anyone will ever be charged, of course.

Accused bank robber wants NSA phone records for his defense

One of the exceptionally odd things about about the revelations about the NSA metadata and phone records revelations is that I, not to mention various other Cypherpunk fellow travelers, predicted all this 15 years ago.

In fact, we predicted it so long ago, that almost no one seems to remember we did.

I have to say, though, that this is the first story I’ve seen on the subject that made me smile. So that’s something.

Unfortunately, this may not be the perfect test case:

Prosecutor Michael Gilfarb told the judge that even if the information is available, it may be irrelevant depending on whether Brown carried a phone.

Brown’s wife, Vesta Murat Brown, who testified for the prosecution Wednesday morning, told jurors that her husband didn’t have a cellphone at the time but sometimes borrowed phones from her, other family members or friends.

But even if it isn’t, it won’t be long:

Local lawyers said they anticipate there will be many more requests for this kind of information now that defense attorneys know the information may have been preserved.