NSA: Fears Of Government Spying Are Unwarranted

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The NSA would never spy on you! You can believe what they say because, after all, they are from the government. :D

"NSA is a foreign intelligence agency," she explained. "Our mission is to collect critical intelligence on foreign powers or their agents necessary to defend the country." The response is almost dismissive, but technically correct: the NSA isn't supposed to keep tabs on domestic threats, that's the FBI's job.
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It's waaaay too late for the truth to work. Too many people who already were whining and complaining about their government were given ratings-seeking and click-generating half truths that they wholeheartedly accepted without doing any of their own critical thinking. These are the same people who got very drunk and would claim they had alien encounters years ago when that was super popular.
 
Ok NSA. And if you were spying on us, you would tell us, right? The first rule of trying to spy on someone is don't let them know you are spying on them.
 
I'll say this, they are about one entire year too fucking late trying to get their side of the story out there. PR certainly isn't the NSA's strong suit :mad:

Still, if this chick get's tired and her job is up for grabs, I'd take it :D
 
We don't spy, we just gather all the data on the entire planet and then hand it under the table to people who do. We cover our tracks with "parallel construction".


Parallel Construction: Unconstitutional NSA Searches Deny Due Process

Peter Van Buren, 09/20/2014

The NSA sits at the nexus of violations of both the Fourth and Fifth Amendments with a legal dodge called Parallel Construction.

Parallel Construction is a technique used by law enforcement to hide the fact that evidence in a criminal case originated with the NSA. In its simplest form, the NSA collects information showing say a Mr. Anderson committed a crime. This happens most commonly in drug cases. The conclusive information is passed to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who then works backwards from the conclusion to create an independent, "legal" body of evidence to use against Mr. Anderson.

Example: an NSA email intercept shows our Mr. Anderson received a Fedex package with drugs, which he hid under his bed. The DEA takes this info, and gets a search warrant for the Fedex data, which leads them to Mr. Anderson's apartment. A new legal warrant authorizes a search, and agents "find" the drugs under the bed right where the NSA said they were in the first place.

Some may call this little more than illegal evidence laundering.

Some Constitutional Background

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects Americans against unreasonable and unwarranted searches. The Supreme Court has generally held that searches of, for example, someone's home, require a warrant. That warrant can be issued only after law enforcement shows they have "probable cause." That in turn has been defined by the Court to require a high standard of proof, "a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place." The NSA pulling information out of the cyberspace ether bypasses and thus violates the Fourth Amendment.

The NSA violations of the Fourth Amendment enable further DEA and other law enforcement violations of the Fifth Amendment, specifically the critical due process clause. The concept of due process dates back to the 13th century Magna Carta.

Specifically, the use of information obtained illegally and whose ultimate source is concealed from the accused violates procedural due process. This is the requirement that before any government actions to take away life, liberty or possessions, the persons affected have the right to defend themselves, to understand the evidence against them, and to question and call witnesses in rebuttal, one's "day in court." In short, procedural due process aims to protect individuals from the coercive power of government by ensuring that adjudication processes are fair and open.

DEA is blunt in a document released via FOIA as to how conveniently parallel construction violates these rights:

Our friends in the military and intelligence community never have to prove anything to the general public. They can act upon classified information without ever divulging their sources or methods to anyway [sic] outside their community.


Why Do This to Americans?

With exceptions, courts have held that evidence obtained illegally cannot be used in trial. So why bother to fight for an exception when, using NSA data surreptitiously, evidence can subsequently be obtained cleanly under a warrant, albeit a warrant issued by a court kept ignorant of the source of the underlying information. Another reason to use parallel construction is to hide the NSA's role. Apart from the broader goal of not disclosing to the American people what their government is doing, blurring the trail back to the NSA gets around any courtroom attempts that require such data to be shared with the defense. And of course the defense can't ask for something it does not know exists. Lastly, if defendants do not know the ultimate source of the information used to convict them, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence- information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

Needless to say, using information obtained already pre-packaged from the NSA makes DEA's and other law enforcement agencies' jobs much easier. They have to do little work on their own to gather the data needed to track down Americans they seek to prosecute. It's all in the bag.

DEA as the Nexus

DEA seems to be the center of the NSA distribution network, as the program originally started as a way to bust foreign drug dealers before it metastasized into the currrent tool for broadly evading the Bill of Rights.

How widespread domestically is the practice of parallel construction? No one knows. It is known that the unit of the DEA that distributes the NSA information is called the Special Operations Division (SOD.) It partners with two dozen other agencies, including the FBI, CIA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. Once laundered of any NSA fingerprints, what those multiple agencies do with the data, and how far they themselves spread it to even more agencies, or to local law enforcement, is unknown.

Why it Matters

There have been complex questions raised about the hiding of NSA-obtained information used to convict Americans, leading to the Solictor General of the United States lying to the Supreme Court about how the Justice Department was not notifying defendants in situations when warrantless surveillance had led in turn to a wiretap order that produced evidence used in court. The Justice Department has taken to notifying some defendents that information obtained via warrantless survellience is being used against them, allowing for a likely Supreme Court challenge. The Justice Department has previously blocked Supreme Court challenges by hiding how information was obtained, thus denying the accused of "standing" in the Court's eyes.

As part of the response to such government actions, organizations such as the Los Angeles County Bar Association are now offering for-continuing-education-credit tutorials to defense attorneys under titles such as "Criminal Prosecutions and Classified Information."

A lot of attention Post-Snowden has been paid to what the NSA does-- vacuum up emails, listen in on Skype chats and so forth. Too little attention has been devoted to what is done with the information NSA collects. The appetites of law enforcement agencies in Post-Constitutional America are bottomless, and the NSA holds terabytes of data to fill them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-van-buren/parallel-construction-unc_b_5606381.html
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I would've never guessed the majority of hard ocp users are pro surveillance.
 
Their reasoning being that they're not actually looking at the data they're collecting. The problem being that the law will eventually be bent to allow for that information to be used against us.
 
It is a good thing the NSA hasn't been lying about what they're doing for the last decade or two or more...otherwise they'd have a credibility problem
 
Skripka said:
It is a good thing the NSA hasn't been lying about what they're doing for the last decade or two or more...otherwise they'd have a credibility problem
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They weren't lying. The neither confirm or deny something. It's not lying to not say anything at all and it's so in the public's best interest for them not to know about things which is why they're classified. Honestly, look at all the dumb-headed reactions from hearing inaccurately reported little pieces of information and ponder how the generally stupid reality TV watching redneck losers of the world would react if they knew what was actually happening. Most don't have the reasoning capacity to understand anything.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
It's waaaay too late for the truth to work. Too many people who already were whining and complaining about their government were given ratings-seeking and click-generating half truths that they wholeheartedly accepted without doing any of their own critical thinking. These are the same people who got very drunk and would claim they had alien encounters years ago when that was super popular.
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It's true. The NSA doesn't care about what you are doing. But the other agencies with access to their data, like the DEA, are using it to prosecute people while hiding that they used it. Which in itself isn't legal. The DEA calls it parallel reconstruction.

Pretty much every alphabet soup company in DC has access, including the IRS.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
They weren't lying. The neither confirm or deny something. It's not lying to not say anything at all and it's so in the public's best interest for them not to know about things which is why they're classified. Honestly, look at all the dumb-headed reactions from hearing inaccurately reported little pieces of information and ponder how the generally stupid reality TV watching redneck losers of the world would react if they knew what was actually happening. Most don't have the reasoning capacity to understand anything.
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Sounds like good incentive to teach more critical thinking skills in primary school.
 
Kueller said:
Sounds like good incentive to teach more critical thinking skills in primary school.
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Noooo, it's better to brainwash with fluffy silly versions of history that give people dumb ideas about the formation of the nation and continue to promote subcultures that glorify being stupid as a good trait. :)
 
Yeah guys don't worry about anything. The NSA is there to protect us.
 
As usual, someone desperately needs to explain to the NSA who is supposed to explain to whom what should be considered a warranted fear. This is the same agency who claims the American people do not have legal standing to sue when the agency tramples all over our Constitution. And as a final boot to the teeth, it was recently discovered our last NSA chief (Keith Alexander, 2005-13) had personal financial ties to several tech companies who make their living by pushing terror and fear. Historians will be justifiably brutal, it's our own pathetic version of the Nazi Gestapo.
 
JeffDC said:
As usual, someone desperately needs to explain to the NSA who is supposed to explain to whom what should be considered a warranted fear. This is the same agency who claims the American people do not have legal standing to sue when the agency tramples all over our Constitution. And as a final boot to the teeth, it was recently discovered our last NSA chief (Keith Alexander, 2005-13) had personal financial ties to several tech companies who make their living by pushing terror and fear. Historians will be justifiably brutal, it's our own pathetic version of the Nazi Gestapo.
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No no no, that's misinformation. Its misconception about the NSA spread by the media. They don't really spy on us good law-abiding citizens. Thats the honest truth.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
They weren't lying. The neither confirm or deny something. It's not lying to not say anything at all and it's so in the public's best interest for them not to know about things which is why they're classified. Honestly, look at all the dumb-headed reactions from hearing inaccurately reported little pieces of information and ponder how the generally stupid reality TV watching redneck losers of the world would react if they knew what was actually happening. Most don't have the reasoning capacity to understand anything.
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I'm pretty sure Clapper telling Congress and the American people you were not bulk collecting metadata of Americans...while simultaneously bulk collecting metadata is lying. At least if you or I did it and not the NSA, we'd be court contempt'd and charged with perjury.

Congressional testimony said:
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., was one of the last senators to ask questions during the open portion of the committee hearing, before it went to a closed session.

Wyden: "I hope we can do this in just a yes or no answer, because I know Sen. Feinstein wants to move on. Last summer, the NSA director (Keith Alexander) was at a conference and he was asked a question about the NSA surveillance of Americans. He replied, and I quote here, ‘The story that we have millions, or hundreds of millions, of dossiers on people is completely false.’ The reason I’m asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozens years, I don’t really know what a dossier is in this context. So, what I wanted to see if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

Clapper: "No, sir."

Wyden: "It does not?"

Clapper: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."

Wyden: "All right. Thank you. I’ll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer."
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Skripka said:
I'm pretty sure Clapper telling Congress and the American people you were not bulk collecting metadata of Americans...while simultaneously bulk collecting metadata is lying. At least if you or I did it and not the NSA, we'd be court contempt'd and charged with perjury.
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Lying to Congress is different than lying to the general public.
 
Skripka said:
And doing one will get you jail time, for any normal person. Clapper and the NSA regularly do both.
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Meh, normal people usually like are up to no good anyway. Look at how many of them constantly drive faster than the speed limit. All of those people should be arrested and put in jail forever. The NSA is just making sure it can continue to do awesome stuff, but they need the resources and support to act like without being harassed by the public or by some random politicians trying to pretend to know at all what's going on. Those guys just need to like keep doing what they're good at, collecting taxes and making roads or funding some new pipe.
 
Lith1um said:
We don't spy, we just gather all the data on the entire planet and then hand it under the table to people who do. We cover our tracks with "parallel construction".
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Doesn't surprise me one bit... I assumed that was a large part of the reason the nsa collects and spies on Americans wholesale. Pathetic, and our founding fathers must be rolling over in their Graves. Orwell says hi :(.
 
It is offensive to have a government agency that is dedicated to the sole purpose of surveillance, tell the populace it serves that fears of domestic spying are unwarranted when we are telling them that we fear them and their practices are unwarranted. That they are in clear violation above and beyond their stated role and other regulatory practices. That there are verifiable incidents that fly in the face of their claims.
 
lcpiper said:
Still, if this chick get's tired and her job is up for grabs, I'd take it :D
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yea, no shit. if there's "nsa" in a forum post, the thread is guaranteed to contain 15-20% posts by you. sometimes three posts in a row in the same thread.
 
There's some honest truth to the statement, they don't actively surveil American citizens. But as @Lith1um pointed out, that doesn't mean the inadvertent evidence of a domestic crime that they stumble across during foreign operations doesn't end up in the appropriate hands.

Truth be told, if this wasn't the NSA, if this was a corporation, or even a private citizen, we would laud the act of reporting evidence of a crime. It's a basic question of ethics, if you know a crime has occurred and you have the power to prevent future crimes by reporting it, then you have a moral obligation to do so.

This thought process is further justified by the knowledge that good, law-abiding citizens, won't be scooped up. The NSA figures, "If you aren't committing crimes, you won't pop up on our radar." It's pretty sound logic.

I don't normally throw my hat completely in for any government agencies, but I think a lot of people fail to keep a very simple fact in mind: These government employees are not inherently evil. These are people, our family, our friends, our high school classmates. Though the responsibilities are different, the desire to serve is often one and the same as the one that drives people to join the military. We have to try not to be so myopic.
 
Methadras said:
It is offensive to have a government agency that is dedicated to the sole purpose of surveillance, tell the populace it serves that fears of domestic spying are unwarranted when we are telling them that we fear them and their practices are unwarranted. That they are in clear violation above and beyond their stated role and other regulatory practices. That there are verifiable incidents that fly in the face of their claims.
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If you think they're dedicated to the sole purpose of surveillance then how can you also conclude that performing surveillance is some sort of violation? I mean really, calm down and think just a teeny, tiny bit before getting all growl-y about something.

Besides that, surveillance isn't their sole purpose at all. They have lots of other missions so they're not just some big monolithic organization dedicated to keeping track of you cheating on your spouse or downloading yucky videos. You've been watching waaay to many movies about this kinda stuff.
 
Methadras said:
It is offensive to have a government agency that is dedicated to the sole purpose of surveillance, tell the populace it serves that fears of domestic spying are unwarranted when we are telling them that we fear them and their practices are unwarranted. That they are in clear violation above and beyond their stated role and other regulatory practices. That there are verifiable incidents that fly in the face of their claims.
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Kinda makes you wonder who's in the drivers seat, the horse, or the rider?
 
spugm1r3 said:
These are people, our family, our friends, our high school classmates. Though the responsibilities are different, the desire to serve is often one and the same as the one that drives people to join the military. We have to try not to be so myopic.
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These people are puppets, political, and professional. Their strings are pulled from above, from the side, from below, through mirrors and prisms, and paychecks.

Hell, most of the NSA budget goes to private contractors. After all, that's what we are talking about here, big business.

Booz Allen, the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization
By Drake Bennett and Michael Riley June 20, 2013


In 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy began to think about what a war with Germany would look like. The admirals worried in particular about the Kriegsmarine’s fleet of U-boats, which were preying on Allied shipping and proving impossible to find, much less sink. Stymied, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox turned to Booz, Fry, Allen & Hamilton, a consulting firm in Chicago whose best-known clients were Goodyear Tire & Rubber (GT) and Montgomery Ward. The firm had effectively invented management consulting, deploying whiz kids from top schools as analysts and acumen-for-hire to corporate clients. Working with the Navy’s own planners, Booz consultants developed a special sensor system that could track the U-boats’ brief-burst radio communications and helped design an attack strategy around it. With its aid, the Allies by war’s end had sunk or crippled most of the German submarine fleet.

That project was the start of a long collaboration. As the Cold War set in, intensified, thawed, and was supplanted by global terrorism in the minds of national security strategists, the firm, now called Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), focused more and more on government work. In 2008 it split off its less lucrative commercial consulting arm—under the name Booz & Co.—and became a pure government contractor, publicly traded and majority-owned by private equity firm Carlyle Group (CG). In the fiscal year ended in March 2013, Booz Allen Hamilton reported $5.76 billion in revenue, 99 percent of which came from government contracts, and $219 million in net income. Almost a quarter of its revenue—$1.3 billion—was from major U.S. intelligence agencies. Along with competitors such as Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), CACI, and BAE Systems (BAESY), the McLean (Va.)-based firm is a prime beneficiary of an explosion in government spending on intelligence contractors over the past decade. About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says almost a fifth of intelligence personnel work in the private sector.

It’s safe to say that most Americans, if they’d heard of Booz Allen at all, had no idea how huge a role it plays in the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. They do now. On June 9, a 29-year-old Booz Allen computer technician, Edward Snowden, revealed himself to be the source of news stories showing the extent of phone and Internet eavesdropping by the National Security Agency. Snowden leaked classified documents he loaded onto a thumb drive while working for Booz Allen at an NSA listening post in Hawaii, and he’s promised to leak many more. After fleeing to Hong Kong, he’s been in hiding. (He didn’t respond to a request for comment relayed by an intermediary.)

The attention has been bad for Booz Allen’s stock, which fell more than 4 percent the morning after Snowden went public and still hasn’t recovered. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence, has called for a reexamination of the role of private contractors in intelligence work and announced she’ll seek to restrict their access to classified information. Booz Allen declined to comment on Snowden beyond its initial public statement announcing his termination.

GRAPHIC: Chart: How Booz Allen Hamilton Swallowed Washington
The firm has long kept a low profile—with the federal government as practically its sole client, there’s no need for publicity. It does little, if any, lobbying. Its ability to win contracts is ensured by the roster of intelligence community heavyweights who work there. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper—President Obama’s top intelligence adviser—is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm’s vice chairman, Mike McConnell, was President George W. Bush’s director of national intelligence and, before that, director of the NSA. Of Booz Allen’s 25,000 employees, 76 percent have classified clearances, and almost half have top-secret clearances. In a 2003 speech, Joan Dempsey, a former CIA deputy director, referred to Booz Allen as the “shadow IC” (for intelligence community) because of the profusion of “former secretaries of this and directors of that,” according to a 2008 book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Today Dempsey works for Booz Allen.

It’s possible that fallout from the Snowden revelations will lead to significant changes in intelligence contracting. The Senate intelligence committee has been pressuring spy agencies for years to reduce their reliance on contractors. And in the age of the sequester, even once untouchable line items such as defense and intelligence spending are vulnerable to cuts.
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Lith1um said:
We don't spy, we just gather all the data on the entire planet and then hand it under the table to people who do. We cover our tracks with "parallel construction".
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Great way to get rid of one's political enemies.

This is why surveillance is BAD for American citizens, not good for its citizens.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
It's waaaay too late for the truth to work. Too many people who already were whining and complaining about their government were given ratings-seeking and click-generating half truths that they wholeheartedly accepted without doing any of their own critical thinking. These are the same people who got very drunk and would claim they had alien encounters years ago when that was super popular.
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lol

sometimes your trolling is truly brilliant
 
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