Section 702 Mass-surveillance

[medi]

Posted as a 24-minute read, but I think it takes longer, if you want to fully grasp the topic.

Inside the White House Program to Share America’s Secrets

Mass surveillance and social media are changing the spy game.

time.com

I'll choose the following paragraph to show one aspect of what the Times has to offer on this:

The result is a toxic mix of public skepticism and diminished security. The share of Americans who believe the intelligence community respects their privacy and civil liberties dropped from 52% in 2020 to 44% in 2022, according to a University of Texas survey. After revelations of abuse by the FBI, Congress is struggling to renew the controversial Section 702 mass-surveillance program that the government says is crucial to fighting everything from fentanyl trafficking to terrorism to Chinese spies.

Besides putting forth a way to get a first learn on this topic, I'd also be quite interested in opinions.

Oh yes, and our friends in/from other nations may very well have opinions that are worthy of note for us in the United States.

 

[Goshin]

Posted as a 24-minute read, but I think it takes longer, if you want to fully grasp the topic.

Inside the White House Program to Share America’s Secrets

Mass surveillance and social media are changing the spy game.

time.com

I'll choose the following paragraph to show one aspect of what the Times has to offer on this:



Besides putting forth a way to get a first learn on this topic, I'd also be quite interested in opinions.

Oh yes, and our friends in/from other nations may very well have opinions that are worthy of note for us in the United States.

Can you sum up?

 

[medi]

I was thinking about that as I studied what the Times had put before the public, and I don't think I can. Really. It is a complicated topic. The Times folks put before us a number of examples, too. A lot of administration officials offering opinions on this-and-that.

 

[Mycroft]

Posted as a 24-minute read, but I think it takes longer, if you want to fully grasp the topic.

Inside the White House Program to Share America’s Secrets

Mass surveillance and social media are changing the spy game.

time.com

I'll choose the following paragraph to show one aspect of what the Times has to offer on this:



Besides putting forth a way to get a first learn on this topic, I'd also be quite interested in opinions.

Oh yes, and our friends in/from other nations may very well have opinions that are worthy of note for us in the United States.

That article really doesn't give much on the 702 query issue, other than a brief mention of the millions of illegal queries conducted by the Biden FBI and about the Obama FBI's FISA abuses. But then, the article really isn't about "Section 702 mass surveillance". It's about intelligence declassification.

It IS nice that this stuff is mentioned...hell, I don't think very many of our fellow forum members are even aware of the criminal actions that have been allowed to go on regarding FISA abuses...but there are sources of much more information regarding the FISA 702 issue.

Here...check this out: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/?s=702+

 

[medi]

That is an interesting page that link takes us to, Mycroft, and I wish to place here a copy of the first paragraph of the second article on that page:

For those confused. There are two bills to modify the FISA702 reauthorization in the House. (1) HR 6611 from the House Intel Committee and (2) HR 6570 from the House Judiciary Committee. The intel committee bill expands domestic surveillance authority under the modifications; the judiciary committee bill requires the DOJ to get a search warrant before they can look at the incidental collection of American citizens.

BUT that is a decidedly conservative leaning web page and so it would be fair to offer up a liberal leaning view, if anyone knows of one. Or I'll go digging for more along that line of thinking.

Frankly, I wanted to think the Time magazine article was a centrist approach, but was not quite bold enough to make that assessment in that first post. And not "bold enough" because I am not sure I am correct.

I haven't had Section 702 in any of my own projects here at this work station, or the other over the hills, for a number of years. I am not even sure which of my computers has that last work I had to do related to Section 702. In fact, one of my admin staff had a file that sort of disappeared when that position was vacated by that staff member. This will be a sort of work in progress as I update myself on stuff I've forgotten. And as we watch this unfold in the Congress.

 

[Mycroft]

That is an interesting page that link takes us to, Mycroft, and I wish to place here a copy of the first paragraph of the second article on that page:



BUT that is a decidedly conservative leaning web page and so it would be fair to offer up a liberal leaning view, if anyone knows of one. Or I'll go digging for more along that line of thinking.

Frankly, I wanted to think the Time magazine article was a centrist approach, but was not quite bold enough to make that assessment in that first post. And not "bold enough" because I am not sure I am correct.

I haven't had Section 702 in any of my own projects here at this work station, or the other over the hills, for a number of years. I am not even sure which of my computers has that last work I had to do related to Section 702. In fact, one of my admin staff had a file that sort of disappeared when that position was vacated by that staff member. This will be a sort of work in progress as I update myself on stuff I've forgotten. And as we watch this unfold in the Congress.

The article that quote comes from focuses on current re-authorization efforts. To fully understand the effects of those efforts, it is best to understand how FISA 702 has been abused. For that understanding, I recommend one of the other articles at that link I gave you.

The Obama Use of FISA-702 as a Domestic Political Surveillance Program.... - The Last Refuge

Now that we have significant research files on the 2015 and 2016 political surveillance program; which includes the trail evident within the Weissmann/Mueller report; in combination with the Obama-era DOJ “secret research project” (their words, not mine); we are able to overlay the entire...

theconservativetreehouse.com

While CTH is a conservative leaning web page, that doesn't mean the information in this article is slanted or incorrect. The writer includes a slew of supporting links from official sources for everything he says.

 

[ralfy]

Opinion | Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe

A surveillance law referred to as Section 702 is needed to protect us from foreign threats.

www.nytimes.com

Since then, Section 702 has supplied extraordinary insight into foreign dangers, including military threats, theft of American trade secrets, terrorism, hacking and fentanyl trafficking. In 2022 intelligence from 702 helped the government find and kill the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the terrorists responsible for Sept. 11. Almost 60 percent of the articles in the president’s daily intelligence briefing include information from Section 702.

Although Section 702 can be used only to target foreigners abroad, it does include Americans when they interact with foreign targets. Not only is such incidental collection inevitable in today’s globalized world; it can be vital to U.S. security. If a terrorist or spy abroad is communicating with someone here, our government must find out why.

Archive version:

https://archive.is/20240422130337/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opinion/fisa-section-702-fbi-privacy.html

 

[akyron]

It doesnt seem that complicated to take time to justify your warrant request to a judge.

Why they want to continue to spy secretly is not much of a puzzle. Lack of oversight. The usual suspects blantantly lied about the rc fisa warrants. They wont stop unless they are stopped.
----------------

It looks like Obama did spy on Trump, just as he apparently did to me

The Obama administration spied on a range of journalists, elected officials and others.

thehill.com

I have spent more than two years litigating against the Department of Justice for the computer intrusions. Forensics have revealed dates, times and methods of some of the illegal activities. The software used was proprietary to a federal intel agency. The intruders deployed a keystroke monitoring program, accessed the CBS News corporate computer system, listened in on my conversations by activating the computer’s microphone and used Skype to exfiltrate files.

Patterns

It’s difficult not to see patterns in the government’s behavior, unless you’re wearing blinders.

• The intelligence community secretly expanded its authority in 2011 so it can monitor innocent U.S. citizens like you and me for doing nothing more than mentioning a target’s name a single time.
• In January 2016, a top secret inspector general report found the NSA violated the very laws designed to prevent abuse.
• In 2016, Obama officials searched through intelligence on U.S. citizens a record 30,000 times, up from 9,500 in 2013.
• Two weeks before the election, at a secret hearing before the FISA court overseeing government surveillance, NSA officials confessed they’d violated privacy safeguards “with much greater frequency” than they’d admitted. The judge accused them of “institutional lack of candor” and said, “this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

Officials involved in the surveillance and unmasking of U.S. citizens have said their actions were legal and not politically motivated. And there are certainly legitimate areas of inquiry to be made by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But look at the patterns. It seems that government monitoring of journalists, members of Congress and political enemies — under multiple administrations — has become more common than anyone would have imagined two decades ago. So has the unmasking of sensitive and highly protected names by political officials.

 

[Northern Light]

I watched the debate closely in congress and then in the senate. I was very sad to see so many congressmen and senators so against it, only to flip opinions really quickly. They obviously caved to pressure or bribery. They just expanded warrantless spying on our citizens, via social media. It didn't seem to get much attention in the MSM, which is also typical. I don't think a lot of people know this happened, but it's a sign things are getting worse in our polity.

 

[medi]

I watched the debate closely in congress and then in the senate. I was very sad to see so many congressmen and senators so against it, only to flip opinions really quickly. They obviously caved to pressure or bribery. They just expanded warrantless spying on our citizens, via social media. It didn't seem to get much attention in the MSM, which is also typical. I don't think a lot of people know this happened, but it's a sign things are getting worse in our polity.

Now I am suspecting I'll get hit with that frequently run out response that I should be doing tons of homework before asking this question, but I suppose my hide is still thick enough to stand being branded with the "Lazy." mark, if that is the problem.

BUT, it has been my experience over the years on the Net that in communities such like here the asking can lead to information coming out that might not be so easy to find when doing single-person (non-group) research.

My question is whether there are any open organizations that help us know when spying on the Net is happening? Not some secret style of organization, but some folks that are straight out in the open with the goal of pointing at spying incidents? Why a particular investigation was started, how it was conducted, and the results?

Or is an open style like that too dangerous in some way? Maybe our ISP is told to cut us off, if the government folks don't like the line of enquiry and information put out to the public?

Now I am an old fart, so I think back to when that telephone bugging may have been taking place and it was legal to buy equipment that could maybe find the bugs.

Then there is that very key vocabulary "warrantless" and what might can be done to try and have that stopped. Certainly there is some organization that is openly fighting against that, yes?

AND, a very important question; will the boss here, the owner(s), allow us to openly pursue this? Maybe there is already a thread around here? I'll check after I get done asking a thousand questions, like I have done. [I don't think it is such a horrible 'crime' to ask in a thread when the topic might arise, and THEN go see where and when the subject came up in an older thread.]

By the way, I'm not so sure it is only government organizations spying that worries me. I think there is way too much Google Spying, too. Maybe Microsoft Spying. But I suspect Google has the art of this down better than any other commercial organization.

 

[Northern Light]

Now I am suspecting I'll get hit with that frequently run out response that I should be doing tons of homework before asking this question, but I suppose my hide is still thick enough to stand being branded with the "Lazy." mark, if that is the problem.

BUT, it has been my experience over the years on the Net that in communities such like here the asking can lead to information coming out that might not be so easy to find when doing single-person (non-group) research.

My question is whether there are any open organizations that help us know when spying on the Net is happening? Not some secret style of organization, but some folks that are straight out in the open with the goal of pointing at spying incidents? Why a particular investigation was started, how it was conducted, and the results?

Or is an open style like that too dangerous in some way? Maybe our ISP is told to cut us off, if the government folks don't like the line of enquiry and information put out to the public?

Now I am an old fart, so I think back to when that telephone bugging may have been taking place and it was legal to buy equipment that could maybe find the bugs.

Then there is that very key vocabulary "warrantless" and what might can be done to try and have that stopped. Certainly there is some organization that is openly fighting against that, yes?

AND, a very important question; will the boss here, the owner(s), allow us to openly pursue this? Maybe there is already a thread around here? I'll check after I get done asking a thousand questions, like I have done. [I don't think it is such a horrible 'crime' to ask in a thread when the topic might arise, and THEN go see where and when the subject came up in an older thread.]

By the way, I'm not so sure it is only government organizations spying that worries me. I think there is way too much Google Spying, too. Maybe Microsoft Spying. But I suspect Google has the art of this down better than any other commercial organization.

I'm sure there will be subsequent legislation or simply subcommittee planning relating to exactly how the back doors will be created, assuming they don't exist already. For example, the main operating systems that come with PCs all have backdoors for law enforcement to gain access if they confiscate your computer. Those were legislated a long time ago.

The corporate partners of the government have no scruples, in the sense that they will respond immediately with obedience to the legislation. They are already mining our consumer data based on our user habits, so it's not a far cry to just let the government read our private messages as well.

The key thing to remember is that it is warrantless. Meaning, they can surveil anyone at any time for any reason, or no reason. They may even just mass gather data and back search it if the individual becomes relevant to law enforcement. That approach was what Snowden and his contemporaries exposed before they were ousted. There are huge data warehouses in the United States that just bulk-gather data.

As AI becomes more and more skillful, it will be incredibly easy to batch-search this data for suspects or anyone the government du jour deems a threat.

It seems like the whole country is currently busy fighting over social justice and other culture wars, but social justice is meaningless if there is no technological justice. It is technology that determines who has real power, not their social status. Humanity's next big struggle with government won't have anything to do with social justice. It will be all about digital control of people and information through technologies that only specific entities will own, understand and operate.

 

[medi]

I best answer one question I asked above; there are many threads showing here under the search parameter: 'Internet spying'. A tad bit surprising, though, was the lack of duplication in the first page results. Looks like I'll need to start a new file.

Actually, I felt like a real dumbshite just after doing the previous post. I went to the top of the page to see who had started this thread. I had actually forgotten I had. My brain is beginning to piss me off these days. Too much not working like when younger.

EDIT: And, Northern Light, I am not so sure I want to trust lawmakers in any nation to be on the front line of this battle to stop the spying. Yes, it would be a good idea to have a file on what lawmakers are doing in various nations around the planet where democracy of any sort is supposed to be the waters in which a government ship is sailing, but I think Earth's citizens need to take matters into their own hands, if that is remotely possible. Meaning, if we haven't already missed that chance.

 

[Northern Light]

I best answer one question I asked above; there are many threads showing here under the search parameter: 'Internet spying'. A tad bit surprising, though, was the lack of duplication in the first page results. Looks like I'll need to start a new file.

Actually, I felt like a real dumbshite just after doing the previous post. I went to the top of the page to see who had started this thread. I had actually forgotten I had. My brain is beginning to piss me off these days. Too much not working like when younger.

EDIT: And, Northern Light, I am not so sure I want to trust lawmakers in any nation to be on the front line of this battle to stop the spying. Yes, it would be a good idea to have a file on what lawmakers are doing in various nations around the planet where democracy of any sort is supposed to be the waters in which a government ship is sailing, but I think Earth's citizens need to take matters into their own hands, if that is remotely possible. Meaning, if we haven't already missed that chance.

The main thing that should in theory notify us that we may be getting spied on is the privacy policy of the various online platforms we use. They will probably say something along the lines of "will provide access to your account at the behest of law enforcement," or it may be worded more vaguely. Privacy policies are really unwieldy these days, and they change very often. Most people just click "agree" when there are changes, without reading on.

One thing that could help with this down the road is AI. You could get an AI to read a huge privacy policy and tell you within a few seconds if it says anything about government spying.

AI could also help us more quickly digest the massive legislation that goes through Congress, often which are hundreds or thousands of pages. It's important that we understand our rights because they are being eroded continuously.

 

[The Mark]

Posted as a 24-minute read, but I think it takes longer, if you want to fully grasp the topic.

Inside the White House Program to Share America’s Secrets

Mass surveillance and social media are changing the spy game.

time.com

I'll choose the following paragraph to show one aspect of what the Times has to offer on this:



Besides putting forth a way to get a first learn on this topic, I'd also be quite interested in opinions.

Oh yes, and our friends in/from other nations may very well have opinions that are worthy of note for us in the United States.

IMO it doesn't matter if it's the multiple data collection companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon that do it, or if the intelligence organizations do it themselves. The government can and will ask them for data if they think they need it.
I just assume that data is being collected on me at all times, unless I'm not near any electronics, and possibly even then.

I have zero expectation of my privacy being respected.

And I doubt that will ever be adequately addressed by legislation, or at least not anytime soon.

 

[medi]

Appreciate the feedback, Northern Light and The Mark.

Taking your thoughts first, The Mark, I think I have pretty much fallen into that line of thought at my end, too. I'm very sure my own admin records on a few sites, one I didn't own, reflect that view to consider that nothing posted in our admin/mod sections as being completely safe from view of anyone that really made the effort to sneak into our supposedly restricted posting areas.

Please allow me to set aside for the moment that point about whether lawmakers can define there roles in all this. I see that Northern Light also touched upon what lawmakers are doing, but it is that use of "if" used in that second paragraph that strikes me as worthy of a question; do you really think there is a chance that some government entity is not at least putting a given site into a file? And this might be where I'd like to start.

You see, I think of this idea of spying as something like a human in a given nation having a criminal record. Now all citizens have a federal (central government) record because of taxes. BUT not all citizens have a criminal record. And I have gotten to a kind of thought process that has me viewing my site being in some government file as my site having a criminal record. No matter that I may have done zip-zero-nothing illegal with my site, but if some government wants my site in some special "Watch It/Them." file I view that as I am in a hot seat. As in just being in that file as a bad thing.

And you'll see I use the vocabulary "some government" because I started taking the view of watching out for ALL governments that may be monitoring a given site and that started back a fair number of years when I was a paid admin on a site here in Asia that was, for a time, one of the hottest debating sites on the Net. Both China groups, the ROK, and Japan had citizens from all four nations going at each other in some really hardcore ways. Then there was a fair number of folks from outside those four nations. And from time-to-time we'd see signs of government folks poking their noses into areas for the general membership, and even the mod/admin section, before we'd spot the hole and plug it. And there were a very few times where we actually had to co-operate with law enforcement because some member posted something indicating civil laws had been broken. So we get back to the "some government" thought process, I have never dumped the idea to be wary of ALL governments.

And when I have had to learn about a given bit of law written in a document I have frequently seen some very strange differences in how a given government viewed what they had the right to do on the Net. In fact, some fifteen years ago I was in a special slot here in Japan at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and I had a fella take me into a room where they had stored the laws of a whole bunch of other countries and it was stunning the size of the room and the numbers of books and folders and such. Obviously, one would easily realize such a room would be large and full, but when actually seeing that --- well, it is a surprise, even though you had anticipated it.

It almost reminded me of a time in the ROK when I was shown into a special room in a building on Yoido and that special room was a strictly controlled temperature/humidity room because it stored very old books and papers of laws written a long time ago.

Okay, I might have drifted a bit; but trying to get back to a key question: Might there be a default government operating procedure that ALL Net sites that allow a free exchange of ideas between Net citizens goes into some sort of government monitoring mechanism? And how many governments might have that set as SOP (Standard Operating Procedure)?

THEN; could a "Yes." to either of the two questions above and inclusive of any specific government on Earth then be given a verification by us right here in this thread? Or in a separate thread just for the purpose of gathering the information and properly filing it. A kind of privately run professional monitoring system.

If governments want to monitor us, why can't we monitor them?

 

[medi]

< < < truncated > > >

Please allow me to set aside for the moment that point about whether lawmakers can define there roles in all this. . . .

I was too late in catching that absolutely stupid / careless error, so I guess I need to do this "fix" this way. Of course, all of you can see the stupid mistake I made, so there's no need to type in the correct word.

 

[Lutherf]

Posted as a 24-minute read, but I think it takes longer, if you want to fully grasp the topic.

Inside the White House Program to Share America’s Secrets

Mass surveillance and social media are changing the spy game.

time.com

I'll choose the following paragraph to show one aspect of what the Times has to offer on this:



Besides putting forth a way to get a first learn on this topic, I'd also be quite interested in opinions.

Oh yes, and our friends in/from other nations may very well have opinions that are worthy of note for us in the United States.

Over the years our government has construed the Constitution to be more of a frustrating obstacle to management of society rather than as a protection of independence of the individual and the states. Their "need" to circumvent protections against government intrusions on individual rights has been around for decades, was expanded with the Patriot Act and is now being used on a global scale to subject US citizens to control even beyond our borders.

 

[medi]

< < < truncated > > >

It’s difficult not to see patterns in the government’s behavior, unless you’re wearing blinders.

• The intelligence community secretly expanded its authority in 2011 so it can monitor innocent U.S. citizens like you and me for doing nothing more than mentioning a target’s name a single time.
• In January 2016, a top secret inspector general report found the NSA violated the very laws designed to prevent abuse.
• In 2016, Obama officials searched through intelligence on U.S. citizens a record 30,000 times, up from 9,500 in 2013.
• < < < truncated > > >

For those who may not have yet checked, the first link akyron shared with us is a pdf. But I had trouble saving it. Might be because I am outside of CONUS and not presently on a base/post computer. Once I did get it to load, though, there was the abbreviation "temp" in the address and I'm not quite sure why.

And the second link is this:

IC ON THE RECORD

Introduction In June 2014, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) began releasing statistics relating to the use of critical national security authorities, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), in an annual report called the Statistical Transparency Report...

icontherecord.tumblr.com

Only reason I'm doing this is because when covering a topic such as this, sometimes links go 404.

Oh yes, a belated thank you for that post, akyron.