It's chilling that they explicitly mention parallel construction on page 12:
When a complete set of CDRs are subpoenaed from the carrier, then all memorialized references to relevant and pertinent calls can be attributed to the carrier's records, thus "walling off" the information obtained from Hemisphere. In other words, Hemisphere can easily be protected if it is used as a pointer system to uncover relevant numbers.
The notion of "walling off" information apparently also extends to court testimony and the prosecution brief:
"However, when the mention of Hemisphere data in official documentation or court testimony is unavoidable ... Hemisphere analysts might advise the investigator on issues such as report writing, presentation to the prosecutor, and the trial phase." (p14)
If you work for an agency like the NSA or ONDCP as either a contractor or a full-time employee, and you're aware of a program like this, and you do not act to disclose it to the press and/or subvert it, then...
Hell, I'm not even going to finish that thought. If I do, it will seem redundant to someone with a conscience, and legally actionable otherwise.
... you're not upholding the Constitution of the United States, which you took and oath to defend.
The oath to protect the constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic should take precedence over any oaths to individual institutions that derive their raison d'etre from the Constitution itself. Without the Constitution, there is no United States of America. Without the United States of America, there is no Department of Defense. Without the DoD, there is no NSA or ONDCP.
The simple truth is this: Anyone who supports the war on drugs as it is currently being run has abandoned what the US stood for at its founding regarding liberty, freedom, and the rule of law.
I agree with the main thrust of your comment but perpetuating the 'immaculate conception' myth of the US as a government of, for, and by the people is counterproductive. In particular the war on drugs absolutely goes against the ideas 'espoused' at that time. But that still holds. Ask any senator what America stands for and they will say something like "liberty, freedom, and justice for all". That doesn't mean it is what they work for in the background.
Even while framing the constitution the controlling landowners of the US, i.e. the "US", were aware of the internal enemy that needed to be controlled.
"The framers of the constitution made the determination that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent"
> makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to insure that the government will, in his words "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform
My point wasn't that this didn't happen or the US was some magical egalitarian wonderland (though the foundational period of the US had a surprisingly level of wealth equality compared to some other periods).
Rather, my point was the manner in which they did this was to construct a system of law that protected the private individual from the instruments of government, and that we're slowly undoing that precise social contract - not stealing their wealth in exchange for restraint on government powers.
It's hard to argue even though the founding of the US wasn't perfect, and that these instruments largely came about as a protection for the wealthy, that it didn't significantly raise the profile of the citizen-as-having-rights-to-be-protected form of government or that the US doesn't have a long history of viewing such policies as important, even if there have been historic violations.
I think you'd even have trouble finding periods similar to the 50-70 year long ratcheting we've seen meant to undermine those exact same rights, or that their infringement has crept so far up the social ladder.
OK. Yes the framers of the constitution did create protections from the government for themselves, and shared that with the rest of the population. As you imply it is hard to know if the general case was a side-effect or original intent.
At the same time they purposefully sought to disenfranchise the majority so that they might change the rules at any time.
So the constitution within the constitution is that the government will protect the wealthy, and that makes sense given who was writing it.
It appears that the ruling elites now value control of the population over privacy. I see two possible explanations but perhaps there are others.
* They see the incredible growth of poverty in the US and there is no vast neighboring region in which to exterminate existing inhabitants and settle. Hence wealth protection from the masses is a higher priority than the privacy protections.
* Mass media has distorted the scale of the disenfranchising effects of our system (rich have more control and poor even less) and the wealthy realise they can use their control of the government to make huge fortunes. For example the profits of the banks are derived by transfer of wealth from taxpayers through implicit insurance since insurance allows highly profitable high risk strategies. They then choose short term profits over privacy / human rights.
In any case they choose to exercise their rights under the constitution within the constitution to change the laws to bring about repression and control.
I'm not really rebutting your point here. Instead I want to highlight that what is happening now IS consistent with the ideals of governance around during the formation of the US and what has changed is likely a lower level 'priority'
'Anyone who supports the war on drugs has abandoned liberty and freedom.'
Terms like "the rule of law" encourage a mentality that's unempathetic and unconcerned with many forms of tyranny and suffering. It encourages complicit behavior through blind allegiance and rhetoric. That allegiance will probably remain until the faithful are personally affected and destroyed by the rule of law they so thought they knew.
The rule of law is a process that should be (and usually isn't) viewed as deserving of great distrust, fear, and delicacy rather than of great admiration and worship. The largest atrocities and cruelest of societies may happen due to the rule of law. The United States' Bill of Rights is not enough. Legitimacy doesn't fear it. Meaning is created. Meaning overrides meaning. Freedom and free speech may be eternal flames in the hearts of free minds. I hope that will always be so. Legitimacy, meanwhile, paves a path with new terms while nationalists are left clinging to the rule of law.
> The largest atrocities and cruelest of societies may happen due to the rule of law.
I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to.
Conflating secret law with law being the basis of our large scale interactions doesn't make for a strong argument, unless you can show that one necessitates the other.
Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it.
I'm curious what you'd propose as a stable large scale social structure that doesn't fundamentally depend on us establishing a mutual rulebook that we all agree to play by. I don't mean that sarcastically, I honestly want you to suggest one.
Talking about the systemically brutal consequences of people who have blind allegiance to the rule of law is not equivalent to inferring that humanitarian law (e.g. Bill of Rights) shouldn't exist. It's not equivalent to saying law isn't useful. You're conflating or projecting these sentiments. Unfortunately, conflation like that is a common consequence of nationalism. People who find faults are often derided or willfully misinterpreted. I'm not accusing you of this. It's just a point.
> "I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to."
Those societies didn't have "secret" police. They had police who operated (sometimes in secret) legally. Every nation is as fueled by law as the next group seeking legitimacy. This shouldn't be a point of contention. No one's conflating "secret law" with "law." In a land where "secret law" becomes increasingly legitimate, it becomes a fool's errand to stress over shallow semantics, as dire reality takes shape (e.g. a prison, surveillance, military economy legitimately escalating).
> "Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it."
Allegiance to "rule of law" is entirely nationalistic in this context of nations. I'm not talking about the 'laws' of physics. The violence that inherently serves as the foundation of all national laws isn't magic. Zeus and his jack-booted thugs aren't appearing out of the sky to magically enforce words written on paper. Maybe you're trying to say that one person's interpretation of a nation will vary from another person's interpretation and, therefore, this means that one particular nationalist is not the same as another particular nationalist in the same nation. That's true. Yet, it doesn't mean much. It's usually a source of delusion ultimately.
Wow. We actually have secret police in America. I didn't really put together what that means until now.
There are 'law enforcement' agencies that operate outside the law, and they fight to keep their very existence from being exposed in court. Thats crazy.
Our country is full of police departments that fund themselves through seizures of drug money, that they know about by using data our intelligence services collected on us.
I wonder who's using the phone data to buy and sell stocks? Maybe that's what they'll get into once we legalize marijuana.
There are easier ways for the government to make money. There is a strong belief the CIA was selling drugs to citizens in the 80s to fund themselves [1]
A strong belief in the sense that it's a fact. Read about operation Dark Star [1]. The cia was complicit in Rick Ross selling several metric tons of cocaine (earning himself inflation adjusted $0.85B [2]). Every American should read Dark Star [3] to know what cia and republicans get up to when a central american country exercises a little too much democracy or our pet dictator is overthrown. That is, while the cia is not busy encouraging rape, torture, indiscriminate killings of civilians, etc.
In his affidavit to the World Court, former contra Edgar Chamorro testified
that "The CIA did not discourage such tactics. To the contrary, the Agency
severely criticized me when I admitted to the press that the FDN had
regularly kidnapped and executed agrarian reform workers and civilians. We
were told that the only way to defeat the Sandinistas was to...kill, kidnap,
rob and torture..." [4]
While this story may be true, it doesn't quite support 'There are easier ways for the government to make money.'
The CIA is very different from local law enforcement agencies, and they don't just rely on the material support of siezures of cash and other things which go to auction, but a substantial portion of all of their staffing budgets come from federal drug grants, which means that there are individuals who need to protect the drug war in order to protect their jobs.
There are scarcely easier ways for law enforcement to fund itself than to sieze cash from marijuana farmers and distributors. Even legalization campaigns to tax and regulate come across as shockingly close to protection schemes, since not supporting them is effectively supporting the continued risk of militarized police encounters.
McCoy addresses this theory in his book: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. His conclusion was that the CIA appreciated having a little no-strings-attached pocket change, but that it wasn't funding them in a meaningful way, and that their involvement in the drug trade was more for the access that it gave them to shady people.
Sidebar: for all the ranting that deserves to be done here, it's also interesting to note that this was an internal IT program, like many other programs I suspect HN readers may have participated in. There was a help desk, a POC, a procedure to follow, and so on.
They didn't want the average Law Enforcement schmuck calling operations! Instead you had to contact your POC. They were probably afraid of being overwhelemed by call volume. Turnaround looks like a couple of hours on a good day. In addition, they were doing one of those "train the trainer" things where they were looking at using the POCS to create "super users" to work the system and work with the local folks. Must have been a real concern about volume and support. Gad, how many people were (are) using this thing, anyway?
Email was the preferred medium of response, so no online app, at least as far as end-users go. In addition, there was a section about "deconfliction" which was a bit confusing to me, but I never took the training. Was there training? I wonder if, along with this deck, there wasn't a 1-day or 2-day class? If so, who was sent to take it?
It always surprises me that when you see something really bad, how normal it all looks and acts. I can just see a conference room at some Holiday Inn full of regular-looking middle-aged folks, slurping up bad coffee and stale donuts, wondering if they were going to be let out early while some other guy putzes around with a MacBook and a projector and an assistant hands out TS/SCI forms.
Yes, they met at a Holiday Inn, drank shitty coffee, ate stale donuts, some guy complained about video adapters, and then they spent the day discussing how to completely subvert the fourth amendment of the constitution.
Let me commend them on the clarity of their writing. When the audiences is themselves it's brisk, vigorous, candid, and refreshingly to the point.
Now contrast that with monstrosities like the Affordable Health Care Act, thousands of pages long, nearly impenetrable, and executed without any of the legislators involved actually reading or understanding it.
Or the tax code, which is incapable of returning idempotent values when the same functions are applied to identical inputs.
They should rewrite the tax code in Haskell. Not only would that simplify it greatly, it'd also lead to a significant increase in the number of MonadFactoryFactories in Enterprise tax-handling code, which might ultimately motivate Oracle to add higher kinded polymorphism to Java. One can always dream...
That will accomplish absolutely nothing, except to legitimize those who have overseen this reprehensible development, and all the other political and social catastrophes of the past 30-40 years.
Voting, writing your congressman, and helping elect another corrupt politician are all activities that do nothing to improve the status quo. Voting in particular helps maintain the facade that America is a functioning democracy, when in fact our only choices are two sides of the same coin.
The sooner the citizenry understand that, the better we'll all be.
Instead, work toward educating your fellow citizens about these problems, and why they're happening.
Refrain from spending your money on companies that back up the status quo. It's a hard task, but there are some major offenders (defense industry and banking industry are two big ones).
If you're entrepreneurial or technical, consider developing technical solutions to these political problems, that work around the problems or help solve them. This recent ycombinator company offering "justice-as-a-service" is a good example of this approach:
Got it. Don't vote, don't attempt to hold elected officials accountable or even let them know in tangible communications about what I feel. Give up and disengage completely, educate other citizens on why they should give up and disengage completely, put my money into my mattress (or a credit union, I guess), and start a garden so I can feed myself. But where do I buy the seeds!?
I say get more engaged, but be pragmatic and protect yourself emotionally. I do believe that many, but not all, representatives would respond to increased personal communication. All of my conversation with former DC staffers has done nothing by reinforce this view for me.
But don't leave it there. Support causes you believe in, and if you can use technology or commerce to enact change positive change then that's even better.
On the contrary, he advocates a proactive approach to 'engage and inform other citizens' and start having people stop relying on a broken system, instead of taking responsibility for their actions and effectuating real change.
The problem is that his analysis is weak: the reason that there are two choices are because of people like him disengaging and not supporting a third choice.
Further, it's not the case that actions like those done by the NSA happened in a vacuum. The reality is that most of the country demanded, following one stinging terrorist attack that this must never happened again. The men and women of our military fulfilled that wish: at the cost of $20 billion a year, they delivered to us most of the globe on a silver platter, completely electronically dominated and ready to be watched to stop even a whiff of such a threat.
That our social demands (in aggregate) are childish, insane, bipolar, etc isn't their fault. They simply did what society demanded it needed to feel safe, what they saw as their duty.
The simple truth is that the current state of affairs is exactly what we've asked for, in large part, and that the most realistic way to reform it is to engage with other citizens and help them understand why their contrary and silly demands are contrary and silly.
All that pulling away from the political exchange will do is lead us down the path of a civil war (or other turmoil) as people who refuse to be part of the rule making also refuse to follow the rules.
> the reason that there are two choices are because of people like him disengaging and not supporting a third choice
I think this is untrue, or at least not the major factor. First-past-the-post voting seems to result inevitably in the situation the US finds itself in, with two main parties with no significant differences on most major issues, where voting for a third party candidate causes a spoiler effect.
I am sometimes surprised that this type of argument gets downvoted. How can it be said that the political system is NOT broken? You`d think after all the information uncovered by Snowden this would be obvious to most of us.
Saying "the system is broken because it doesn't represent my interests" doesn't seem likely to go anywhere. Someone will always say that. Assuming you fix the system, whoever's interests are currently being represented will make the exact same complaint.
For the majority of American history, the system was fundamentally broken for women. That wasn't fixed by women sitting out and saying boohoo.
This is a database of call detail records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record) and the numbers they have called, and numbers that have called them. It does not contain subscriber data (names, account information) - just metadata about calls.
They use this database to find cycled phone numbers that have similar calling patterns. (Phone number 1 tends to make and receive calls from number 2, 4, 9 and 13. in geographic area X) Phone number 1 stops making calls, and phone number 50 starts making/receiving calls to 2, 4, 9, and 13 in area Y. So they can assume that whomever owns 50 is the same person that used to own 1 and now they're in area Y.
Maybe Im just being clueless today, but can anybody explain to me what is so chilling about this system? I don't see where it can really be abused unless you've got some stalker that works for LA's DEA and they're trying to find out their estranged ex-wife's new phone number?
When you have the entire call graph, it's almost trivial to match it up to names. And then you know who everyone calls and who calls them, which I would argue is almost as fundamental an affront to privacy as knowing the actual content.
Law enforcement doesn't have the entire call graph. They have a service, that they can request specific data from, that takes 2-5 days to return the requested information, which is pretty much only "additional phones, and switched phones", and they have to have a subpoena to get that data in the first place. This isnt some google search they can mine for whatever. The 2-5 day lag is almost certainly paperwork bureaucracy verifying that they have a legal reason to search the database.
I suppose the folks at the "Hemisphere Regional Data Center" could theoretically match up the names to the phone numbers (not AT ALL trivial - I used to work with credit header data and telco record data - the data quality is an absolute shitshow), but that power certainly is not in the hands of any local law enforcement.
Subscriber data is easily matched, as mentioned in the slides. It advises law enforcement officers and other judicial officials to perjure themselves. There have been enough discussions about the value of metadata for identifying people that one should have an opinion by now as to whether it is a violation of one's rights for the gov't to collect it indiscriminately.
Doesn't surprise me at all. I've been subject to 'random physical search' in very unexpected situation, twice. Both of those cases were when I had been in (phone) contact in previous days with guys which phones were highly likely to be monitored by law enforcement. - Random isn't nearly as random, as you might think.
Wikipedia has: "Limited Distribution, Proprietary, Originator Controlled, Law Enforcement Sensitive were designations the Pentagon attempted in 2011 to exempt from President Obama's Executive Order 13556"
Executive Order 13556 "Controlled Unclassified Information" required a public registry of such information and that the
registry and implementing directives would be available to the public.
woah, I hadn't even considered that the term has an explicit legal definition. Scary stuff. Protect and serve the people but do it behind closed doors because the people can't handle the truth, right? Problem is the people can't make an informed vote on something they don't know about. The line between democracy and fascism is a fine one and I feel more like our government's mission is creeping in a definite direction every time one of these stories comes to light. I thank the god I don't believe that there are real patriots in this world like Snowden and the EFF who are trying to put the power of the truth in the hands of the people.
My impression was Obama had issued the executive order to make public "controlled unclassified information" so the guys used a euphemism so if taken to court they could they had no undeclared controlled unclassified information. Sensitive information maybe but not controlled.
When the document has more than one title, it makes sense to use the most informative one.
The submitted title was "DO Not mention Hemisphere in any official reports or court documents". That broke the guidelines, certainly by being baity and arguably by editorializing as well.
I know, but picking an arbitrary sentence to emphasize one tendentious point is a form of spin, and thus arguably editorializing.
In the absence of any good title, subtitle, or caption, it's ok to pick the sentence from the article that best and most neutrally represents it as a whole. But that is not the same thing.
When a complete set of CDRs are subpoenaed from the carrier, then all memorialized references to relevant and pertinent calls can be attributed to the carrier's records, thus "walling off" the information obtained from Hemisphere. In other words, Hemisphere can easily be protected if it is used as a pointer system to uncover relevant numbers.