NSA Chief Denies Domestic Spying Story (2012)(forbes.com) |
NSA Chief Denies Domestic Spying Story (2012)(forbes.com) |
No.
Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?
No.
It's worth noting that "intercept" has a very specific meaning here, which the Congressman asking the question nor the reporter may not have realized.
From http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all...
A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls.
So it is possible that the NSA routinely collects telephone and/or email metadata and that the NSA does not routinely "intercept" citizen's email or cell-phone conversation (depending upon the meaning of "routinely" used), and that an answer of "No" to the latter is not a lie.
This article by the same author has more information on the program's specifics (http://theweek.com/article/index/245285/how-the-nsa-uses-you...), as his sources have told him:
The NSA would insist that it does not actually "spy" on you until it gets a further order, if at all. In most all circumstances, the FBI, not the NSA, would actually listen to your conversations if a FISA order was acquired. So merely "collecting" the data is like receiving a box full of records but not opening it until and unless they had a good reason to do so.
That metaphor is not terribly comforting, but it does appear to be the government's justification for insisting that they don't actually, actively "spy" on you. It is true: If they only compile these transactional records and don't do anything with them, and they faithfully honor this distinction, then the scale of the actual surveillance is not necessarily harmful, although it feels heavy. That's a big if. It depends on whether you believe the NSA follows the rules.
In other words, they collude to keep the public in the dark.
Have you heard the claim that your name in all caps is different than your name as you would write it? What is your opinion on that claim?
That won't stop Congress from being livid, should the representatives choose to be.
Lookup: "William Binney" former NSA official. he says the NSA intercepts most American email communications.
Having a permanent digital record of what many assume to be transient information is what makes this alarming beyond belief.
"Obama administration spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen"
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-admin-spied-fox-new...
These creative redefinitions of seemingly benign terms are at the root of the problem.
- "Verizon intercepts the calls, we only collect them"
- "Verison only gives us call meta data (who called whom? when? how long?)."
- "We don't intercept the emails, Google just gives us all of the emails sitting on their servers."
... etc
"we don't - our interception devices do"
:(
Interesting. Along those lines then if you were to make a clone of someone's hard drive but you actually didn't boot or access any of the information on the hard drive I wonder what law that may or may not break? You seem to be guilty of cloning a hard drive which may not be the same as stealing anything in particular that is covered by the way a law is written.
Language matters.
Also the questions focus on what the NSA is intercepting, not what they are being given /demanding under a NSL.
Also it's unclear what processing by computers may be done of such material. If you have a computer doing threat assessment of all emails, but the NSA employees only get the assessment results, not the text, they could arguably state what they are saying.
Wrong questions. Someone should clue congress into the right questions.
see: "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is."
In other words, if we find out this guy is lying through his teeth, he's toast no matter what the rules said he "could" say.
Most of us might hate that the government has this power but that does not make it extra-legal.
Without trying to confuse the issue too much, Congress could pass a law that makes slavery legal again, which is to say, that it is allowed by law. The flip side to that though, is that the Constitution would prohibit such an action.
That is clearly of little comfort in the meantime, but it does mean that law enforcement officers are not necessarily bound to enforce the law, courts are not necessarily bound to uphold it, and it likely has a good chance of being overturned by the Supreme Court (if not before).
American Jurisprudence has this to say on the matter:
It is impossible for both the Constitution and a law to be
valid, one must prevail. This is succinctly stated as follows:
The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having
the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void,
and ineffective for any purpose since unconstitutionality dates from
the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the
decision so branding it an unconstitutional law.
In legal contemplation, it is as inoperative as if it had never
been passed...
Since an unconstitutional law is void the general principles follow;
that it imposes no duties, confers no rights, creates no office, bestows
no power of authority on anyone, affords no protection, and justifies no
acts performed under it.
A void law cannot be legally consistent with a valid one. An
unconstitutional law cannot operate to supersede any existing valid law.
Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the
land, it is superseded thereby.
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no court is bound to
enforce it.
To be legal, under US law, an act must necessarily be Constitutional as well; an unconstitutional act is, ipso facto, illegal.
Thanks for the correction.
Still, a resignation might give us some hope that at the very least the recognize how outraged this makes use, and they'll try to do better in the future. If they don't do that, then that's just defiance against the American people and against the Constitution.
Legislation often includes a section dedicated to definitions, commonly the first or last clause in a subsection of the US code. The holdings of court cases are also a significant source of information (but you have to distinguish between the holding, which is highly technical and narrow, and the dicta which is the long and often wide-ranging explanations of what the holding means that makes up the bulk of a judicial opinion, but which do not themselves have the force of law).
Have you heard the claim that your name in all caps is different than your name as you would write it? What is your opinion on that claim?
Complete garbage. I don't want to spend time or energy digging up all the references for you, but you can safely assume that anyone advancing that argument is a crazy trying to get out of paying income taxes (similar arguments include claims that having a certain kind of flag in the courtroom nullifies the legal force of a judicial decision and that your social security card is actually a certificate of slavery). Almost all such arguments originate from a set of fringe Christian conspiracy theories informally known as Dominionism in which (among other things) the federal government is considered an invention of Satan designed to trick Christians out of their rightful place as rulers over the Promised Land. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reconstructionism
Surprising or counter-intuititve legal arguments that lean heavily on 'natural law' often turn out to be grounded in religious belief as well.
It is interesting to compare this to a different thread about fallacies. If you're seeking the truth it's good to interpret someone's statements charitably. However when somebody in government says something, it's better to interpret it as cynically as possible, because that's where the unconstrained power forms.
Words don't have universal legal definitions. However, at the start of a law there is usually a list of terms and how they are defined for the purposes of that law. So if want to know whether or not you can be prosecuted for X, you need to look up how the relevant terms are defined in the laws for X.
In the case of emails and phone records, in many cases the NSA isn't intercepting that information. Rather, the ISPs/telcos are intercepting it and sending the data to the NSA.