Once again the lack of media coverage on this is appalling.
Rand Paul has introduced an amendment that goes up for vote tomorrow that would disallow this surveillance on American citizens, which of course is not expected to pass.
McConnell is drafting language to prevent this from being used on “federal election candidates” which of course is expected to pass.
>An individual running for a seat in the House or Senate or for the office of U.S. President becomes a candidate when he or she raises or spends more than $5,000 in contributions or expenditures.
One generally needs a certain number of petition signatures to appear on a ballot, but apparently not needed just to legally be a candidate.
So we start a party where we all sign to get each other on the ballot and donate to a pool that allocates $5k to each of us? Can this $5k just be moved around per candidate which counts as spending?
This would become a problem if someone just joined the party with the intent of cashing out the 5k$ and leaving. Maybe you could fix this somehow with smart contracts? idk
I gave you an upvote in the previous comment because I knew what you were talking about mainly due to Slackware's reference to Church of SubGenious. I don't think many know what that is though.
I would like to add, just think of the chaos at the primaries if the act of declaring candidacy one also declares they are running for the R|D nomination. The voting machines can barely deal with 20 presidential candidates. Imagine what would happen if you had to thousands of people running for a congressional seat!
The way this works is that no one is excluded. They collect everything blindly, then sort through for what they want. That was the issue when they falsely claimed US citizens were excluded. That’s the issue when they say the same about election candidates or sitting senators or whoever.
“(G) if the target of the electronic surveillance is an elected Federal official or a candidate in a Federal election, that the Attorney General has approved in writing of the investigation;“
No perfect solution, for sure, but you have some reasonably options to mitigate risk. If you can, use one outside the US i.e. with no financial presence of any kind there.
Admittedly that's a high bar, the next best choice is one that claims to keep no logs and has successfully defended such a claim to law enforcement. Not a long list here, but there are some.
Just use ~3 VPNs in a nested chain. So an adversary would need data from all three. Better yet, have the middle one be in a jurisdiction that doesn't cooperate with your adversary's.
Are VPNs legal in China? It would be hilarious to set up a chain of VPN connections that are each in a jurisdiction that will not cooperate with one another.
E.g. one connection each in China, Russia and USA, and three more in the opposite direction of geopolitical allegiance if you’re super paranoid.
I'm not at all familiar with Chinese VPN services. But it's my impression that the Chinese authorities mostly care about domestic VPN use. Citizens are limited to approved VPNs, which are obviously backdoored.
More generally, as long as you're not interacting with domestic Chinese people, authorities don't care much about what you're doing. That's what I've seen providers claim in darknet forums. And that was my experience when I leased VPS in Hong Kong. Once I made it clear that I wouldn't be interacting with domestic Chinese people, all was cool.
I have used one Russian VPN service, Insorg. They're one of the oldest. I've read about others, but don't recall names. And it's my impression that Russian authorities also mostly care about interactions with citizens.
So anyway, I typically start with a mainstream VPN service. Then I chain one or two notoriously hard to coerce ones. And for Mirimir, IVPN is the final one. Because I've written stuff for them, basically, so using IVPN earlier in chains would be stupid.
Although Tor is better, because the connection reroutes dynamically. And worse, because anyone can volunteer to be an entrypoint or endpoint - this matters because a very well-resourced adversary could conceivably control both your entrypoint and your endpoint, and use a timing correlation attack to de-anonymize you. But I don't know that nested VPNs are immune to that either, given the level of invasive surveillance 5-eyes has over the entire internet.
I only use Tor via nested VPN chains. The VPNs mainly provide backup anonymity, in case Tor circuits are compromised. And they also anonymize me vs Tor use, which may avoid attention.
When I don't care so much about anonymity, I just use nested VPN chains. Throughput is 5-10 times that for Tor, latency is lower, and I'm not limited to TCP.
And do you just need to spend ten minutes making a static webpage saying that you're running for federal office as a write-in candidate, or do you actually need the signatures to get on the ballot?
yeah the NSA will put a note in your file saying DO NOT SPY THIS PERSON and if someone sees that note and spies anyways, you can engage in a long and ultimately fruitless battle against the US DoJ.
To your point, I just visited the NYTimes.com, and no mention of this very important story on the front page. Clicked on "Politics" and "U.S.", and I still cannot find a single mention of this story. A complete failure.
Once again the lack of media coverage on this is appalling.
I often encourage (and practice myself) looking for a tip email address to your favorite outlets and sending them...well a tip when there’s a story going on they haven’t yet reported, but one feels especially is need of wider dissemination.
As it is right now, it would allow access to the internet search and browser history of anyone in the world, without probable cause or a warrant.
But to be clear, this is just a reduction in friction of the previous process which was to just call a judge of a secret FISA court which no one is really allowed to know the details of.
So this is likely just a move to reduce some red tape, and increase data ingress.
> the previous process which was to just call a judge of a secret FISA court which no one is really allowed to know the details of.
This is simplifying the process to imply it’s nothing more than just a phone call away. I do not think any court works like that. They still have to argue their case before a judge of the court which also allows third parties to submit material in the case.
Simply saying “no one” is suppose to know about these courts is portraying this process as something unconstitutional and nothing more than a secret society of government friends. If by no one you actually mean the public, then you have a point. There’s national security concerns around these type of things that you’re ignorantly ignoring.
You act as if this court has no existed for over 40 years and under multiple administrations from both side of the aisles.
The Lee-Leahy amendment passed the Senate. Not sure how someone can say there is no counter-balancing entity with regard to FISA courts.
From Senator Mike Lee's webpage[0]:
The Lee-Leahy amendment will strengthen third-party oversight of the FISA process. Specifically, it requires FISA court judges to appoint an amicus curae (a neutral third-party observer) in any case involving a “sensitive investigative matter” so long as the FISA court does not determine it to be inappropriate.
The amendment will also empower the amicus to raise any issue with the court at any time and give both the amicus and the FISA court access to all documents and information related to the surveillance application.
It is just a phone call away. Sometimes not even a phone call. In some cases the AG can authorize surveillance and merely notify a judge and file the warrant application later (within 10 days IIRC).
Even calling it a rubber stamp is an exceedingly generous definition of probable cause.
It's a pandemic, and as far as i remember they didn't finalise a rule to allow senators to vote remotely[1]. I don't know if this is why Bernie missed it, but 3 other senators besides him missed it too.
What media do you think should cover this? FOX News? CNN? MSNBC? Do you think Rachel Maddow should report on this? Who is going to report on this kind of stuff?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, everybody. Right now on the NYT side there's a story about renewable resources being used more than coal. Great news, but is it more important than the government snarfing your browser history? A California congressional election? We have college students considering gap years, LA Times has a spurious Wuhan-interest story and a whole 1/3 sidebar dedicated to the death count.
There are plenty of stories being written, but not about this. Pretty much at all. That is the problem, and I don't know how assigning blame certain outlets would change that. We don't know if pitches are getting rejected, or the money is in other topics, or anything, but the simple fact is that it's not happening and it's something that affects everybody in the US (and beyond, I'm sure).
Looks like you're getting the usual HN anti-intellectual downvotes and my upvote wasn't enough to drag you out of the gray.
I don't get the hostility towards requiring a warrant to spy on election candidates. Even if the goal is similar protections for everybody, it's obvious that measures designed to prevent parties from abusing the surveillance apparatus for political ends is a good thing. It's difficult to imagine a better tool for ensuring one side gets muck raked harder than the other.
Aside from the blatantly obvious issue of equal protection of the law, if the people who would have to pass a broader law are already protected by one that is narrowly focused on them, they're less incentivized to pass the broader law. Letting the narrow law pass creates a barrier to passing the broader law.
It goes even further than that. If the politicians are protected by their own special law they are much more likely to write laws that violate the privacy and rights of everyone else because they do not feel threatened by it.
For one, we have a POTUS that may have benefited knowingly or unknowingly by means of a foreign intelligence influence campaign. This gives those entities a free pass to influence campaigns or to hide other types of spying relating to an incumbent who is running for re-election. Seems like a bad time to make such a change in the law.
There’s also the whole equal protection under law issue — a core tenant of American law is that everyone is nominally the same. Declaring a vague category of citizen out of bounds of the law is absurd.
> Declaring a vague category of citizen out of bounds of the law is absurd.
Yet it’s hardly new for congress to exempt themselves from the laws they pass. Political campaigns are exempt from robocalls for instance. It’s an unfortunate reality.
You could literally say the same thing about the Steele Dossier sponsored by the Clinton Campaign, Steele was identified as connected to a foreign government influence campaign as well. A candidate literally cooperated with a foreign actor with undisclosed Russian ties to generate evidence against their opponent which they knew would be disseminated by the American IC. Not having these protections just incentivizes whoever currently controls the apparatus to strategically investigate their party's opposition.
Steele is very publically a former MI6 agent, and while the British are our allies, that counts in and of itself.
However, it's also fact that Steele himself was well known to Russian intelligence, and while it's clear he was no friend to them he was a known enemy - They were specifically trying to feed him disinformation[1][2]
Did he bite bad bait? That's the question that doubters bring up. The "pee tape" thing is so bizarre I think it's likely true, but on the other hand I think that at this point Trump could just own it.
It isn't about POTUS, it's about the notion that preventing US counter intelligence from doing their jobs with respect to illegal influence on political campaigns. If what you say is true, and the Clinton campaign was seeking foreign assistance, shouldn't we know about and prevent that?
It violates the core principle of equal justice. What if we only required search or arrest warrants for those with more than $10M in assets? Your comment would still apply, and would be more obviously unjust.
Whether it harmonizes perfectly with the spirit of equal justice or not is irrelevant to whether or not it still represents an improvement over the status quo. Your hypothetical is similarly asanine and works mainly as a straw man because, as far as the integrity of the democratic process, there's a clear difference between shielding individuals competing in a public election and random rich people on the street. You're literally arguing against something that would improve the integrity of the system.
If you have a broken system, and you allow people in power to fix it in targeted ways that only affect them, then it will never get fixed for ordinary people.
Your point might hold true if the people being exempted from surveillance weren't also the people deciding who can be exempted from surveillance. But since they are, it is counterproductive to the privacy cause to allow Congress to give itself these kinds of special rules.
Force everyone in society to play by the same rules, and everyone in society will get the benefits. Allow Congress to get into the habit of exempting themselves from social systems or problems, and those problems will continue to exist.
In other words, when setting up incentives you have to think pragmatically about the entire system in the long term; you can't always just focus on short-term goals to the exclusion of everything else. Local optimums[0] aren't just a problem in AI, they're also a problem in real life. Because of the long term consequences, we're not interested in forming privacy castes in scenarios where doing so will make it harder for us to improve the system in the future.
Rand Paul has introduced an amendment that goes up for vote tomorrow that would disallow this surveillance on American citizens, which of course is not expected to pass.
McConnell is drafting language to prevent this from being used on “federal election candidates” which of course is expected to pass.