Note that since it wasn't immediately apparent to me what or when the data was collected, this is about bulk collection of financial data in order to combat ISIL. Given the timeline of the report, https://www.cia.gov/static/63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/..., it makes it sound like they looked into activities in the 2014 timeframe.
Perhaps if that's the case the ACLU (or you) should provide some evidence of that instead of dressing up the most mundane incidental collection I've heard in my life.
It doesn't matter what information they were looking for:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[2]"
> Note that since it wasn't immediately apparent to me what or when the data was collected, this is about bulk collection of financial data in order to combat ISIL.
The second statement does not logically follow from the first.
The elephant in the room is the ability for the President to issue executive orders that can more often than not impinge on liberties that should be protected by the Constitution.
The CIA will always want more power, that is the nature of the secret services but if the people are bothered, why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
Legal and criminal responsibility for actions while governing leads to a situation commonly seen in a number of republics, most prominently ancient Rome, which the creators of the American constitution desperately wanted to avoid. While in office, you're safe to some degree with the powers of the office. Once out of office, you're an immediate legal target and all the lawsuits get filed. Solution? Don't leave office. Avoiding that is the basic logic behind immunity in political office; stable transfer of power breaks down when you know your successor is going to imprison you.
My guess would because the president is also technically the chief law enforcement officer? Not saying I like it, but that’s how it is I think.
Impeachment is what exists to hold presidents accountable, and then voting is what holds the senate accountable, when they choose not to hold the president accountable.
I think the president can be prosecuted for criminal offenses though when they’re out of office, since what I said above would no longer apply.
Because they /all/ do it. Every single president. To prosecute looks political but more importantly if the current president prosecutes, they'll be the defendant next time the other side is in and they'll be guilty as sin.
Why do they all do it? Might be a better question to ponder.
What is "unconstitutional"? It's what the Supreme Court says it is.
The Court has had the opportunity on multiple occasions to rule that this domestic spying is unconstitutional, and has declined to do so. Ergo, for all practical matters, it's legal.
To gain the presidency it is all-but-mandatory to have the enthusiastic backing of a big chunk of voters and the tacit or explicit approval of around half of them. Combine mass popular support with executive power and there isn't a lot practically that can be done.
Furthermore it appears that most of the US politicians have some sort of borderline-corrupt activity going on if not being actively involved in something illegal (Epstein springs to mind, various scandals that turn up around presidential elections). People in glass houses are cautious in their stone throwing.
And a final and decisive stroke - there is plausible uncertainty about whether the action is illegal. These are people who write the law, they are not expected to be stay-inside-the-legal-lines types because they all have different opinions on where the lines should be and are usually in the process of drawing them. They appoint the people who determine what the words mean and that leads to occasional creative reinterpretations. There isn't time to prosecute over every detail that someone objects to given the range of objections there are.
Because it sets a bad precedent. The former used his presidency to push as many buttons as he could to see just what the extent of the President's powers are. Sure there are some legal rumblings now, but I'd wager he will never see a prison. Ever.
Read the EO, it isn't secret, and doesn't seem to directly impinge on liberties, it is just the vague charter of what various agencies should be doing. I don't see any problem with the intent.
The problem is when you have a bureaucracy directed to "go collect intelligence" there is going to be a large grey area where there needs to be oversight, and there will always be people in a large org that need to be reigned in.
Anyway, the EO isn't the problem, it is the more boring challenge of oversight and managing large orgs.
>why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
Because the Presidents job is to distract from - and take the heat for - the crimes of the nation.
The nation has crimes it is keeping secret. These are national secrets, the revealing of which would harm the security of the nation.
Whether you think these national secrets being revealed would be a catastrophe, or indeed a badly needed justice for the inhumanities being committed in your name - it is the Presidents job to make sure the nation stays safe during the discussion.
Which is why CIA powers are not discussed until the weight of public opinion itself, threatens the 'security' of the secret-keepers/nation.
why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
This is why impeachment exists. We impeached the last idiot-in-chief twice. Unfortunately, we get the Congress we deserve (ie, if we elect authoritarian-minded lackwits, we shouldn't be surprised when they refuse to convict).
No, this is not why impeachment exists. A president is impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors". If the Prez is acting legally, I can't see how he could be impeached for it.
>why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
Executive orders don't give Presidents unilateral power. They are subject to judicial review and cannot legally violate the Constitution, or exceed Presidential authority as defined in Article 2 of the Constitution, unless specific authority is granted by Congress. Also Congress can overturn a legislative order, either through legislation or simply denying funding. Although, when the legislative and judicial branches don't really want to stand up to the President for whatever reason, that's a moot point.
Also, there is always plenty of talk - from the party not currently in control of the White House. Executive orders are always tyranny when the other side writes them, and a necessary bulwark against tyranny when your side writes them.
The problem is that judicial review takes time and only important cases get heard. For example Biden quite literally said that he issued a executive order extending the moratorium on evictions knowing that the courts would over turn it, but he said at least it would buy more time for people so he would do it anyways. Knowingly doing something that will get overturned still isn’t enough to impeach someone is very odd. If we look at the count of executive orders issued by each president, the current president has issued more in 1 year than the last 6 presidents issued in their entire 4 year terms. The problem is having the Supreme Court review those would take a review of a new order every single week of the year.
They describe it as structured and unstructured data, with the latter examples being "emails, spreadsheets, word processing files, or other electronic documents"
The former is likely database files, JSON, XML, etc. and anything that has a "common format", but I don't think specifics are given.
Saw the title, thought "This is probably Wyden," clicked the link... Yup. Say what you will about the guy he's remarkably consistent on this sort of thing. I think that's admirable.
I would rank that coolness as way cooler than Kazakhstan but equally as cool as the Brazilian dictatorship? Still haven't got a chance to check out the CIA torture footage, but seeing as one of the people who ordered the torture and authorized the destruction of the tapes was put in charge and just left office a year ago, it turns out that discussion doesn't mean much.
edit: I guess it teaches us that we shouldn't expect more consideration from the current regime than the past one, seeing as they've not only gone entirely unpunished, but were rewarded. If we had never heard about the transgressions of the past, we wouldn't be fooled into expecting better out of the current crop.
edit: Am I the only one who read Brasil: Nunca Maís? Did the Church Committee change anything? It's actually reprehensible that we can talk about this stuff openly while parading the people who did it as experts on what we should do next.
edit:
"The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved."
> eventually legally declassified and discussed openly
That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended. Critically, it's a "must take increasingly burdensome measures to maintain classification" configuration. So default / inaction is declassification.
It took multiple whistleblowing attempts in the span of over a decade to get it widely accepted that the government is conducting illegal mass surveillance on an internet scale. That for sure keeps people from having faith in the current classification system, and for good reasons.
As intended by the people in power? By the time this stuff comes out, everyone involved is retired or dead or past statute of limitations.
This program operated under an executive order forty years ago, before many HNers were born, likely. The guy who signed that order died many years ago. How is this coming to light now serving any public good? Guarantee the Patriot Act, for example, does not get repealed.
We also have no idea what hasn't been released, so it's impossible to say things are 'working', by design or otherwise.
> “Once an MDR request has been submitted to an agency for the review of a particular document, the agency must respond either with an approval, a denial, or the inability to confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of the requested document.”
So you not only need to know the existence of some secret document you are interested in (how could you?), they basically have the option to simply deny it’s existence?
Knowing what the CIA has done in the last 60 years, it’s hard to credit a system of government that thinks partial declassification every 40 years or so counts as supervision or any kind of meaningful corrective.
Letters like this don’t signify anything cool unless they lead to meaningful action, and they usually do not. I wouldn’t be so quick to congratulate the system for such things. This is like having a fancy PnL dashboard that’s updated too late and nobody with power looks at it anyway.
It's troubling that those that would openly break the law face no consequences, I guess having a place that doesn't equally apply the justice system to everyone be visible about it is better than being invisible about it.
They're supposed to enforce the laws equally against everyone, though, so the fact that certain powerful organizations in government are exempt and open about it is a little bit more terrifying than if they were exempt but quiet about it.
It's a bit of a flex.
There's literally a part of the US government that can torture people, get caught, get investigated by US Congress, hack into official congressional computers to delete evidence, get caught doing that, and then... face no consequences whatsoever.
If that isn't the most powerful organization in the world, I sincerely don't know who else might qualify for that title.
It would be better to have a system of checks and balances instead of the government sweeping stuff under the rug for a decade or so to "let things simmer"
Yes, that would be better. But it is also nice that, despite not having that, we do have a system where we can see what was done.
Obviously it's tricky. By delaying things people can mentally bias towards "that was then". It wasn't that long ago that the US government was kidnapping and forcibly drugging US citizens, but "that was then".
But it's also really important that at some point that information does make it out.
From a government standpoint it's better to control the release of this kind of information rather than a Snowden type disclosure. Reminds me of how the Obama administration CIA disclosed they had secret assassination kill-lists which included American citizens. This was done through a Friday release of a NYT page 6 article that casually mentioned this in a single sentence buried in text.
and nobody goes to jail, except for people like Assange who expose it. This is more of a power flex than any sort of consequences for their illegal activity
The best of both worlds; we have a police state that only after the fact accepts accountability and never in a way that disrupts whatever it is presently doing, and yet we still can condemn the other police states by pointing to this same process.
Does it matter if there are no legal consequences? That is even worse in my opinion. And it doesn't make government look bad if people just find it "cool".
It'll become cool when the perpetrators get punished. Otherwise it is like robber admitting robbery and then walking away from it in the open laughing all the way to the bank. And doing it again and again.
Readit News
You should be worrying about the NSA.
Deleted Comment
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[2]"
The second statement does not logically follow from the first.
And. That link. Not clicking.
Yes it does, "it was not immediately apparent, so I did some research and it was x. Now you don't need to do the research."
And the CIA is mandated to produce such reports, while they could add malware it'd likely be more of a liability than a benefit.
The CIA will always want more power, that is the nature of the secret services but if the people are bothered, why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
If the president signs something illegal (unconstitutional in this case), why does nothing happen?
Impeachment is what exists to hold presidents accountable, and then voting is what holds the senate accountable, when they choose not to hold the president accountable.
I think the president can be prosecuted for criminal offenses though when they’re out of office, since what I said above would no longer apply.
Why do they all do it? Might be a better question to ponder.
The Court has had the opportunity on multiple occasions to rule that this domestic spying is unconstitutional, and has declined to do so. Ergo, for all practical matters, it's legal.
Furthermore it appears that most of the US politicians have some sort of borderline-corrupt activity going on if not being actively involved in something illegal (Epstein springs to mind, various scandals that turn up around presidential elections). People in glass houses are cautious in their stone throwing.
And a final and decisive stroke - there is plausible uncertainty about whether the action is illegal. These are people who write the law, they are not expected to be stay-inside-the-legal-lines types because they all have different opinions on where the lines should be and are usually in the process of drawing them. They appoint the people who determine what the words mean and that leads to occasional creative reinterpretations. There isn't time to prosecute over every detail that someone objects to given the range of objections there are.
https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu...
The problem is when you have a bureaucracy directed to "go collect intelligence" there is going to be a large grey area where there needs to be oversight, and there will always be people in a large org that need to be reigned in.
Anyway, the EO isn't the problem, it is the more boring challenge of oversight and managing large orgs.
Because the Presidents job is to distract from - and take the heat for - the crimes of the nation.
The nation has crimes it is keeping secret. These are national secrets, the revealing of which would harm the security of the nation.
Whether you think these national secrets being revealed would be a catastrophe, or indeed a badly needed justice for the inhumanities being committed in your name - it is the Presidents job to make sure the nation stays safe during the discussion.
Which is why CIA powers are not discussed until the weight of public opinion itself, threatens the 'security' of the secret-keepers/nation.
Deleted Comment
This is why impeachment exists. We impeached the last idiot-in-chief twice. Unfortunately, we get the Congress we deserve (ie, if we elect authoritarian-minded lackwits, we shouldn't be surprised when they refuse to convict).
Rather, this is what voting is for.
Executive orders don't give Presidents unilateral power. They are subject to judicial review and cannot legally violate the Constitution, or exceed Presidential authority as defined in Article 2 of the Constitution, unless specific authority is granted by Congress. Also Congress can overturn a legislative order, either through legislation or simply denying funding. Although, when the legislative and judicial branches don't really want to stand up to the President for whatever reason, that's a moot point.
Also, there is always plenty of talk - from the party not currently in control of the White House. Executive orders are always tyranny when the other side writes them, and a necessary bulwark against tyranny when your side writes them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federa...
https://www.cia.gov/static/63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/...
The program is apparently bulk collection of financial data.
The former is likely database files, JSON, XML, etc. and anything that has a "common format", but I don't think specifics are given.
--- Sorry, a potential security risk was detected in your submitted request. The Webmaster has been alerted.
Reference ID: *.****.*****.****
You can proceed to www.senate.gov.
If this problem persists, please contact the Office of the Secretary Webmaster at webmaster@sec.senate.gov. ---
All right, keep your secrets.
Deleted Comment
https://archive.md/qcJcf
I would rank that coolness as way cooler than Kazakhstan but equally as cool as the Brazilian dictatorship? Still haven't got a chance to check out the CIA torture footage, but seeing as one of the people who ordered the torture and authorized the destruction of the tapes was put in charge and just left office a year ago, it turns out that discussion doesn't mean much.
edit: I guess it teaches us that we shouldn't expect more consideration from the current regime than the past one, seeing as they've not only gone entirely unpunished, but were rewarded. If we had never heard about the transgressions of the past, we wouldn't be fooled into expecting better out of the current crop.
edit: Am I the only one who read Brasil: Nunca Maís? Did the Church Committee change anything? It's actually reprehensible that we can talk about this stuff openly while parading the people who did it as experts on what we should do next.
edit:
"The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cia-mistak...
That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended. Critically, it's a "must take increasingly burdensome measures to maintain classification" configuration. So default / inaction is declassification.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_th...
> That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended.
What makes you say it largely functions as intended? It sometimes functions, but that is different. Also, we don't know what we're missing.
This program operated under an executive order forty years ago, before many HNers were born, likely. The guy who signed that order died many years ago. How is this coming to light now serving any public good? Guarantee the Patriot Act, for example, does not get repealed.
We also have no idea what hasn't been released, so it's impossible to say things are 'working', by design or otherwise.
So you not only need to know the existence of some secret document you are interested in (how could you?), they basically have the option to simply deny it’s existence?
Is it really how it supposed to work?
Deleted Comment
Letters like this don’t signify anything cool unless they lead to meaningful action, and they usually do not. I wouldn’t be so quick to congratulate the system for such things. This is like having a fancy PnL dashboard that’s updated too late and nobody with power looks at it anyway.
They're supposed to enforce the laws equally against everyone, though, so the fact that certain powerful organizations in government are exempt and open about it is a little bit more terrifying than if they were exempt but quiet about it.
It's a bit of a flex.
There's literally a part of the US government that can torture people, get caught, get investigated by US Congress, hack into official congressional computers to delete evidence, get caught doing that, and then... face no consequences whatsoever.
If that isn't the most powerful organization in the world, I sincerely don't know who else might qualify for that title.
Obviously it's tricky. By delaying things people can mentally bias towards "that was then". It wasn't that long ago that the US government was kidnapping and forcibly drugging US citizens, but "that was then".
But it's also really important that at some point that information does make it out.
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-repo...
https://9-11commission.gov/report/
Dead Comment