Lets get one thing corrected. I am all for the NSA spying on those who wage war or would help those wage war on the US, with a warrant if it involved us citizens, overseas all the power too them.
Uh.... yeah. Metadata as a subject includes things like "locational data". When you've got the phone number of Abu McJihad, leader of the Jihad Army of the Jihadi's for Jihad (JAJJ), having his communications device pinging off a tower and broadcasting his location is useful as all get out.
Harmless... lol
Metadata is the index to all the that E-content. That NSA is able to record, say, a days worth of AT&T phone calls. Its agents can then easily locate any particular call within that huge chunk of metadata. Such "basic" information can be used for geo-location information tracking of physical movements. Metadata showing that you called your doctor, followed by metadata about that labcorp she called next, followed by your trip to a pharmacy might fall into the “something you want to hide” tick box. But in reality, using metadata to learn about your medical history may not be even necessary. some insurance co's based on the insistence of the government have an exception to the privacy policy for example Kaiser Permanente, states: “We may also disclose your PHI [personal health information] to authorized federal officials as necessary for national security and intelligence activities.” HBCBC has a similar exception as do regional medical outfits.
But one mere example. What I can find out about you if I have the metadata would shock you.
:shrug: can you point to any drone strikes on US soil that have been fed by metadata collection? It seems like random **** blowing up would be fairly difficult to hide.
****, obama wouldn't rule it out at first.
The Judiciary has signed off multiple times on the metadata collection program which is also:
The Judiciary once signed off on slavery as well.
Yup. That is their Title 10 responsibility. There is another organization called the "CIA" which engages in offensive HUMINT operations, actually going out and spying on people through Mark 1 eyeballs rather than via their networks. Heck, there is another organization - the NGA - which spies on people through sattelites which it uses to take pictures!!!! :shock:
Again, on foreign folks they suspect of wanting to wage war or terrorism on us, great. randomly spying on Americans on american soil. Why?
Seriously, man. Don't discredit a reasonable constitutional question by going overboard and accusing the NSA of fully lawful (and in fact, required) actions.
I disagree, I think much of what the NSA does is extra constitutional.
For example:
"The Patriot Act elevated a once rarely used tool, the National Security Letter (NSL), into the mainstream of government practice. National Security Letters are an extraordinary search procedure that gives the FBI the power to compel the disclosure of customer records held by banks, telephone companies, Internet service providers, public libraries, and others. These entities are prohibited, or “gagged,” from telling anyone about their receipt of the NSL. Though the Justice Department itself cited abuse of the letters by the FBI in 2008, in 2012 the FBI used 15,229 National Security Letters to gather information on Americans. NSLs do not require judicial approval and the built-in gag orders prevent anyone from seeking judicial relief; indeed, most people will never even know that they were the subject of an NSL. And at the moment, the Department of Justice is trying to keep classified an 86-page court opinion that determined the government violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper directly lied to that check-and-balance branch of the government, Congress, in a public session. (He later termed his response the “least untruthful” answer.) And we wouldn’t even know that he lied, or much of anything else about the NSA’s surveillance activities here or globally, if it weren’t for one man’s courage in exposing them. The government had kept it all from us for 12 years and never showed the slightest sign of reconsidering any part of that policy. Without Snowden, we would not even know what needs checking and balancing."
Scary **** right there.
As they should. If Abu McJihad decides to contact his good buddy Ahmed McKillTheInfidels via their gmail accounts to do some joint op planning, the idea that we shouldn't pay attention to their correspondence because the email bounces off one of google's servers between Libya and Tunisia is self-destructively idiotic.
I'm not against this.
See #4
As well they should. Although actually your VLR does this
again, overseas, fine, but an nsa game of "6 degrees of separation" with no checks and balances, is patently un-American.
I think you are confusing "the NSA" with "google".
Pretty much interchangable with what they are willing to share.
:shrug: welcome to the 21st Century, where national security depends on this stuff. You wouldn't like the alternative (effective government takeover of the major providers) any better.
Why? Why does the USG need unrestricted gag order searches of american enterprises and people?