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FBI admits no major cases cracked with Patriot Act snooping powers

Politicians routinely pass unconstitutional laws despite knowing that it is unconstitutional. Legislative bodies have staff attorneys that can and should advise them when a law is clearly unconstitutional. In my opinion elected officials should be charged with a crime when they do that because it requires a huge expenditure by civil liberties advocates and the government and years of process to get a Supreme Court ruling.

Without authorization for invading our privacy at least the government can not use the information to convict someone in court. (for those who get a real trial)

If I'm not mistaken, the Patriot Act, in its current form, has survived several constitutional challenges to and through the Supreme Court.

It is simply awaiting renewal or permanency since it was "extended" for the past 4 years - considering the current climate, it's likely to simply be kicked down the road again for a few years.

The PATRIOT Act and the Constitution: Five Key Points
 
but the intrusion on your personal business is not there. It just COULD be there with this data, and that is concerning enough.
I mostly agree. but personally, when it comes to government staying within its Constitutional authority, I make no distinction between the potential for abuse and actual abuse.

If I'm not mistaken, the Patriot Act, in its current form, has survived several constitutional challenges to and through the Supreme Court.
I bet the rulings were 5/4, right along party lines. Actions taken under the same Patriot Act have been ruled unconstitutional.

United States v. Jones (2012) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
One can avoid corporate data mining by opting out. That is why corporations often provide incentives, such as discounts, to encourage it. The laws in many states and some federal laws also require that businesses provide disclosures on how they use customer information and provide their customers with a method for opting out. Also, corporations risk losing customers and ruining their reputation when they abuse their customer data.

Our government does not provide disclosure or opt out options and has a well documented record of using personal information to discredit and disrupt people and organizations for political reasons, ie. Cointelpro Other governments are even worse and we seem to be headed in the wrong direction.


Well, you can opt out of their selling it.. but they still have it. And honestly, haven't you seen that merely going to a web site allows people to target you with specific advertisement, which you didn't opt in for?
 
Well, it's about 10's or 100's of millions like me.

There you go. The confusion is not whether the patriot act is constitutional. It is whether the mass collection of telephone meta data is constitutional. Congress is trying to clarify the patriot act to close down the mass collection. It is important to note that not a single arrest or conviction has occurred as a result of the mass collection. It doesn't even work. Personally I hate everything about the patriot act. I'm for government having to go to a judge for a warrant just like any police department has to do.
 
There you go. The confusion is not whether the patriot act is constitutional. It is whether the mass collection of telephone meta data is constitutional. Congress is trying to clarify the patriot act to close down the mass collection. It is important to note that not a single arrest or conviction has occurred as a result of the mass collection. It doesn't even work. Personally I hate everything about the patriot act. I'm for government having to go to a judge for a warrant just like any police department has to do.

Here's my understanding of the meta data collection and how it's accessed and how it's used. You're right - it's a mass collection of information, but information that's not viewed, listened to, or massaged. Then, when one of your intelligence agencies gets a lead, say the name of a suspected terrorist, they get permission from the FICA court to mine the data for information on that suspect. Once they get that information, likely including phone numbers used by and numbers called, the FICA court gives permission to mine on the basis of that other information. As a result, the intelligence agencies connect the dots between the initial suspected terrorist and his/her connections. And then the intelligence agencies monitor their activities.

At no time is your information or mine or 300 million other individuals' information touched unless you have a connection to the suspected terrorist. For me, that's perfectly fine. I have no problem with letting multiple sophisticated computer systems massage electronic data to do the investigative work that would take tens of thousands of manpower hours to do if it could ever be done. If that keeps the bad guys guessing and us good guys safe, that's a trade-off I'm quite comfortable with. It's how my government this week stopped 10 Canadian young men and women from flying off to the Middle East to join ISIS and how your government did the same in California with two others. And those actions by the government didn't invade my privacy one bit.
 
Here's my understanding of the meta data collection and how it's accessed and how it's used. You're right - it's a mass collection of information, but information that's not viewed, listened to, or massaged. Then, when one of your intelligence agencies gets a lead, say the name of a suspected terrorist, they get permission from the FICA court to mine the data for information on that suspect. Once they get that information, likely including phone numbers used by and numbers called, the FICA court gives permission to mine on the basis of that other information. As a result, the intelligence agencies connect the dots between the initial suspected terrorist and his/her connections. And then the intelligence agencies monitor their activities.

At no time is your information or mine or 300 million other individuals' information touched unless you have a connection to the suspected terrorist. For me, that's perfectly fine. I have no problem with letting multiple sophisticated computer systems massage electronic data to do the investigative work that would take tens of thousands of manpower hours to do if it could ever be done. If that keeps the bad guys guessing and us good guys safe, that's a trade-off I'm quite comfortable with. It's how my government this week stopped 10 Canadian young men and women from flying off to the Middle East to join ISIS and how your government did the same in California with two others. And those actions by the government didn't invade my privacy one bit.

I believe that's right. The problem is that you have to trust the government to keep things that way. I, for one, do not trust the government at all so I view every slippery slope as a very slippery slope. We have a fourth amendment to handle this sort of thing and it has served us well for almost a quarter of a millenium. I'd rather have a real court review these things than a rubber stamp FISA court handle it. It's a bad law.

By the way, I think we should help people that want to leave the country to join ISIS. That gets them out of the country. Then we should shut the door to their return to make their choice a lifetime decision.
 
I will only speak for myself here when I say that what is in bold is NOT the reason I think The Patriot Act should be abolished. It should be abolished because it is an infringement of liberty, it has and will continue to be abused, and it gave rise to the practice of data mining.

The very concept of data mining is evil.

Exactly correct - the 4A exists for a reason.
 
Well, you can opt out of their selling it.. but they still have it. And honestly, haven't you seen that merely going to a web site allows people to target you with specific advertisement, which you didn't opt in for?

I would like to see more legal protection of our right to privacy from business interests, but the weakness of those laws and people's passive acceptance of those privacy invasions due to the convenience offered in return doesn't justify the government also invading our privacy.
 
Here's my understanding of the meta data collection and how it's accessed and how it's used. You're right - it's a mass collection of information, but information that's not viewed, listened to, or massaged. Then, when one of your intelligence agencies gets a lead, say the name of a suspected terrorist, they get permission from the FICA court to mine the data for information on that suspect. Once they get that information, likely including phone numbers used by and numbers called, the FICA court gives permission to mine on the basis of that other information. As a result, the intelligence agencies connect the dots between the initial suspected terrorist and his/her connections. And then the intelligence agencies monitor their activities.

At no time is your information or mine or 300 million other individuals' information touched unless you have a connection to the suspected terrorist. For me, that's perfectly fine. I have no problem with letting multiple sophisticated computer systems massage electronic data to do the investigative work that would take tens of thousands of manpower hours to do if it could ever be done. If that keeps the bad guys guessing and us good guys safe, that's a trade-off I'm quite comfortable with. It's how my government this week stopped 10 Canadian young men and women from flying off to the Middle East to join ISIS and how your government did the same in California with two others. And those actions by the government didn't invade my privacy one bit.

Your understanding is incorrect. The huge amounts of telephone and internet metadata is analyzed by people and computers in an attempt to detect patterns that suggest illegal activity. In other words, everyone's private information is searched on the off chance a criminal will be found. That is clearly a 4th amendment violation.

If you don't consider you metadata private please prove your sincerity by posting a copy of your phone bill in this thread.
 
I would like to see more legal protection of our right to privacy from business interests, but the weakness of those laws and people's passive acceptance of those privacy invasions due to the convenience offered in return doesn't justify the government also invading our privacy.


While the weakness of the laws doesn't justify the government also invading our privacy, I am as concerned, or more so with the corporate use. ..
 
Your understanding is incorrect. The huge amounts of telephone and internet metadata is analyzed by people and computers in an attempt to detect patterns that suggest illegal activity. In other words, everyone's private information is searched on the off chance a criminal will be found. That is clearly a 4th amendment violation.

If you don't consider you metadata private please prove your sincerity by posting a copy of your phone bill in this thread.

I believe you're wrong. "Patterns" don't materialize out of thin air - searches for them initiate from some other form of intelligence operation. Someone may become a suspect and then his/her information may be fed into the database to determine who he/she is in contact with or what websites, etc. he/she has visited. And the content of emails, text messages, phone calls, etc. is not routinely reviewed. What would be the purpose?

I think you're exaggerating the extent of the monitoring. It is the collection of data that is massive - the review of data is targeted.

Irregardless, posting my personal information on this site is far different from my personal information being collected by the government in the performance of their mandated and legislated functions.

And I would note, just in passing, that I believe this is the second time you've challenged a poster to put their personal information on display in this thread and I believe you'll find that doing so is in contravention of the site's rules.
 
I believe that's right. The problem is that you have to trust the government to keep things that way. I, for one, do not trust the government at all so I view every slippery slope as a very slippery slope. We have a fourth amendment to handle this sort of thing and it has served us well for almost a quarter of a millenium. I'd rather have a real court review these things than a rubber stamp FISA court handle it. It's a bad law.

By the way, I think we should help people that want to leave the country to join ISIS. That gets them out of the country. Then we should shut the door to their return to make their choice a lifetime decision.

Exactly. And if government could be trusted, or if men were angels, as one of the framers said, we wouldn't need a constitution. The people's bill of rights was added to safe guard civil liberties, because government can't be trusted. In fact, we wouldn't have need of any checks and balances if government could be trusted. Does anybody remember senator Church, and his committee, which investigated the NSA in 1976, and the conclusions they made concerning the NSA's fantastic ability to be abused such was the technology that the government had developed. And that was 40 year old technology, one might only imagine what may be going on now.
 
I believe you're wrong. "Patterns" don't materialize out of th
in air - searches for them initiate from some other form of intelligence operation. Someone may become a suspect and then his/her information may be fed into the database to determine who he/she is in contact with or what websites, etc. he/she has visited. And the content of emails, text messages, phone calls, etc. is not routinely reviewed. What would be the purpose?

I think you're exaggerating the extent of the monitoring. It is the collection of data that is massive - the review of data is targeted.

Irregardless, posting my personal information on this site is far different from my personal information being collected by the government in the performance of their mandated and legislated functions.

And I would note, just in passing, that I believe this is the second time you've challenged a poster to put their personal information on display in this thread and I believe you'll find that doing so is in contravention of the site's rules.

If the medadata was only used to target individuals based on evidence from other sources they could easily obtain warrants. It is the lack of such evidence that makes the legalization of bulk data collection necessary.


Information is either private and worthy of legal protection, or it is public. The challenged to post phone bills is directed at anyone and everyone who claims that phone Metadata is not private information. So far no one has backed up that claim by proving they are willing to share their data with the public.
 
If the medadata was only used to target individuals based on evidence from other sources they could easily obtain warrants. It is the lack of such evidence that makes the legalization of bulk data collection necessary.


Information is either private and worthy of legal protection, or it is public. The challenged to post phone bills is directed at anyone and everyone who claims that phone Metadata is not private information. So far no one has backed up that claim by proving they are willing to share their data with the public.

To my knowledge, the mass collection of data is by way of the Patriot Act but direct access to any specific data in the collection is still governed by warrant through the FISA court. If I'm wrong, you'll have to do more to convince me.

Secondly, as to your challenge to post personal/private information - nothing personal, but I trust the government far more than I trust you or anyone else on this or any site. The government already has an abundance of my personal data as part of tax collection, driver's licensing, passports, banking information, etc. I've never had any concern that this information is being used improperly or illegally.

I have no such confidence that you would be any more trustworthy than the Nigerian Princess who needs my bank account number to secure the funds she's moving out of her country.
 
I'll look for a description of how phone data is used later. At least now we have agreement that the data is private.
 
Despite the fact that Americans are going to die in plane wrecks, car wrecks, of cancer, hell, of bee stings, before they are going to die of a terrorist attack, our civil liberties continue to be eroded to protect us of that ever so slight eventuality.

A Pew research survey finds that about half of members of the Council on Foreign Relations (52%) express concern that the government’s anti-terrorism efforts have gone too far in eroding civil liberties;

Section 6: Views of Council on Foreign Relations Members | Pew Research Center
 
We the people should not expect our government to keep us 100 Percent safe. It is impossible, a waste of resources and will take away our freedom and quality of life.
 
I believe you're wrong. "Patterns" don't materialize out of thin air - searches for them initiate from some other form of intelligence operation. Someone may become a suspect and then his/her information may be fed into the database to determine who he/she is in contact with or what websites, etc. he/she has visited. ....I think you're exaggerating the extent of the monitoring. It is the collection of data that is massive - the review of data is targeted.....

"They are not looking at people's names, they're not looking at content," Obama said then. "But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism."

Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata' - ABC News

"The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message...."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining?INTCMP=SRCH
 
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