"the ability of the government to go back to taps collected years earlier to look for material with which to influence potential witnesses in the present"
Bill Stewart
bill.stewart at pobox.com
Sun Jan 19 16:00:04 PST 2014
At 09:14 AM 1/19/2014, coderman wrote:
>(2) threats to the United States and its interests from terrorism;
Terrorism was the previous justification for the bulk collection
and for the 3-degrees-of-separation "rule", so no change.
>(3) threats to the United States and its interests from the
>development, possession, proliferation, or use of weapons of mass
>destruction;
When Dubya Bush was trying to justify invading Iraq,
he talked about WMDs as "nuculur bombs" and chemical and
biological weapons.
But when some angry young zealot tried to car-bomb Times Square using
"explosives" he'd gotten from an FBI informant,
they also charged him with making "weapons of mass destruction",
the Boston Marathon bombers got charged with that,
and I think even pipe bombs have been called WMDs recently.
So WMDs might be any random young resident calling his
brother or cousin,
and the NSA still gets to Tap All The Phones.
>(4) cybersecurity threats; [ED: WTF???]
Hey, the guy might be using Skype to call his cousin instead
of minutes.
And people are constantly trying to hack the computers at
military facilities,
banks, and civilian government agencies, either with
deliberate targeting
or just because it's easier not to program your botnet to
use whitelists,
and maybe that defense contractor's supercomputer can mine
Litecoins fast.
So no, I don't see the situation improving soon, and
certainly not before they repeal Moore's Law.
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