Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data
Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes>Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombedThis argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law.The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from the FISA court.Stuff that has come out of these leaks have ranged from banal (oh, we listen to the German Chancelor's cell phone? What else is new) to absolutely damning (forcing companies to hand over SSL keys). But even in the most damning cases, all of these happened within the legal frameworks given to them (such as the National Security Letters) and maybe some overzealous law enforcement agents. The illegal incidents can be explained more by incidents outside of how things are "supposed" to work (LOVEINT is probably not sanctioned by the NSA), and a lack of strong implementation of the framework given by the courts.The narrative has always seemed to be "check out how the NSA is going crazy over here!". But the reality is "check out how all these politicians are voting in these new laws allowing this to take place!"From the leaks you can even see how the courts are constantly reeling things in, the system is actually working. We hear about old NSA programs that got shut down because of the FISA court's rulings. This is how rule of law works! We vote laws, and people follow them.To actually come to this, given all we've seen from how courts rule on this issue in general, and the FISA court's rulings, this sort of data sharing would absolutely definitely not be allowed to exist. No judge would agree to this being allowed to be set in place, as it so obviously goes against 4th ammendement in such a program's intent.Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell the contents of your e-mails to somebody.This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws.