The Executive Order That Led To Mass Spying, As Told By NSA Alumni 180
An anonymous reader writes with this Ars piece about the executive order that is the legal basis for the U.S. government's mass spying on citizens. One thing sits at the heart of what many consider a surveillance state within the US today. The problem does not begin with political systems that discourage transparency or technologies that can intercept everyday communications without notice. Like everything else in Washington, there's a legal basis for what many believe is extreme government overreach—in this case, it's Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981. “12333 is used to target foreigners abroad, and collection happens outside the US," whistleblower John Tye, a former State Department official, told Ars recently. "My complaint is not that they’re using it to target Americans, my complaint is that the volume of incidental collection on US persons is unconstitutional.” The document, known in government circles as "twelve triple three," gives incredible leeway to intelligence agencies sweeping up vast quantities of Americans' data. That data ranges from e-mail content to Facebook messages, from Skype chats to practically anything that passes over the Internet on an incidental basis. In other words, EO 12333 protects the tangential collection of Americans' data even when Americans aren't specifically targeted—otherwise it would be forbidden under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
NSA was collecting data in the 1960s (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of my sister's worked for NSA for eight years in the 1960s. At that time the fact of its existence was classified - insiders said the acronym stood for "No Such Agency". He spent most of those eight years in a shack on a hill in Japan, listening and recording phone calls and telegraphs in and out of Japan. He came out of those eight years imbued with an extreme level of paranoia that he never did shake off. It cost him his marriage among other things.
So 1981 wasn't the beginning. I would be more likely to think that the directive in question was created to paper over and legalize what had been going on for decades before. The agency was founded by Harry Truman in 1952 based on signals intelligence units from WWI, per Wikipedia. I saw an article recently which asserted that spying on foreign (and some domestic) entities really came out of the period before and after World War I, and it made sense.
Having said all that, I recently learned that the NSA is not just "spooks peeking into our bedrooms" and getting everyone upset. That is just one of three branches.
- Signals Intelligence Directorate is the one that has been upsetting people, and may in fact be as crazy as people think they are;
- Information Assurance Directorate one might consider the "good guys" - they are working with US industry and agencies to prevent security breaches - one might consider this the "anti-spy" group, and you'll see guys from IAD at conferences regarding improvement of the security infrastructure of the net, to prevent spying and other problems. By all accounts the Information Assurance Directorate is working very hard to protect us, and has had some successes preventing or stopping serious hacking and other incidents against both public and private organizations in recent years that they, of course, can't ever tell anyone.
- Technical Directorate, which I assume is the people inventing the HW and SW the rest of the gang uses.
TL;DR - don't paint the whole of NSA with the same tar and feathers. Some, at least, are out there actively helping with things like Tor as we read recently - spy agencies including NSA have regularly helped Tor find and fix bugs, even while other groups in the same agency are trying to exploit them.
Re:Reagan is alive! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually that's kind of the point, to some degree. It's now clear he was suffering from symptoms of dementia throughout his entire term, and they became especially pronounced near the end. His suggestibility and deteriorating mental health made him easy prey for those who wanted laws changed in their favor.
Clearly Bush's fault. (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, really, he was once head of the CIA, and once he became VP, why not persuade the President this was good for America?
Re:Executive Orders Need to Expire, and Quickly (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand the expiration idea has merit.
Re:Different era (Score:4, Interesting)
Because?..
I wish, you had anything on-topic to offer, when you get "started"... The topic, in this case, being the abuse of the Executive Order 12333 [wikipedia.org] by the intelligence community decades after the order was signed.