this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Apparently you don't read TechDirt, which I have for over a decade now, and NSA had been active in shenanigans and lax securityy since the wiretapping scandals of the aughts, and in 2023 has been leaking stuff to FBI without warrants (which is supposed to be unconstitutional but between the PATRIOT act and the Federalist-Society-dominated SCOTUS, we may be no longer legally protected from NSA surveillance as an unreasonable search).
The FISC has always been a rubber stamp court, so it shouldn't be necessary for law enforcement to circumvent warrants for NSA information, but it turns out it's just easier using the NSA backdoor access.
I will admit to a certain degree of cynicism. When official channels tell me something is secure or handled with respect to all ethical and civic concerns, and investigative journalists tell me the opposite, I trust the journalists more than I do the official channels. But then I've been through the aughts and the George W. Bush administration when the only sources of actual facts were from foreign sources, because the native news agencies were terrified of reprisals for failing to toe the line.
It's why when people are alarmed today that the fascist autocrats are here and SWATTING their political enemies, I can only quietly sip my coffee from the corner.
I don’t read TechDirt
Oh, I know about this, I thought you were talking about local law enforcement offices, which is not something I’ve seen.
As far as the unconstitutionality of the NSA’s actions, I fully agree with you. From the perspective of of an anarchist, I don’t exactly see any alphabet agencies or the branches of government in a good light. I fully expect the NSA to be involved in shenanigans, just as I expect the FBI or CIA to do so.
If you are talking about the FBI when you saw law enforcement, the FBI has it’s own malware it uses, such as Magic Lantern historically, and certainly others that are not public. There is also some info about them possibly using the NSO group’s Pegasus spyware, which is obscenely hard to detect, and has, at times, been 0-click, meaning you don’t need to take any actions, and it has cleaned up evidence of tampering. Since the FBI has to make sure their evidence is admissible in court, they do need to make sure their evidence is gathered in such a way that it does not violate laws.
However, I have listened to interviews with people who argued their case was built on unconstitutional evidence, and claimed that the feds told them “if you try and attack the case like this, we will tack on more charges,” so I’m not saying they always deal with admissibility in court when starting investigations.
The only gripe I still have is the your statement about the NSA’s lax security, since the breaches I’ve read about have all been done by nation state actors, which tend to be the most capable groups in the world.
My experience with the NSA, as someone who works in security, does not indicate they have lax security. From their leaked tools (I <3 ghidra), to their security guidelines, to their malware like stuxnet, to their public tools like SELinux (and eventually ghidra), their security capabilities seem solid.
I don’t want this to come out as me liking the NSA, since I hate a lot of what they do. But as someone who is a huge security nerd and malware enthusiast, I find their tools fascinating, and do have some respect for them from that perspective, in the same way someone might like Kanye’s music and respect his talent, but hate his guts for being a nazi.
If there are any good techdirt articles, please send them my way, I’d love to read them