In a cross-Solar System interplanetary first, our Earth was photographed during the same day from both Mercury and Saturn. Pictured on the left, Earth is the pale blue dot just below the rings of Saturn, as captured by the robotic Cassini spacecraft now the gas giant. Pictured on the right, the Earth-Moon system is seen against a dark background, as captured by the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft now orbiting Mercury. In the MESSENGER image, the Earth (left) and Moon (right) shine brightly with reflected sunlight. MESSENGER took the overexposed image last Friday as part of a search for small natural satellites of the innermost planet, moons that would be expected to be quite dim. During this same day, humans across planet Earth snapped many of their own pictures of Saturn.

APOD: 2013 July 23 - Two Views of Earth

Service Provider Meta-Data Retention - US: http://www.aclu.org/cell-phone-location-tracking-request-response-cell-phone-company-data-retention-chart … (years) EU: http://blogs.wsj.com/brussels/2010/08/02/exclusivedata-retention-limits-per-eu-country/ … (months)

Twitter / _decius_: Service Provider Meta-Data Retention

Congress is growing increasingly wary of controversial National Security Agency domestic surveillance programs, a concern likely to erupt during legislative debate _ and perhaps prod legislative action _ as early as next week.

Mood shifting, Congress may move to limit NSA spying | McClatchy

My reply to Stewart Baker's Congressional Testimony:

Suffice it to say that I think that a model that says "collect everything, and let agents analyze it without individualized suspicion, but try to flag questionable searches" is a radical departure from our current approach, which requires justification before collection, and it is also a radical departure from a model that says "collect everything, but require individualized suspicion before analysis."

I don't agree with your assertion that "the risk of rule-breaking is pretty much the same whether the collection comes first or second." If the collection comes first, the data is there to be abused and the risk that it might be abused exists as long as it is there. For example, if the data is stored for 5 years, than at any point in that 5 year period of time an agent decides to make an abusive query, the data will be there waiting for him.

However, if collection comes second, then the data isn't there. It disappears the minute the phone company decides that it is no longer needed for their purposes, and at that point, the risk that it will be abused is over. Any new data created after the point that the agent decides to do something abusive will be available, but the old data will not be. Therefore, the risk to an individual person is significantly lower, and individual people can make real time risk assessments regarding the situation going forward.

For example, lets say you phone Martin Luther King because you support his views on civil rights. Two years later, King makes a public statement opposing a war in Vietnam. At that time, it occurs to you that the military might target King and his associates because King is an influential person who opposes a war that the military wants to get into and they want to shut him up and they want to shut up anyone he might have influenced.

In the collect first scenario, you have to wait for five years after that phone call before you no longer have to worry that the military will find out that you associated with King and target you personally for having done so. In the collect second scenario, you only have to wait six months, or a year at most, until the phone company destroys the data.

The total risk to you in associating with King is significantly reduced the second scenario. Therefore, your likelihood of feeling free to associate with King is significantly greater. Furthermore, if at some point King does something that might make him the target of an illegal government crackdown, you can choose at that point to stop associating with him if thats what you want to do, without having to worry about all of your past associations being exposed.

In other words, the collect first model places a significant chill upon your exercise of your right to freedom of association, because if you ever associate with anyone who later does something that makes him a target of a illegal government crackdown, you could be targeted as well. In the collect first society, you're best off avoiding contact with anyone that might, in the future, be considered an enemy of the state. In the collect second society we don't have to go around worrying about that kind of thing, because, you know, we live in a free society.

The Volokh Conspiracy » Intelligence Under Law — Judiciary Testimony

None of these has gotten much ink, and what continues to remain striking is that, for all the intense media attention to the NSA story, almost no attention has been given to efforts such as these that would actually do something about the problem, or at least one important dimension of the problem. There is not nearly enough media coverage of the various policy fixes that would begin to correct an aspect of this that everyone should agree is problematic, no matter what people think of the NSA programs themselves — the secrecy that shrouds their legal rationales.

Keep chipping away at NSA secrecy

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD's most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA's teaching academy, said he immediately knew the true value of the PREAL manual if employed as part of an interrogation program.

"This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence," Kleinman said in an interview. "If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using."

EXCLUSIVE: "Guidebook to False Confessions": Key Document John Yoo Used to Draft Torture Memo Released

Brennan admits that in affirmations to the FISC relating to the continuation of “certain programs” — that is, the “scary memos” — he relied on information from the CIA’s torture program.

The one that was designed to elicit false confessions from the start.

John Brennan’s admission sure seems to indicate that that original dragnet opinion, the one the others have built on, relies on the unreliable information elicited by CIA torture.

The Torture That Underlies FISA Court’s “Special Needs” Decisions | emptywheel

The Supreme Court has the power to issue an order called a “writ of mandamus” to deal with lower courts that overstep their legal authority. This type of order is only supposed to be used in “exceptional circumstances.” But EPIC argues that the NSA’s phone records program is exactly the kind of situation that merits the Supreme Court’s intervention.

Could the Supreme Court stop the NSA?

This law review article is from 2008. In it, the author explains why a call records retention program of the sort that has now been disclosed would be an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment Right to Freedom of Association.

Recent controversies about the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of international calls have overshadowed equally disturbing allegations that the government has acquired access to a huge database of domestic call traffic data, revealing information about times, dates, and numbers called. Although communication content traditionally has been the primary focus of concern about overreaching government surveillance, law enforcement officials are increasingly interested in using sophisticated computer analysis of noncontent traffic data to map networks of associations. Despite the rising importance of digitally mediated association, current Fourth Amendment and statutory schemes provide only weak checks on government. The potential to chill association through overreaching relational surveillance is great. This Article argues that the First Amendment's freedom of association guarantees can and do provide a proper framework for regulating relational surveillance and suggests how these guarantees might apply to particular forms of analysis of traffic data.

Quoting from the article:

The First Amendment’s freedom of association guarantees require that any program of relational surveillance meet a strict scrutiny standard. The surveillance must serve a legitimate and compelling government interest and its methodology must be sufficiently accurate and narrowly tailored to that interest in light of the extent to which it is likely to expose protected expressive and intimate associations.

The collection of all meta-data for everyone all of the time is not "narrowly tailored" and hence it would fail strict scrutiny. The Government's program is unconstitutional.

Freedom of Association in a Networked World: First Amendment Regulation of Relational Surveillance by Katherine J. Strandburg :: SSRN

The public disclosure of classified documents by Edward Snowden has been a polarizing issue, particularly among my friends and colleagues in the infosec world, who pay close attention to matters involving civil liberties, national security, and the Internet. The thing that I have found most disappointing about this whole affair is the need that people have to rationalize their feelings about it by ignoring its reality. I've seen a number of very smart people, for whom I have tremendous professional respect, twist the facts of this situation inside out in order to create simple, morally clear narratives that are utterly wrong.

It is this aspect of human nature that makes political discussions so difficult. We approach challenging controversies with the desire to affirm our own sense of identity and our self interests. Often, the best way to accomplish that, is a selective reading of the facts.

Partisan pundits are professionals who specialize in weaving these narratives for us. They take a set of facts, emphasize and exaggerate some of them, and ignore or minimize others, in order to reach a conclusion that is emotionally satisfying. Having established that the facts clearly lead to a particular conclusion, they then proceed to attack anyone who reaches a different conclusion for not having their "facts straight."

Part of the problem is that we just aren't very good at putting ourselves into other people's shoes, particularly other people that we are angry with.

Its easy to discard facts that don't have any personal relevance for you. In order to understand the relevance to someone else, you've got to go to a lot of effort to understand their circumstances and their point of view. Then you've got to incorporate their legitimate interests into the narrative, leading to a conclusion that is less clearly about you.

It is much easier to just disregard the other side or ridicule them than to respect them and take their interests seriously in this way and risk having to make compromises with them. We want to feel a certain way about a given situation and we're just not interested in points of view that make us uncomfortable. So we construct echo chambers where other people who are just like us tell us how insightful they find our narrow views. People seem to do this regardless of how smart they are, how informed they are, or what part of the political spectrum they are on.

Many of the facts that we ignore and dismiss through this process have more relevance for us upon careful examination than they did at first glance, but we rarely get far enough to figure that out.

Four Americas

In light of these observations, the way that peo... [ Read More (3.8k in body) ]