That's the default modus operandi for the German 3-letter agencies: If they spy on you, up to installing surveillance devices at your home, and following you wherever you go for years, you will be never told that happened in case this observation doesn't lead to some "official" accusation. It's now like that for a few years. Before that they (usually) needed to at least inform you after surveillance stopped. Now they don't. The justification for the new regulation is that it would be "too much work" for them to inform all people they spied on.
The law was changed in light of mass surveillance by the German agencies… Because they did spy on most of people by searching almost the whole German internet traffic but never informed anybody they got data from, and that was illegal, our government just changed the law and made it legal.
if they do not notify you automatically, can you ask them? are they obligated in law to disclose these records on demand?
Something tells me they'd simply decide to have an active investigation on everyone from birth to death and simply decline all requests due to "ongoing investigation".
> if they do not notify you automatically, can you ask them? are they obligated in law to disclose these records on demand?
No, of course not. What the German secret services do is mostly, well, secret. One of our ministers for inner affairs said once the following in an interview as an answer to some questions about what the agencies know: "Ein Teil dieser Antworten würde die Bevölkerung verunsichern."¹
It's actually even difficult to get to know what the normal police knows about you. But there they at least have to disclosure such information if you ask as long as there is no open investigation.
> Something tells me they'd simply decide to have an active investigation on everyone from birth to death and simply decline all requests due to "ongoing investigation".
The German agencies don't have the capacity for such thing at the moment. I guess they really would like to have some data-centers like the NSA, but they don't have them currently.
"Physical" surveillance is expensive and needs people. They also need usually some "real reasons" (like you're anti-government and you reach a lot of people online) to spy on you.
What's expanding is digital mass surveillance—as it's considerably cheap. But that's a problem not only in Germany I guess…
At least on paper they can't investigate against any random people. Germany is still considered a nation of law.
They need to report to that panel on secret service affairs in parliament I've mentioned, and there are laws in place for what they are allowed to look for (even you could construct something arbitrary at any time against anybody as we saw in the past; if someone needs a reason for an investigation they will find one for sure).
On the other hands side, as I said, as nobody can really control what they're doing hell knows what kind of data they collect. If someone (like a board of inquiry after some scandal) asks to much questions and wants to look into things they would shred the records likely again, and every involved person "couldn't remember" anything (that last thing is a common trope before parliamentarian boards of inquiry anyway).
Of course they won't tell you as long as you're under suspicion. That's normal and makes perfect sense.
But after the case is closed (and there is no accusation) they should inform you so you could take legal steps to validate the rightfulness of such actions. If observation over a long time doesn't lead to accusation there is a strong pointer that this observation wasn't actually justified in the first place…
As it stands there is no possibility for those affected by state surveillance to ever prove any wrongdoing of the agencies that spied on them!
Now only a very small group in parliament can check cases after the fact. But they can't check mostly anything as this is I think 10 or so people against three agencies and hundreds of cases (if you take internet surveillance into account it's actually millions of cases…).
This becomes a problem in over criminalized society where most people commit some violation of law with out even being fully aware of that fact or what law they violated
This allows for for selective targeting and prosecution based on all manner of reasons form political to personal.
It is not something we should just simply excuse away as "well everyone else does it so it valid and OK"
> It arrived one morning in March, bearing news that Facebook had received an order from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over data from personal accounts Lackey uses to chat with friends and exchange cat photos.
> the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret
This is some scary shit. Seriously, social media companies are sociopathic friends who record everything you say and then throw it into the public in a mangled mess if you don't obey.
Yep, I'm old enough to remember when the general advice was to never use your real name on the internet. Then social media came along and suddenly that changed.
And now we're seeing the results of the naive trust we placed in these platforms as well as our fellow human beings. As a people we need to get back to drawing a hard line between our Private and Public selves.
First thing I told my kids when they were old enough to start communicating with friends over the internet: don't use your real name, don't tell anyone your last name, don't tell anyone your address.
And then they go to school.
School makes then use their full legal names to create an account and Google or Microsoft or Apple, store all their school activity under that.
Then you explain to the school why it's not a good idea, but they say, they have to because, etc.
Most important: don't give your phone number to companies! It is used to link your activity across sites and apps.
You of course can't get an Apple ID, a Google Account, a Twitter username, a Discord account, et c without giving a phone number. There are several good reasons for that but the biggest one is for identification.
That was the benefit of early account creation with several of those companies. Spam email address is the only link. Twitter and Facebook keep harassing me for a phone number but nah, I’d rather not use it.
Of course it would be trivial to link to my IP, but I’m not going to make it easy for them.
I just discovered yesterday that while the Discord itself does not require it in all cases, certain servers with the highest restrictions can require that you have a phone number verified with Discord in order to post.
When companies like Discord or Google seem to let you create an account without a phone number, what that really means is that they already figured out your phone number based on your IP, HTTP ETAGs, or browser fingerprint.
I've begun to think that our private and public selves should be legally distinct entities using a corporation with a screen name and keep your personal identity for offline use only.
You are 10 years too late. Remember when Google plus was arguing that you had to use your "real name", endless arguments about that, very few for why this was a good thing. There were some naive claims that it would lead to some mysterious social pressure for people to behave if their real name was used.
In today's world, the ever more ubiquitous tracking should give everyone pause. Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary. Do you want to have any privacy? Then you need to do that. I don't hold any hope for the legislative bodies to succeed in blocking this. Not at the US federal level at least - there may be hope for California.
Yeah, that's a good point. Anonymity relies on everyone using Tor as well so they all look the same. If there's just one weird guy using Tor it's easy to single him out.
Unfortunately there are huge moves to decreasing privacy going through the legislatures and via ad/social technologies.
You'd basically have to leave everything behind and start over, change your name, move and leave no forwarding address and forget your friends; thats a non-starter for most people.
It's surprising how many sites don't even let you edit your name after you've input the data. I've seen this on a lot of them as I slog through my password manager to scrub and delete every account that I can.
Oh, this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Most people have absolutely no idea how compromised the information system is.
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, am I right? Unless people in government want to have you murdered for standing up against corruption, or for being an activist. Very, very deeply disturbing, actually.
Not to record the conversation in a form that they can turn it over in a useful fashion in the first place. Eg mine your data from it and then delete it or encrypt it with only the user being able to decrypt it.
Honestly at this stage I just have to assume that the three letter orgs have access to all my online data. All my important data is being captured and stored forever. Even if I'm using encrypted communications channels, and even if I know that I'm doing it correctly, the other endpoint likely leaks like a sieve.
I’m starting to wonder if adding garbage to your online identity is the best path forward.
If they try and use what you say online against you, well, make half of the content contradictory and easily falsifiable.
When they come for you with a claim of “posted messages indicating involvement in a conspiracy” I wonder how good of a defense it would be to clearly show half of what you post are outright falsehoods and lies.
Can they claim you were conspiring against X when half of your online presence is defending X?
They can do whatever they want. If the president isn’t safe from the fbi, then nobody is. The other agencies I think get a lot of unfair press. The fbi are pure shit, if for no other reason than it’s just way too large an organization to police itself. How many fbi employees even are there at this point? I’m sure a few of them (including those reading this post) are good, but the others are pure shit.
Of course, but when they quote statements like “Biden is a criminal” your defense lawyer can pull quotes like “Biden is the savior of our Republic” to basically cast doubt on anything you’ve actually said online.
It’s not denying anything. It’s clearly showing that what you say on the internet isn’t based on your true beliefs.
It happens all the time in actual court cases. Someone say “i hated John” and that’s used to show motive so the defense beings a witness who said the defendant drove John to church every Sunday.
It's just that it's a weak defense because the prosecution will make the argument that you committed your crime in one of those periods where you held malicious beliefs, in an emotional state.
They only need to demonstrate that you had motive sometimes, not all the time.
I don't know, it seems that usually the alphabet people are the ones conspiring with you.
But yeah, I think adding garbage is a good strategy. I tell myself this whenever I watch Netflix or a football game online. They'll think I'm just some Regular Joe, but actually, deep down, I'm a rebel...
This uses phantom js and unfortunately it won't work in principle, because Google has a "I'm not a robot" button that can tell you're a robot from mouse movements only, so they can do the same with every search result link.
The person under surveillance in this article is a friend of mine.
I am today very happy that I have NO Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc accounts: none of my private conversations with this person are possibly subject to this fishing expedition.
Yet another reason to delete your accounts on these ad surveillance systems. (This includes gmail, for those of you still donating your entire purchase and travel history to the world's biggest ad company.)
I've been somewhat careful about what I put on social media, moreso lately, but I think you have really good points about this.
I've been somewhat Anti-Google for a while but explaining why they're bad to the average person falls on deaf ears. They won't care until google bans them or deletes all of their files. Google banning personal documents has been more publicized recently, but it won't slow the layperson down who thinks "nobody is interested in me" or "I'm not doing anything wrong!".
There will be a day that the Government and/or Google thinks you're doing something wrong and you'll lose out. We see FB handing out bans/timeouts for stupid things regularly, its only a matter of time before there's some government blocklist that they will all follow and be able to place you on...
Only corporate ad surveillance social media! I grew up on the internet and it is my hometown. I'm on IRC and the fediverse, and still anonymously browse reddit via the api, and run a bbs (link in profile).
Much of the best shit in my life came from weird strangers on the internet.
I love social media; I just hate advertising and surveillance.
I'm pretty much the same. I used to believe in gov and rule of law but when you see how many criminals get off and how selective all these agencies are in whom they prosecute, I am disgusted at how corrupt the whole system has become.
>Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
"Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it ... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance."
But Herbert was also speaking in a context of a rigid social structure. Any leader came not from the masses but an elite social class, royal houses. Even those that seemed to come from the masses inevitably would turn out to be elites in hiding. Or they would quickly step aside to make room for someone of better blood. So the wisdom of the quote is that if one must choose between two princes, the prince that does not want power should ascend over his ambitious brother. It does not mean looking for leaders amongst the lower orders.
They always have been corrupt, it’s just that in the past they’ve been better at keeping it quiet and had better PR. The “G-man” fighting organized crime goes pretty far in terms of positive public perception.
However, I would argue the FBI is likely less corrupt now than in the Hoover days when it was a one-man kingdom. More opportunities for leaks of electronic documents, etc.
It's my firm belief that transparency is what will help us as a society to reform these institutions, little pieces at a time, bit by bit. Transparency and liability.
Corruption was built-in, easy, while "we-the-people" have the power to highlight corruption and act on it there's hope to get a better system at some point.
Agreed. This is why "perception of corruption" indexes can be misleading. I came from a country, where, if you ask residents would say there is little corruption. I would argue it's just not visible.
While other countries that attempt to root out corruption in the public way, get the perception of being more corrupt only because the government is transparent about it.
> When I was younger, I respected agencies like the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Now I think they are corrupt as hell and we’d be better off without them.
Hear, hear. I'd abolish these institutions long before I abolished the police (and I'd love to reform US police into something basically unrecognizable).
And then we'd need to replace them with new institutions to pick up the slack they were originally set up for. And we'd staff them with the same people because we need their skills. A bit like what happened in Germany post ww2.
In Georgia (a country in Eastern Europe, not a US state) they just dismissed nearly all police officers some time around 2004, without the right to work in police again. The previous police force was corrupt beyond redemption.
Then they hired and trained an entirely new police force, including the top officers. As a result, corruption in the new police force basically does not exist.
I suppose most people in NSA are not renowned cryptographers; it's not they who are most corrupt.
Arguably anyone with the sheer horsepower to play ball at the Equation Group level can see far enough around the bend to feel conflicted about working for the contemporary NSA.
This is obviously speculation but if the NSA was reformed into something that mostly respected the rule of law most of the time, more excellent cryptographers and cryptanalysts would want to work there.
I imagine that the NSA’s ostensible mission of protecting United States communications and compromising the communications of legitimately menacing regimes would be better served without domestic full-take and secret courts.
My thoughts are that it's a good thing to have agents in the world that can operate in the dark, keeping their actions, and sometimes the consequences, hidden and secret. It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on. That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.
Take the oversight and principled direction away, and you're left with state funded villains whose activity will almost always run counter to societal well-being.
Our institutions are failing because we eroded and ultimately lost our social cohesion and embraced the cultural balkanization instead of seeking new shared values.
It's bad enough that we don't trust the media, but the CIA being off the leash is horrifying. The war on drugs is a crystallized example of this social failure mode.
> It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on.
This may be true in the abstract, I agree, but out there in the world, you don't have to stray too deeply into kook-dom to realize that, unsettlingly often, we're (the US) the guys responsible for the creation of the conditions in which warlords and drug cartels operate in the first place -- and almost as frequently, of the groups themselves. There are no drug cartels without a War On Drugs, and indeed, the CIA has been shown to be deeply involved in cartel activity itself. (See the Kiki Camarena story, Gary Webb's work, and the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz. All mainstream sources, no whackjobs. The recent-ish Camarena Netflix documentary "The Last Narc" is terrific.) So you could make a compelling case that if we didn't get our hands dirty in these areas at all, we wouldn't need a CIA or NSA to manage the inevitable consequences when the actors involve start behaving in ways we don't like. (I'm told they call this "blowback".) And indeed, this is exactly the point. It's a genius business. It's like the guys in Amsterdam who own both the cannabis coffee-shop and the kebab place next door to it. Revolving door operation. Prints money!
> That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.
Respectfully, this is impossible. Human beings cannot do this. No one is incorruptible, and there are too many people with an interest in meaningful oversight never existing, starting with these little mafias themselves. The real-world record bears this out: there is no meaningful oversight, from congress to FISA to your local cops using StingRays. They're just not going to tell you what they're doing. And if you bother them too much about it, well, let's just say don't get on any small aircraft. This is an open secret in DC. Look, even Chuck Schumer knows: "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
As I've said in other threads: if you ask a bunch of people to get world-class-good at lying, stealing, betraying, and murdering, and they then start doing those things to you, well, there's no one to blame but yourself.
The warnings against the CIA came as early as the Doolittle report [0] during the Eisenhower administration (see Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes), and Peter Kornbluh's Bay of Pigs Declassified documents the intention of Kennedy's state department to rename the CIA and strip it of its covert action capacity in the aftermath of the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation.
But really, you could go as far back as Nietzsche if you wanted to ignore another perfectly apt warning:
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you.
>> by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.
Nope. All chains are corruptible. Nothing should ever be based on the idea that some core group of people is above reproach. That is the stuff of superhero movies. Realworld trust systems must be built on the basis that everyone and anyone might be a bad actor. All nodes should have oversight. All actors should be accountable to multiple levels of supervision. Everything should be documented. Those who become corrupt need to be detected and removed. When dealing with classified information the process will operate more slowly but must still take place.
On the obverse, we could just eschew hierarchies of power altogether. No nodes to supervise in that case, and everyone is directly accountable. Of course we long ago crossed the Rubicon, and we're simply riding the momentum to the inflection point wherein we are all doomed.
Injecting more naive rationalist bureaucrats into the system won't quell its demise. Those who have the greatest leverage over world outcomes have no interest in remedying even an iota of the social decay. And those who directly act under the dictates of the moment of those people have only self-interest to motivate them. Those of us at the bottom are onlookers, helpless to move the inertial mass away from its predestined impact, or blind to it - either by deliberate delusion or by ignorance and perhaps both. All of this because we allowed the reins to be taken by mere men, unprepared to pilot the immeasurable potential of mankind responsibly.
This is a lovely way of phrasing something that I have been thinking about.
Basically that low accountability systems are really bad across the board. If they work for one generation (as in a benevolent dictatorship) then that’s nice, but it’s not a long-term solution.
I think that systems that require oversight to fight off corruption aren't stable in the long-term. Almost inevitably the executive and the oversight get corrupted in the same way. And then they end up perpetuating themselves. The only real solution seems to be to 'randomly' reset the system once in a while.
The superhero approach might (arguably) be valid in some cases -- I'm thinking of Lincoln, Washington, and FDR.
But an institution must be larger than a single person. Because if you want something to last longer than about 40 years (which is about the maximum amount of time a superhero can be super) you have to have succession.
It's also notable that those "greats" had in common a vision larger than themselves. Selflessness and an annihilation of ego, in service of a larger project, seems to be a requirement for getting yourself to that superhero status in the first place.
>It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on.
Its hard to envision any foreign nation state level threat that is more dangerous than domestic state police that surveil, torture and murder people completely outside the law and the Constitution.
As a routine practice, yes. If my phone was subpoenaed (or likely to be in the future), wiping my phone would be against the law. I would only do so if the risk was worth it.
I believe it's just the comparison to how seizures used to work, where someone would show at your home, workplace, etc, with a warrant, so you knew about it immediately.
I think that if you are doing anything even slightly controversial or dubious, you should assume that any 3-letter agencies might be interested in that stuff already have access to everything you write using big-tech messaging technologies. To my mind, you just cannot afford thinking otherwise.
Its not just big tech, every company does it because they have to. Quite a few just choose to. And many sell your data for the right price. Others fake data breaches and get paid under the table then collect insurance. Its all an ugly game.
Fair point, I have no proof of that happening. It just seems like an easy way to sell data that shouldn't be sold for various reasons. If it hasn't happened yet, it is only a matter of time.
This is obviously unconscionable, but I did find this part of the article absurd and poorly researched:
> the Trump Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed their email account data in an effort to identify the source of classified leaks early in President Donald Trump’s term
Knowing rdl's politics, this is patently ridiculous on the part of the journalist. rdl has been an enemy of the state for decades now, going back to cypherpunks and Haven. Some of this context could have been useful to their readers.
> “I’m pretty confident that I’m a fairly boring person. I haven’t done anything that I would consider worthy of the FBI’s time or interest,” Lackey said.
Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
TL;DR?
"...and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation;"
The more relevant thing is Amendment IV: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Third party doctrine, by which my private communications are exposed because they use a cloud-hosted provider vs. being physically located in my home, is bullshit. Almost all laws on surveillance were made back when it was time and labor intensive to do searches -- even the pen registers for metadata collection -- vs. today where the cloud services run law enforcement portals and the process is very easy (and many judges and senior LE people don't push back on warrants and subpoenas.)
I’m getting really tired of this “big tech” word soup. It comes with a lot of presupposed negative connotation, despite nothing in this article being “big tech’s” doing (instead it’s “big government”).
I know I’m largely shouting into a void here but I wish we could bring back some neutrality to news, reduce the editing-choice of extraneous emotion, and actually look at things with some balance and gray instead of reducing everything down to some kind of political rhetoric.
> despite nothing in this article being “big tech’s” doing
Of course it is their doing. Why are they even storing messages and metadata to begin with? Why are they exposing us to this risk? There should be nothing there for any government to find. In an ideal world they'd be connecting us to each other peer-to-peer so that our encrypted communications don't even touch their servers.
Bit Tech's insatiable hunger for personal data is a massive liability for all of us. Their guilt is not to be excused. Governments would have nothing if not for their extensive non-consensual data collection.
That's not what most people want. Most people want a third party to store their messages. Look how most people react when they switch phones and their message history isn't there, or the change devices and there is no message history.
Or how livid people get when their photos are gone. Most iPhone owner's backup plan is "iCloud".
Most people don't care about privacy, they care about convenience.
They don't want to lose their data if they lose their password/device. The only way that is possible is for the third party to have access to the data.
I would posit most people don't care if a 3rd party has access to their data, all they care about is not losing their stuff when they lose their device/password. They don't care about the technology behind it, which requires the 3rd party to have access.
There are other methods to ensure access. Extra devices. Postits on the back of their TV. Codes their friends have, with 3 of 5 needed. Carving it into jewelry.
Sure, but all of those are for more complicated than "sign up for iCloud". As I said, most people only care about convenience above all else. They are willing to trade convenience for 3rd party data access.
You can backup your iPhone to a local computer and even encrypt it without using iCloud. It's certainly an option. No one chooses it because iCloud is easier.
> Backing up to a computer could be made somewhat easier, though.
How? It's about as easy as it gets. It's just easier to use iCloud backups because it takes less steps.
> And iCloud could have a warning instead of being on by default.
Why? If it had a warning and the person doesn't have another computer to back up to, they wouldn't have backups at all. That actually makes things worse for the consumer.
You could theoritally make an argument that the phone could auto-detect if you have a suitable computer for backing up to and then suggest that instead of iCloud, but why would Apple do that?
And furthermore, there would then need to be additional warnings about how you need to back up your computer too otherwise if you lose your phone then your computer is your only backup until you get a new phone.
I think you're grasping at straws here. It's a better user experience for the average user to just have iCloud on by default. They made it plenty easy for power users and even non-power users who care about privacy to avoid iCloud. I don't think they have a legal or moral obligation to steer you away from iCloud.
Every 4-5 years I buy a new phone. I manually move all my data from my old device to the new one. Many tens of gigabytes. Nothing has ever been lost. I still have every single message, photo and video I've ever sent or received since I first installed WhatsApp about 10 years ago. I have backups too.
None of this cloud storage stuff is necessary. It's nice to have the option to use it but it should be optional. I'm sure these companies are smart enough to automate this process without requiring third party servers or even an internet connection.
The point is what I do shouldn't be hard at all. Two phones with wireless radios. Why can't they transfer data peer-to-peer? They should make it easy to do that.
I don't know about Andriod, but Apple has had this for a while. You just put the phones next to each other on a good wifi network. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210216
Companies wouldn't obscure privacy violations if very few people cared. And Apple wouldn't have a privacy marketing campaign. Or bother end to end encrypting anything.
That sounds very nice, do tell us if you have come up with or know of a (successful) business model where you do not have to collect the data of users. Nothing comes for free.
Early ad companies didn't collect a ton of information and relied on clickthrough ratio to make money, I worked for one of the biggest in the late 90s.
As time went on, people wanted more and more user data, click bots made targeting entirely neccesary.
>That sounds very nice, do tell us if you have come up with or know of a (successful) business model where you do not have to collect the data of users. Nothing comes for free.
Really? I'm not so sure about that.
If the FBI wants my data, they'll need to come to my premise with a warrant.
Otherwise, they're SOL. And how much does that cost me over and above what I spend for the infrastructure I require? Zero.
How many companies that mine my personal information (for whatever reasons) do I use? Zero.
You are substituting your trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature, IMHO.
> do tell us if you have come up with or know of a (successful) business model where you do not have to collect the data of users. Nothing comes for free.
http://valueflo.ws asset backed flow -protocols built on top of the holochain dweb framework.
Headline does imply that when the FBI seizes your messages from Little Tech, you would find out in a different timeframe, but I'm not sure that's the case.
This is indeed done with a warrant - a gag ordered one.
The ones done without a warrant are a tiny fraction of the ones done with. The "burden" of getting a warrant is almost purely token at this point. The agents write some stuff "based on my knowledge and experience" and describe the who and the why and the what, and the judge rubber stamps it. There is no real consequence or penalty for misstatements of fact in the warrant application, and frequently the basis for the probable cause is simply wrong. 100% of the signed warrants I have seen contained obvious and blatant falsehoods.
It is not clear it was done with a warrant. It may have merely been a subpoena for the account details but not really contents. Since FBI refuses to respond to me or my attorney (Jennifer Granick of ACLU, one of the top in this field), we don't know.
How many “Law Enforcement Notice” emails did you receive from Facebook? 1 or multiple?
Did Facebook release the case ID associated with the legal action?
Have you tried a Privacy Act request with the FBI? They may deny it based on “current or prospective law enforcement” but if you were scooped up in a dragnet, they may give you something.
1 (I also emailed them and was told "we can't give you legal advice").
I have the case IDs but my lawyer (Jennifer Granick; she is basically among the best in the world for this) has been unable to get a response from FBI -- they blew her off 5 times.
I did FOIA myself and got "no information since last time you requested" (~10 years ago, which was also basically null)
A Senator's office is involved now. (This is all complicated even more because I currently live in a US Territory where we don't have Congressional representation.)
I meant the general practice of government snoops getting non-e2e customer data from FAANG et al.
People get upset or outraged about warrantless stuff, and they should, but it's important to remember that even search warrants in the USA are essentially rubber stamp (unless they specify like "every photo posted to instagram on x date" or some other obviously overbroad thing). The companies' own transparency reports show the scale of warrants/etc versus NSLs, FISA orders, and the other warrantless stuff people take issue with.
Even without FISA 702 (aka PRISM), National Security Letters, et c, providers having huge, long term, comprehensive non-e2e troves of our data (ie gmail, instagram) is a hazard due to search warrants and of course the insane third party doctrine.
What do you mean illegally? I think a judge signed off on the order. I'm not a lawyer so I'm not completely certain it's legal, but if judges are signing off on orders, I think we need some concrete reason if we want to conclude it's being done illegally.
