
Government Authority Intended for Terrorism is Used for Other Purposes - dpieri
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/peekaboo-i-see-you-government-uses-authority-meant-terrorism-other-uses
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schoen
I'm a bit surprised that there aren't purpose limitations in the enabling
legislation for the most controversial new government investigative
authorities.

The Wiretap Act has an explicitly enumerated list of offenses for the
investigation of which wiretaps may be authorized:

[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2516](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2516)

The default is that a wiretap is _not_ available to investigate an arbitrary
crime. (Of course, there's been a lot of creep and wiretap authority has been
expanded to more and more crimes.) This is based on the idea that a wiretap is
uniquely and intensely invasive compared to other law enforcement techniques.

I don't see why that pattern hasn't been repeated with other investigative
authorities. In the case of section 213 of the Patriot Act, described here,
the effect of the new law was to amend 18 USC §3103a

[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3103a](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3103a)

to allow for "delayed notice" when a search warrant was used. But that section
authorized the issuance of warrants for "any property that constitutes
evidence of _a criminal offense in violation of the laws of the United States_
" (emphasis added), that is, for the investigation of _any Federal crime_.
Presumably it would have been easy for section 213 to have taken a Wiretap
Act-like approach and said that the delayed notice procedure was available for
investigation of crimes x, y, and z, but not other crimes.

(I work with the author of the original article, but we haven't discussed this
topic.)

~~~
smsm42
When some lawmakers openly admit they don't even read the laws they are voting
for, it is no wonder things are passing that people afterwards go "wtf these
guys were thinking?" It's like writing code without any review, testing and
debugging - just type it in and ship to production. But it's about fighting
terrorism - so who has the time to do it right? And of course then when people
see the exploits and try to fix it, they get the pushback - you are siding
with terrorists? So when we get lucky and somebody writing the law really
cares about not breaking things - we can get reasonable limits. Otherwise,
best case we can hope Supreme Court will eventually patch it, once it gets
there, which probably will take another 10-15 years.

~~~
MichaelGG
>It's like writing code without any review, testing and debugging

Well, most PMs don't personally review/test/debug. They assume their people
have done it for them, which I'd guess is how senators operate. So in and of
itself, not reading the laws isn't intrinsically bad. If they had proper
oversight of their teams and knew there was enough QA in the process, they
could rely on summaries from their teams.

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suprgeek
I suspect that 0.5% is not the fraction of searches that most Congress members
voted for when authorizing this law after 9/11 --

"The 2013 report confirms the incredibly low numbers. Out of 11,129 reports
only 51, or .5%, of requests were used for terrorism. The majority of requests
were overwhelmingly for narcotics cases, which tapped out at 9,401 requests."

This is always the case with these kinds of authorizations - a few years pass,
people forget, and suddenly an anti-terrorism "narrowly targeted" drone strike
via the "disposition matrix" becomes the go-to strategy for all police SWAT
teams. This is exactly what we saw in Ferguson recently..

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spydum
I think some of the most interesting findings is how focused the government is
on tackling the drug trade.

You have to wonder, what is the fear of drugs which is driving this? Would a
nation with unrestricted drug trade would descend into anarchy and
lawlessness? That productivity would tank, and all our money/growth would
shrivel up? Are they wrong? It does seem like this would be more terrifying
than a few civilian deaths from terrorist attacks.

~~~
grecy
> _what is the fear of drugs which is driving this?_

It's just a good excuse to be perpetually at war, and war makes people very,
very rich.

Notice how convenient it is that ISIS showed up and suddenly we need to go to
war with them just as Al Qaeda and that war were winding down?

Pretty soon we'll have an entire generation of adults that have never known
peacetime, then being at war will just be normal.

~~~
dTal
> Notice how convenient it is that ISIS showed up and suddenly we need to go
> to war with them just as Al Qaeda and that war were winding down?

Take off the tinfoil hat. It's not "convenient", it's what happens when a
superpower withdraws from a region creating a huge power vacuum. What are you
suggesting, that ISIS is a shadowy plot by Halliburton and the Illuminati?

Quite apart from which, the US _does_ need to sort shit out in Iraq, seeing as
the current mess is _their fault_.

~~~
grecy
> _the US does need to sort shit out in Iraq, seeing as the current mess is
> their fault._

How many messes in a row can they create / need to sort out?

~~~
dTal
I don't think "standard issue dictator likes posturing" and "roving bands of
religious crazies armed with Western equipment murdering women and children
for sport" are quite the same level of mess.

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geetee
"Other purposes" being primarily the "war on drugs", which as we all know, is
going fantastically for the US government.

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Istof
If only Obama would have kept his promise and had the "PATRIOT" Act
repealed...

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legomylibrum
Well, you know what they say; a gun in the first act goes off in the second.
Given these tools, the agencies equipped with them are not going to sit around
not using them.

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dTal
In other news, ursine defecation is predominantly forest-based.

