News How far should the Dragnet reach.

[nsaspook]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/u...from-ruling-on-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0


More of the status quo.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved late Friday to prevent a federal judge in California from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets.
...
So, he said, he was continuing to assert the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to seek to block information from being used in court even if that means the case must be dismissed. The Justice Department wants the judge to dismiss the matter without ruling on whether the programs violated the First or Fourth Amendment.

 

[Evo]

This thread has gotten out of hand with conspiracies and unsubstantiated personal opinions.

 

[Astronuc]

According to dozens of previously undisclosed classified documents, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from the smartphone identification codes of users to where they have been that day.

The N.S.A. and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. Since then, the agencies have traded recipes for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, telephone logs and the geographic data embedded in photographs when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other Internet services.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/world/spy-agencies-scour-phone-apps-for-personal-data.html

Hmmm. Perhaps smart phones (or apps) are a bit too smart. One certainly has the choice of not using such technology.