You are being watched

[geonuc]

I completely disagree. With balanced systems, a 5-10% rejection rate is not only reasonable, but arguably optimum.

We must have worked in totally different industries.

LOL. I am referring to the legal 'industry', so yes, it's probably outside your area of expertise.

[SciFiFisher]

IIRC part of the reason for a 5-10% rejection rate on warrant requests has to do with differing interpretations of probable cause and due process. A certain amount of subjectivity creeps into both sides of the equation. Cop on the beat sees a guy loitering around a house. A few people come and go through out the week and leave with packages. It's in a bad neighborhood. So, they attempt to get a warrant to search the house assuming it's a drug distribution point. The judge looks at the request and says "you don't have probable cause just because people are leaving with packages. They may be selling a perfectly legal product out of the home."

Now, if you had a witness who stated that they bought drugs at the house...

[Sigma_Orionis]

This just in:

US National Security Agency 'is surveillance leviathan'

The tasty bits:

The overall effect is that 0.00004% of the world's online activity is reviewed by NSA intelligence analysts, the memorandum said.
The paper added: "If a standard basketball court represented the global communications environment, NSA's total collection would be represented by an area smaller than a dime on that basketball court."

But Mr Bowden said the figures were "utterly meaningless" since the memorandum is vague about where the data is taken from.

He adds: "After subtracting video media and spam, which accounts for most data by volume, 1.6% is an admission the NSA has become a surveillance leviathan."

There he does have a point, but here:

Mr Bowden also said there was "no privacy restraint or restriction" in the way that the NSA can access the communications of foreigners.

"The reassurances of the NSA document are addressed entirely to the American people. It simply disregards the human right to privacy of the rest of the world," Mr Bowden said.

Since the US Intelligence complex is supposed to answer to the People of the US it's only natural that they attempt to protect US citizens and still snoop on furriners, I don't see how it can be avoided (even assuming it has proper oversight).

now this:

On Friday the Obama administration also released a policy document outlining its legal rationale for collecting telephone metadata.

It said that to be able to spot a suspicious pattern of behaviour it must have access to a sufficiently large set of data.

The US government needed to keep those records itself for up to five years because telephone companies normally do not keep their own records that long.

The papers appeared hours after Mr Obama told reporters he would take action to be more transparent about US surveillance plans.

He proposed making changes to the Patriot Act, under which the NSA programme is authorised, and reforming the secret court that approves surveillance requests.

The president added that he would appoint a privacy and civil liberties officer to the NSA and also create a task force that would make further recommendations on improving transparency.

You'll excuse me, but I don't see how that can be done effectively.

[FZR1KG]

IIRC part of the reason for a 5-10% rejection rate on warrant requests has to do with differing interpretations of probable cause and due process. A certain amount of subjectivity creeps into both sides of the equation. Cop on the beat sees a guy loitering around a house. A few people come and go through out the week and leave with packages. It's in a bad neighborhood. So, they attempt to get a warrant to search the house assuming it's a drug distribution point. The judge looks at the request and says "you don't have probable cause just because people are leaving with packages. They may be selling a perfectly legal product out of the home."

Now, if you had a witness who stated that they bought drugs at the house...

I understand there will be rejection rates.
I just fail to see how any figure can be claimed better than the other.

What if ll the police officers were trained to a higher standard than the courts when dealing with one specific issue, warrants.
That being the case, any rejection at all is likely the court screwing up.

What if they are trained about the same on the subject of issuing warrants, what should the rejection rate be then?

What if they are less trained than the courts, then the rejection rate should be higher.

See where I'm going with this?

Comparing the rejection rates for an intelligence organisation to our standard courts and police won't work because of the differing training levels.

My point in all this is that TSC rejected the notion that there is an oversight in the form of FISA.
It was rejected on the basis of the rejection rates being so low that it "must" be a case of rubber stamping.
I disagree.
Maybe it is rubber stamping, maybe it isn't but using the rejection rate of a police/court figure and comparing it against a more highly trained and specialized group doesn't work.

That's why I wanted to know what makes the normal police/court rejection rate supposedly optimum.
I'd like to see some data on what the problem is with denied requests.
Without that the figures are meaningless for the purposes of working out what is normal or what should be normal.
Case in point, if I reject randomly 1 in 15 requests, I am then considered to be doing my job optimally.
The rejection rate can't be used as a measure of validity one way or the other.

Likewise without seeing any data on FISA and their rejections one can't really claim rubber stamping.

[The Supreme Canuck]

FZ, with respect, you've completely misunderstood what I said - if you had understood properly, you wouldn't have dismissed my mention of conviction rates as a totally different thing. It isn't. It isn't at all. And what's more, the reason that you misunderstood me is precisely the same reason that you can't understand why a 5-10% rejection rate is correct: you are thinking of the law from an engineering standpoint, and the engineering metaphor that you're using is the wrong one.

You seem to think that law enforcement/intelligence agencies and the courts are supposed to work together as one system to produce outcomes that result in both security on the one hand and justice on the other hand. If the courts aren't granting near 100% of warrant requests (and convicting near 100% of accused), something is wrong. The police/intelligence agencies are doing something wrong because they're pushing too many innocent people into the system. Clearly if there is a less than 100% success rate, the police/intelligence agencies need to be fixed so that they can work with the courts to get that 100% rate. That way, no innocent person is burdened.

This is exactly the wrong way to think about it, because a near 100% hit rate does not mean that no innocent people are getting caught up. It means the opposite.

Try this engineering metaphor instead:

Imagine that you have a device that produces widgets. It is the absolute best design possible (go with me here, even if it sounds implausible - there is no way, according to the laws of physics, to make a better device), but even when it is in perfect working condition, some of the widgets that it produces are defective.

Now imagine that you have a second device that examines the widgets as they are produced by the first device. If it detects a defective widget, it will reject it.

From decades of watching how many widgets these quality control devices reject, it has become known that 5-10% of the widgets produced by the manufacturing device will be defective. This is the industry standard.

Think back to your manufacturing device and its quality control device. The manufacturing unit produces widgets, and the QC unit rejects 5-10% of them as defective. That matches the industry standard average, and so you consider the unit to be operating normally. Now imagine that your QC device breaks down and needs to be replaced. You bin it and set up the replacement. You fire up the manufacturing unit... and find that the new QC unit is only rejecting 0.01% of the widgets.

What is the reasonable conclusion? That your manufacturing unit has suddenly and for no reason begun to perform far more efficiently than any other unit ever observed? Or that there is a defect in your new QC unit?

That's the proper metaphor. Of course the manufacturing unit stands for police/intelligence agencies and the QC unit stands for the courts.

That's how the system was designed. Law enforcement and other agencies are imperfect: there is no way to make them 100% efficient. They will always catch up a significant number of innocent people. Moreover, unlike the manufacturing unit, these agencies are always pushing for more leeway, and will thus always tend to become less "efficient" over time, unless they are checked - that is, more innocent people will get caught up unless someone tells them to back off. That's why you need a QC device - a court - to oversee the operation of these agencies. The court ensures that these agencies can't push for too much leeway and ensures that when they do overstep, they are caught and innocent people go free.

Courts are antagonistic. They are necessarily and by design opposed to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They do not work with them to produce a certain outcome, as you thought. To think that is absolutely incorrect.

So if it has been observed over centuries that properly functioning courts will reject 5-10% of search warrant requests that, in essence, becomes the industry standard, because the agencies making the requests cannot be made better. There's only so good an organization made up of fallible human beings can be. Given that a 5-10% rejection rate is the accepted standard for things working properly and justly, a court that rejects only 0.03% of requests sends up a huge red flag.

Again, you need to ask yourself what the reasonable conclusion is. Did the NSA suddenly and for no reason begin to preform far more "efficiently" than any other law enforcement or intelligence agency ever observed? Or is there a problem with your court?

[The Supreme Canuck]

I understand there will be rejection rates.
I just fail to see how any figure can be claimed better than the other.

Observation, over a long period of time, of the rejection rates of properly functioning courts.

What if ll the police officers were trained to a higher standard than the courts when dealing with one specific issue, warrants.
That being the case, any rejection at all is likely the court screwing up.

I agree the world would be a better place if police were both infallible and incorruptible.

Unfortunately we do not live in a world where that is possible. That's why we have courts and constitutional rights in the first place. If police were capable of being trained the way that you want them to be, there would be no need for trials at all.

My point in all this is that TSC rejected the notion that there is an oversight in the form of FISA.
It was rejected on the basis of the rejection rates being so low that it "must" be a case of rubber stamping.
I disagree.
Maybe it is rubber stamping, maybe it isn't but using the rejection rate of a police/court figure and comparing it against a more highly trained and specialized group doesn't work.

Nonsense. Intelligence agencies also go through non-FISA courts, both in the US and out of it. Guess what? Those courts are where the 5-10% figure comes from.

I'd like to see some data on what the problem is with denied requests.
Without that the figures are meaningless for the purposes of working out what is normal or what should be normal.
Case in point, if I reject randomly 1 in 15 requests, I am then considered to be doing my job optimally.
The rejection rate can't be used as a measure of validity one way or the other.

If a judge randomly rejected a request like that, there would be consequences. The same is true if she randomly approved it. Why? Because there is oversight, court decisions are published openly so that anyone, lawyer or not, can tear the reasoning apart, and there are appellate courts to challenge the judge's decision in. That's how you know the courts are doing their jobs properly; the system is designed to self-correct.

Except for FISA.

Likewise without seeing any data on FISA and their rejections one can't really claim rubber stamping.

I certainly can when the normal oversight mechanisms are utterly absent with this "court" and the rejection rate differs hugely from the "industry standard," even for other intelligence warrant requests.

[The Supreme Canuck]

IIRC part of the reason for a 5-10% rejection rate on warrant requests has to do with differing interpretations of probable cause and due process. A certain amount of subjectivity creeps into both sides of the equation. Cop on the beat sees a guy loitering around a house. A few people come and go through out the week and leave with packages. It's in a bad neighborhood. So, they attempt to get a warrant to search the house assuming it's a drug distribution point. The judge looks at the request and says "you don't have probable cause just because people are leaving with packages. They may be selling a perfectly legal product out of the home."

Now, if you had a witness who stated that they bought drugs at the house...

Exactly. Police are not infallible. And they';re going to try to get a warrant even when they think it's unlikely, on the off chance that a judge might agree with them.

[FZR1KG]

Show me some data TSC.
Without it its all just guess work.

[The Supreme Canuck]

Gee, you want information on what goes on in FISA court proceedings? So would I. We're not allowed to see them.

So, yes, of course it's speculation. It has to be - that's how the court wants it, so that's why its records are closed. But it's informed speculation based upon how courts actually work. Moreover, when it comes to civil liberties, it is reasonable to put the onus on the government to prove it's not fucking everyone over.

Given my understanding of how real courts operate in dealing with warrant requests, it is my (informed) opinion that there is something dreadfully fishy about this court. I'm open to the possibility that there's nothing untoward going on... but the government needs to pony up the proof. There's good reason to believe something bad is going on in the FISA court; the onus is on the government to disprove it.

[FZR1KG]

Give me data on normal police/court requests and why they are denied.
It doesn't have to be FISA.

To substantiate a claim of a system being ideal/optimal, there needs to be data showing why.
That's all I'm after.
Otherwise its a case of, "this is how its always been" nothing more.

[The Supreme Canuck]

There is no specific data about that. No one bothers to collect it since it is irrelevant given the structure of the normal criminal courts. We know that warrant issuing system works properly and without police/judicial overreach because A) those courts are open, B) there are appeals courts that review the decisions of lower courts, C) the system is adversarial (meaning that there are two sides, each one of which is trying its damnedest to beat the other, so the best arguments for both side are made in each case), and D) there are consequences to issuing a bad warrant (the case can be thrown, the evidence can be thrown, the government can be sued, etc.).

We know that the system is a good one because of all that openness: legal experts, the press, legislators, and laypeople can all look at it and pick it apart. It is, in essence, peer reviewed. And so we know that the rate of denial of warrant applications is right because it comes from this system that works. People look at the system and say "Yup. That produces just outcomes; I know that because I can read the reasoning of the court in every case, and it pans out." People look at the warrant denial rate and say "Yup. That's about right. I see in the paper the circumstances surrounding the police wanting a warrant and not getting one; in those circumstances, they should not have." People look at the individual trial decisions where warrants are at issue and say "Yup. The court handled the warrants right. Most cases have properly issued warrants. And those that do not impose appropriate consequences on the prosecution for using a bad warrant."

And, believe me, some of the people looking at those things want the court to be wrong. Badly. As in, it's their job. As in, they'd make millions if the court was wrong. If they can't poke a hole in the system, there's no hole to poke.

Basically, we design a good system, and the denial rate arises naturally from it. Given that we have a bunch of those systems, and each has a warrant denial rate that falls into the accepted reasonable range, we have an "industry standard." That the FISA court falls far out of this range is a red flag. With other courts, we'd look to how they handled warrants to determine if for some reason the rate is actually fine for the FISA court... but we can't do that, since the court is closed. It isn't peer reviewed.

So, given that the denial rate falls outside of the accepted range, given that there is no way to determine if this is acceptable or not, and given that when the denial rate is so low it suggests the court just rubber stamps requests... well. At that point it's reasonable to require the court to prove it isn't full of shit. Because, boy, it certainly looks like it is.

I honestly don't understand why you think the onus isn't on the court to prove it's legitimacy. The legal community is saying "Hey, FISA, that rate looks funky. As in 'gross miscarriage of justice' funky. We can't look at your proceedings and your court is not adversarial, so... want to tell us why that rate is actually okay? Because if you can't, you have a problem."

How is that unreasonable?

[SciFiFisher]

IIRC part of the reason for a 5-10% rejection rate on warrant requests has to do with differing interpretations of probable cause and due process. A certain amount of subjectivity creeps into both sides of the equation. Cop on the beat sees a guy loitering around a house. A few people come and go through out the week and leave with packages. It's in a bad neighborhood. So, they attempt to get a warrant to search the house assuming it's a drug distribution point. The judge looks at the request and says "you don't have probable cause just because people are leaving with packages. They may be selling a perfectly legal product out of the home."

Now, if you had a witness who stated that they bought drugs at the house...

Exactly. Police are not infallible. And they';re going to try to get a warrant even when they think it's unlikely, on the off chance that a judge might agree with them.

Actually, I think it's more a case of perspective. As a former LEO I can tell you that when I see a house where there are a lot of people coming and going I automatically assume that there may be an illegal purpose to the activity. Add scruffy looking characters loitering around and no apparent reason for the amount of traffic and my "probable cause" meter pegs up. Throw in a bad neighborhood and I am going to say I am more than 75% certain that illegal activity is occurring.

The difference is perspective and experience. In a sense the law enforcement person is using a form of profiling along with his or her past experience which tells them that most of the time when these criteria exist illegal activity is occurring. To the LEO that is probable cause. To the court that is a not unreasonable suspicion but not sufficient to meet the criteria for a legally binding interpretation of probable cause.

[The Supreme Canuck]

Well, I'll take your word for it - I'm no cop, so I can't speak to their motivations. All I know is that a lot of the time warrant requests get denied for good reasons.

[Swift]

Thomas Friedman from the New York Times had an interesting Op-ed piece today that was republished in the Plain Dealer (that's how I saw it). LINK

It covers several things, and is mostly on US/Russian relations and how Obama should deal with Putin. I thought it a good piece.

There is a bit about Snowden that I found interesting.

Considering the breadth of reforms that President Obama is now proposing to prevent privacy abuses in intelligence gathering, in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures, Snowden deserves a chance to make a second impression — that he truly is a whistle-blower, not a traitor. The fact is, he dumped his data and fled to countries that are hostile to us and to the very principles he espoused. To make a second impression, Snowden would need to come home, make his case and face his accusers. It would mean risking a lengthy jail term, but also trusting the fair-mindedness of the American people, who, I believe, will not allow an authentic whistle-blower to be unfairly punished.

I thought that was very well said and sums up my thoughts well.

[The Supreme Canuck]

trusting the fair-mindedness of the American people, who, I believe, will not allow an authentic whistle-blower to be unfairly punished.

I think this is an unfounded assumption. Forgive me, but have you listened to some of your countrymen?

(By the way, I'm not being anti-American here; I wouldn't make that assumption about Canadians either. Never bet on the reasonableness or fairness of human beings, especially when there's ideology involved.)

[Rommie]

I find that a funny editorial because I really loved the second half... which really had more to do with Putin's Russia and never connected to Snowden.

First half I was curious to hear how Snowden was going to eventually be a traitor instead of a whistle-blower (ie where do you draw the line? lots of interesting conversations to be had there) but never returned to the topic.

Don't worry guys, someday when I write a column such stones won't be unturned.

[FZR1KG]

I've been really busy lately to the point I may not even be able to reply much more on FWIS, but, I waned to address this because I missed it when it was posted.

Try this engineering metaphor instead:

Imagine that you have a device that produces widgets. It is the absolute best design possible (go with me here, even if it sounds implausible - there is no way, according to the laws of physics, to make a better device), but even when it is in perfect working condition, some of the widgets that it produces are defective.

Now imagine that you have a second device that examines the widgets as they are produced by the first device. If it detects a defective widget, it will reject it.

From decades of watching how many widgets these quality control devices reject, it has become known that 5-10% of the widgets produced by the manufacturing device will be defective. This is the industry standard.

Think back to your manufacturing device and its quality control device. The manufacturing unit produces widgets, and the QC unit rejects 5-10% of them as defective. That matches the industry standard average, and so you consider the unit to be operating normally. Now imagine that your QC device breaks down and needs to be replaced. You bin it and set up the replacement. You fire up the manufacturing unit... and find that the new QC unit is only rejecting 0.01% of the widgets.

What is the reasonable conclusion? That your manufacturing unit has suddenly and for no reason begun to perform far more efficiently than any other unit ever observed? Or that there is a defect in your new QC unit?

That's the proper metaphor. Of course the manufacturing unit stands for police/intelligence agencies and the QC unit stands for the courts.

That's how the system was designed. Law enforcement and other agencies are imperfect: there is no way to make them 100% efficient. They will always catch up a significant number of innocent people. Moreover, unlike the manufacturing unit, these agencies are always pushing for more leeway, and will thus always tend to become less "efficient" over time, unless they are checked - that is, more innocent people will get caught up unless someone tells them to back off. That's why you need a QC device - a court - to oversee the operation of these agencies. The court ensures that these agencies can't push for too much leeway and ensures that when they do overstep, they are caught and innocent people go free.

Courts are antagonistic. They are necessarily and by design opposed to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They do not work with them to produce a certain outcome, as you thought. To think that is absolutely incorrect.

So if it has been observed over centuries that properly functioning courts will reject 5-10% of search warrant requests that, in essence, becomes the industry standard, because the agencies making the requests cannot be made better. There's only so good an organization made up of fallible human beings can be. Given that a 5-10% rejection rate is the accepted standard for things working properly and justly, a court that rejects only 0.03% of requests sends up a huge red flag.

I just want to point out the problem in this.
For centuries this "rate" has been empirically determined to be "correct"

Now it is assumed to be correct.
When any system is assumed correct it causes both problems and inefficiencies later.

Your example about the wigets being 5-10% faulty places a caveat on that information that says we can't make that rate better, then you use that to rebut my argument about it being inefficient because it can't be made more efficient. Logically if there is a fault rate someone will try to find out how to improve it. If its assumed that it is optimum already, no one will.
When I ask for data you say there is none.

Lets then add another inherent problem in the legal system, that fact that the richer you are the fairer the system is to you.
Or to put it another way, the poorer you are the more the system screws you.
Anyone that says that doesn't happen really needs to get their head out of the sand and take a good look around.
But that's been the "standard" for thousands of years. If I used your argument, there is no problem, it is optimum.

That is part of the "standard" rejection rate and all the rest of the "standards" in the legal field.

You also seem to be saying that the police are the corrupt ones but don't consider that it makes no difference where people are, corruption exists and the general rule is the more power you have the more corruption takes place.

My point there is that there is corruption on both sides.

With no one looking at the information we're blind.
That's no the way to improve anything. That is the way to keep the status quo and hold onto the corruption and add a little fertiliser to it as well.

Remember, the Earth was flat, that was a "standard", till someone looked at the data, we were the center of the Universe was a standard, till someone looked at the data. If no one looks at the data and everyone assumes its correct, nothing will ever change.

[Sigma_Orionis]

Not too shocking news: for all his incompetent whining, it looks like Snowden's claims about the NSA being way too cavalier with whom and how they snoop has substantial basis, apparently at least some of the files he leaked are Internal NSA audits.

It will be interesting to see how this ends up.

I still don't like the idiot one bit, as for him being a legitimate "whistleblower" or not, I don't know.

[Parrothead]

I agree with you, about this:

I still don't like the idiot one bit, as for him being a legitimate "whistleblower" or not, I don't know.

Perhaps, "Falcon" (in the earlier piece you linked to) and the documentary director in the piece I saw on cnn, nailed it. Best way to describe him just may well be "defector", not traitor or whistle-blower, plain and simple.

[Cyborg Girl]

And now, from the UK:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... -reporters

Deliberately intimidating journalists and threatening to shut down a newspaper. Classy.

Meanwhile, the encrypted email service Lavabit has shut down. Why? Don't know, because the CEO says he's not legally allowed to explain.

Look, I can see the rationale for mass surveillance, but this is fucking ridiculous. We're being treated like mushrooms here.

To the governments of the US and UK: please, stop being so damn secretive and tell us what's going on. Give the public a reason! Tell us what's so horribly dangerous, what's got you so absurdly worked up as to compromise your integrity like this; or stow the black helicopters and shut the fuck up. For God's sake, stop insulting our intelligence with this "you can't handle the truth" crap.

The public deserves the truth. The public has to handle the truth. That is how a democracy is supposed to work. Seriously, I don't care if it's terrorists, alien invaders, or evil goblins from Faeryland. People deserve much better than a load of cloak-and-dagger bullshit.

[Sigma_Orionis]

Not that it matters one damned bit:

No 10 contacted Guardian over Edward Snowden secrets

Following the conversations, Mr Rusbridger agreed to what he has called one of the most bizarre incidents in the newspaper's history.

Two GCHQ security experts oversaw the destruction in a basement of computer files containing information from America's National Security Agency leaked by Mr Snowden.

Mr Rusbridger said: "We were quite clear we were not going to hand this material back to the British government so we destroyed it ourselves under advice from a couple of GCHQ intelligence experts, who told us which bits of the hard drive to smash up, in what way."

The files had already been copied and the Guardian will continue to pursue the Snowden story, but from the US.

You can bet that if the folks at the Guardian have two cents worth of grey matter, the Snowden Files are replicated not only in the US but in all sorts of privacy friendly countries.

As for the Lavabit thing, the fallout is already happening, another encrypted comms service called Silent Circle, founded by Phil Zimmermann (creator of PGP), despite not having been contacted in any way by any US Security agencies, has unilaterally discontinued their private email service (and destroyed all their encryption keys as well), saying that it's inherently insecure and can't guarantee their users privacy.. However:

Meanwhile, Silent Circle is working on replacing its defunct e-mail service with a system that doesn’t rely on traditional e-mail protocols and keeps no messages or metadata within the company’s grasp. It is based on a protocol often used for instant messages and other applications. Janke says the goal is for this to not be e-mail, but “for all intents and purposes it looks, feels, and acts like e-mail.”

I suspect that a lot of private email services using TOR's transport protocols (among other things) will be setup in "privatcy friendly countries" in the short term.

[brite]

You understand that in Britain there is no 2nd Amendment (Freedom of the Press), right? The government is allowed to do that. The BBC is OWNED by the government.

What has peoples knickers in a twist isn't that the government is "spying" on you, it's been doing that for years, it's that now you are aware of it.

[The Supreme Canuck]

You understand that in Britain there is no 2nd Amendment (Freedom of the Press), right?

First Amendment. The Second is the right to bear arms.

The government is allowed to do that.

Actually, that's an interesting legal question. The way that things work is different from in the US. You are correct to say that there is no written constitutional protection for freedom of the press... but that isn't as determinative in the UK as it is in the US. See, the British constitution is mostly an unwritten one based upon norms ("constitutional conventions") rather than on black-letter law. And there is a long tradition of freedom of the press in the UK - long enough that a constitutional convention concerning the freedom of the press has been established in the unwritten constitution. Moreover, there is a fairly strong possibility that this violates the Human Rights Act - it hasn't been decided yet, and is currently before the courts concerning an unrelated matter, as I understand it.

So, depending on how that other trial is decided (and depending on how the constitutional convention issue is decided in a future hypothetical case) the UK government could well not be allowed to do that.

Moreover, even if it is allowed to do it, the real question we (and, more importantly, the British public) should be asking is if the government should be allowed to do that.

The BBC is OWNED by the government.

That has no bearing on the legal question of whether the government is allowed or should be allowed to interfere in independent journalistic operations as it has done. That's a question of law, not a question of who owns what.

Also, the BBC is editorially independent from the government. Yes, they receive funding from London, but that's it - they say what they want and the government has no control over anything they say. The government has zero editorial input. The same is true of the CBC in Canada and NPR in the US (though the NPR funding model is different from that of the BBC and CBC).

Besides which, we're talking about a privately-owned newspaper, not the BBC.

What has peoples knickers in a twist isn't that the government is "spying" on you, it's been doing that for years, it's that now you are aware of it.

Perhaps. But how is that an argument against "having our knickers in a twist"? The fact remains that the government is spying on us. How does the fact that it has only recently come into the public sphere for discussion make that any less bad (or, indeed, any more bad)? And how can people object to a policy if they know nothing about it? Becoming aware of something is the first step in deciding if you are for or against it.

I've seen this criticism all over the place, and I really have no idea why people make it. Don't understand it at all. It says nothing.

[brite]

It's a thing. It has no real bearing on the real world, doesn't change anything. It's business as usual. Nothing has changed. So why are people all worked aup over the government "spying" on them? (and the government isn't really spying on them... it's meta data... unless you say or do something that will trigger their algorithms... they could care less...).. Because now you are aware of it...

[The Supreme Canuck]

It makes no sense because the criticism amounts to saying "Stop complaining about that thing that's being going on for decades but which you've only just learned about. Why didn't you complain about it thirty years ago when you still had no clue it was going on? Since it's been going on so long, you should shut up about it, even though you've only just begun to understand its true extent."

I'm sure you see the issue with that. Saying "You didn't care before" is disingenuous because people didn't know the specifics before. Moreover, even if they had, not complaining in the past is no reason that they should not complain now; something that is wrong is still wrong even if people don't speak against it for decades.