PRISM Part One

affects everybody, American citizens, people all around the world. And what is all this this hubub about anyway, right, because there's been quite a great deal of hubbub ever since a fellow named Edward Snowden uh leaked some information to some to some press like The Guardian and the Washington Post. Although to be fair, the hubb had really been going on for much longer than that, and and and this was just kind of one of those big things that

everyone has gone a minute, yeah, for good reasons. But snow Din pushed the snowball that became the avalanche. That's that's what happened. But you know, today, what we're going to talk about in this episode is kind of laying the groundwork so that our discussion about the PRISM program

and the related programs makes sense. So in order for us to do that, we really wanted to talk more about kind of the groundwork here, knowing the existing US policy, right, knowing that some people, some of our listeners may not be familiar with the US policy. Some of our listeners live in other countries and are therefore not exposed to US law on a regular basis. And more we're brought up within the American public school system and weren't exposed

to US law. Right. Sorry, that's a cheap shot vocal bomb, but that's kind of a little bit accurate one. But anyway, Yeah, it's it's there's there's a lot of stuff that we need to be able to talk about, and so we're gonna lay down some some basic truths. People come along with us. So to begin with, one of the things that this really concerns is one of the specific amendments to the U. S Constitution. This is one from the Bill of Rights. Yeah, Bill of Rights are the first

ten amendments to that Constitution. Now, the Constitution, of course, is the document that established that the United States is in fact a sovereign nation and it has its own laws and its own way of governing the people. And the amendments are kind of the the ways of addressing the Constitution to either expand or focus parts of US

policy so that it has a broad application. And and in terms of the Bill of Rights, it's specifically to um protect the freedoms of the individual citizens right right. So everyone's heard of. The first Amendment is the freedom of speech. That's the one that a lot of people will quote quite a bit. But the one we are specifically concerned with is the fourth Amendment, which and I

will quote this, this is the actual amendment. 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. And now this was created in UM in nine, ratified in sevente So the Internet wasn't a thing, no, but

this was. You know, you can see what the founding fathers were thinking at the time that they they had already experienced what they were calling tyranny under the British monarchy. Those of us who are anglophiles and monarchists might sting a little at that phrase. But at any rate, Uh, no,

it was pretty accurate. Really. Uh. What this is essentially saying is that in order for any one to be able to search you or anything you own, whether that's property or effects on your person, they have to have authorization to do so. And further, in order to get authorization, they have to have a good reason for it. There can't just be a blanket. Yeah, you go out and do whatever you need to do to make sure that

that we get the bad guy. This is to protect against that, so that people aren't subject to unreasonable searches. And so that's what a lot of this fuss is about is. And when I say fuss, I'm not trying to diminish it. I'm just using a word because I was brought up in the South and that's that's what happens. But no, I'm not. I'm not suggesting that this is a trivial matter at all. In fact, it's the very opposite. This is fundamental to the freedoms that are considered to

be integral in American citizen Yeah. Yeah, and I would say that that that modern ly internationally speaking, it's it's a human rights, no, sure, Yeah, these are rights that that organizations like the United Nations have said this is this is a universal right. This is not something that is is a peculiar to a particular government. This should

be something that everyone should expect. And in fact, that's another good point just out of the gate, is to say the Constitution is protecting American citizens rights, it does not protect people who are not American citizens, right. So in other words, uh, and that's that plays a huge part in in the both PRISM and the related programs that the n s A and other intelligence organizations are following. So that's what the key of all of this is

about this this constitutional amendment. Uh. And we'll get into detail in the second podcast about kind of what is going on and why people are concerned and the arguments on both sides, because both sides have presented their own arguments on this. Now, another thing we need to kind of define are the different agencies within the United States that are tasked with maintaining law and order, investigating crime,

and also gathering intelligence or or acting in counter intelligence roles. Right, Because although we will be talking mostly about the n Essay, which is the program that's responsible for PRISM, there are actually seventeen governmental bodies that have to do with intelligence gathering. Yeah, this is it's it's complicated stuff. So we're gonna actually give you a lowdown on all seventeen offices and agencies because it's good to know what these different organizations are.

And it can be really confusing, right, I Mean, there's always that time where I get to something. It's like a central intelligence agency does that? Is that domestic or is it foreign? Is it which one is? Federal Federal Bureau of Investigation. That's certainly domestic, But what do you know? And then you start you start going down this this

rabbit hole of all these different agencies. It really shows how complex and gargantuan and bureaucratic our government this to the point where you're thinking, there's there's probably some streamlining that could happen at some point um. And also keep in mind that not all of these agencies and offices

have traditionally work together. Some of them are have been at odds, very much so at the CIA and the n s A in in particular have not always seen ida I will partially because their their duties come very close to overlapping in some cases. And I think the CIA is tired of the n s A reading their emails. That's really what it comes down to. That's a joke. It's kind of not too but anyway, Yeah, the CIA and n s A have actually competed. There's a in

fact that there's a little aside. We can give a little bit later, but let's talk about these basic definitions. So we've got law enforcement, all right, law enforcement, that's pretty much what it sounds like. These are the agents who are designated to protect citizens, to enforce laws, to apprehend people who are violating laws. So this is essentially your police, so of various levels, whether it's in the United States, we have lots of different kinds of police.

There's a federal, state, county, municipal. Yeah, there's there's lots of different police. You know, because you can you can violate federal law, you can violate state law. I mean you can't. Don't go do that. I'm just saying that there are different agencies that are in charge of No you may not. Well, I mean it's bad. We do not condone that goes without saying, we're just we're both loopy. Has been a very long day of lots of research.

You would be amazed at how much research we have in front of us right now, But so so who who Who oversees all of these? So the Department of Justice oversees law enforcement, and this involves agencies beyond just the police. We're talking about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency or d e A UH, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also known as a t F because they didn't have explosives in their name for a long time, and the U. S. Marshals Service.

All of those fall under the Department of Justice and its law enforcement. UH. Then you have investigation, which is actually part of law enforcement. It's not like it's completely separate, but investing. You know, law enforcement can be about enforcing laws and apprehending people who are violating the law. Investigators they are the ones who actually investigate crime to determine who committed the crime and and and how to apprehend

that person. Sometimes detectives, right right, You can have investigators or detectives. These are the type of names that you tend to hear with investigators, and that can be with agencies like the police, with the FBI. We also in the United States have private investigators who can get a private license to be uh to to investigate certain things. Um, so that's that's another level. Then you've got intelligence. Now

this is different from law enforcement. It's different from an investigation. Uh. It involves some investigative work, but it's not an investigation role. So intelligence is all about gathering data, getting as much information as possible. Generally speaking, it tends to be focused on foreign entities. So foreign intelligence would be uh, information about other nations, governments, their activities there, their motivations, what you know, what they are doing, and the activities of

their agents, both within those foreign nations and abroad. So this is the James Bond stuff, right, this is spy stuff. And then uh, you've got two broad versions of intelligence.

You have human intelligence. That's specifically the James Bond type stuff, because this is what you get when you have interpersonal contact, when you have a spy meeting a double agent and they're exchanging information so that the spy can bring the information back home or uh it's a spy who has infiltrated an agency or a government office or whatever to

gather information. That's human intelligence. That's the CEE I a's job that they oversee human intelligence in the United States for foreign intelligence, so CEE I A focused on the foreign um intelligence, by the way, can also be domestic. There's domestic intelligence where you've got especially with things like homeland security. You have within the United States lots of domestic intelligence UH officials as well, but we're mainly looking at foreign in these podcasts. The other broad type of

intelligence you have your human intelligence. The other broad type is signal intelligence. Now this is messages communication, right, so this is the realm of anything digital or phones or yeah, this is this is what the n s A looks at, right,

this is this is their department. So the signals Intelligence, by the way, sometimes abbreviated I'm signed yeah yeah, which I just love and n s A by the way, in case we were using the acronymics National Security Agency M. I don't think we said that at the top, No, but that's their actual full name, and they are in charge are of intercepting and decrypting messages between entities, normally foreign entities or foreign like a foreign government and its agents.

Agents can be located within the United States, which gives rise to Yeah, that's that's one of the big reasons why this whole mess has become you know, it's become such a powder kig really because the potential for agents to be in the United States means that the n s A has to look at the broadest approach to trying to gather information, but that then creeps in on the individual liberties and the expectation of privacy that American

citizens have. That's the crux of this. So the signal intelligence is really what we're looking at, though the human intelligence is awesomely cool. And we have to do a podcast about spy stuff at some point. Absolutely we haven't. You know, we never did. Chris never did, you know. I tried to convince Chris to do it, but then he would just sort of glance around and say red roses and then just run away. And I have no

idea what that means to this day. Um. He told me that I was supposed to use my Captain decoder encryption ring. I don't have one of those. Chris is a little messed up. I love you, Mr Polettic wherever you are. Um. Anyway, then there's counter intelligence. So counter intelligence does not mean that you sit around, you know, watching reality TV and about counterintelligence is about preventing other entities from gaining information about your country, government, agency, whatever. Right.

This can also be called information assurance, Yes, that's the other term for it. So really this is all about protecting the information structures within whatever, whether it's a country or whatever it's it's encrypting communications, you know, doing the

opposite of essentially intelligence. This is this is where you end up hiring what are called white hat hackers who try to break into a systems so that way you can identify any vulnerabilities that your system has and address it before real bad guys are able to get into your systems. Um. So those are your basic terms. Now we've defined that, which leads us to the intelligence community

of the United States. And I don't mean to suggest that the intelligence community is a big old band of happy spies who just sit around and chat spy stuff all the time, because, uh, like we said, they can sometimes be a little competitive. Now, there's quite a few of them, and we're gonna go through and mention them. I will go ahead, and I'm gonna lump in four of them together, actually I think five of them together. The military branches of intelligence, so Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marines,

and Navy all have their own offices of intelligence. Uh, and they're all similar enough where I feel like I can lump them in together in the sense that yeah, because that way it cuts down the other like five down, twelve to go um. But they essentially all concentrate on

gathering intelligence to support wartime efforts. So specifically, when the United States is in some form of actual combat type of situation, there's some sort of conflict, even if it hasn't broken out into all out war, these offices are gathering the information that gives the United States the best chance to counteract anything that the various other parties could

be doing. But they also coordinate with other intelligence agencies whenever they gather intelligence that could be key to national security. It's just not their main focus. Their main focus is to support whatever branch of the military they happen to be part of. So, but each one does have its own intelligence agency. Then you've got the Central Intelligence Agency,

which we've already kind of alluded to. It gathers information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals in an effort to provide intelligence that affects national security interests, and they report directly to the the The CIA has its own structure, but the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence, which replaced and the CIA replaced the Office of Strategic Services. Are the OSS back in? Here's a bit of trivia.

Do you know what pop culture character started in the early eighties had a stint in the O s S. But you only get to hear about it in a little bit of a side dialogue and the most recent version of his movies. He wears a fedora and carries a whip. Indiana Indiana Jones was part of well, he at least worked with the OSS. According to India Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he has this one

little aside where he mentions the OSS. And as soon as I heard that, I thought, this is the movie I want to see, not the one that I'm currently watching. That I would. I would, if anyone out there is listening, I would watch that movie too. An audience of two, Yes, yeah, I mean, you know, I've done more for less, all right, So then we've got skipping over the other military ones. We've got the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is a central

producer and manager of foreign military intelligence. It's part of the Department of Defense. There's actually quite a few civilian employees who work for the Defense Intelligence Agency. They're not all military employees, and it includes a clandestine service that conducts spy activities. So, in other words, a lot of

our spies report to the Defense Intelligence Agency UM. It was established back in nineteen sixty one, and the director of the d i A answers to the Director of National Intelligence just like the CIA does, and also advises the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so important person in the role of the United States government. Like I said, the one thing, if you don't take anything else away from this podcast, you will take away the fact that our government in

the United States is enormous and complicated. And then we've got the Department of Energy, which has its own Office of Intelligence and counter Intelligence, which might surprise you to hear that the Department of Energy has one. But then when you think how important energy is, yeah, yeah, it's

it's a huge part of our infrastructure. So yeah, so you know, you remember hearing the news a couple of years ago about how hackers had discovered not just hackers, but people working in cybersecurity had discovered that uh, hackers in in foreign countries had accessed certain parts of our power grid and placed essentially little uh surveillance, Yeah, just to keep an eye on what was going on with the potential maybe down the road at some point to

commit sabotage. Although there was no evidence of sabotage being committed at that time, the potential there was a big you know that that that raised some huge alarms. Yeah, and we have we have a whole um what one or two part series on them on cybersecurity from a few months back, if you care to go listen to that, right exactly. And so the Department of Energy has its

own Office of Intelligence and counter Intelligence. They provide information to the Secretary of Energy, and the expertise for this office includes nuclear energy, radioactive waste, energy security. So these are the people that you go to when you want to be able to gather information about uh, not just not just domestic but foreign activities as well that could

involve specifically things like nuclear power or even nuclear weapon capability. Uh. The counterintelligence efforts are led by the Department's National Nuclear Security Administration or in an essay. Then we've got the

Department of Homeland Security. This is a relatively young department really was formed in response to the terrorist attacks on September eleven, two thousand one, and it's responsible for the protection of the US and its territories from terrorist attacks as well as to respond to other events like natural disasters. So it's it's supposed to be all about, you know, it's in the name Homeland Security. It's the supposed to

be protecting the United States citizens. That particular department has been the recipient of lots of criticism from various people who think that the legislation that created that department may have overstepped some constitutional bounds, and that's still a matter

of debate in the United States. A lot of these policies that were formed very quickly after nine eleven um are going to come back in the conversation because because they were a bunch of them, and they were big, yeah, yes, and rapid change was sometimes uh, sometimes led to concerns after the fact, like everyone was so concerned about responding to a particular horrible event in the United States history that some would argue that that mistakes were made in

that process. Others would argue that it was exactly what was needed. So I don't mean to say that, you know, it's a one sided debate. It really isn't. There's a lot of absolutely cogent points being made on both sides. Then you have the Department of State and they have the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Their primary responsibility is to analyze intelligence data. So this was originally part of the os S, so it was part of what is now the CIA, but it's its own separate department at

this point. So they are all about, you know, if you they don't necessarily gather intelligence, but they analyze it. So it's one of the departments that really focuses on what does this intelligence actually mean. Then you have the Department of the Treasury. They have an Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence that's meant to guard the US financial system against threats from rogue nations, terrorists, money launderers, and

et cetera. Then you've got the Drug Enforcement Administration, which, as I mentioned before, was part of the Department of Justice that was established in nineteen seventy and it's a federal law enforcement agency and its main purposes to combat drug smuggling and uh and within the United States. It also has a responsibility for controlling and pursuing US drug investigations.

In foreign countries, which is tricky business. Anytime you have a country performing an investigation in another country, you know, you've got that's sticky, absolutely, especially with with you know, something as sticky as drug laws, which are so different in so many places, so so economically driven. Yes, yes, economically, that's plays a huge role in it. Politically, it gets really sticky. It's a tough situation. Then you've got your Federal Bureau of Investigation the FBI. It's also part of

the Department of Justice. That's meant to be a federal criminal investigative body and also an internal intelligence agency, and that was established back in nine eight. Of course, uh I would say that the most famous director of the FBI would be j Edgar Hoover, known for, according to the movie Clue, known for a cleaning up multiple murders because his name is Hoover. But dump Bump. I just saw a Clue like a couple of weeks ago. So again, it wasn't my first time. I've seen it many times.

I'm glad that you're pulling in puns from other storiess. Now that's really I can't be the sole source of puns. I'm only one man. Then, We've got the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which I'm gonna be honest, I had never heard of until I did the research for this podcast. I did not know this agency existed. Um, but they're also known as the ng A, and they're part of the Department of Defense, and they're an agency that plays a role in combat support, so it's kind of similar

to the military roles. They're primarily tasked with gathering and analyzing geospatial intelligence to protect national security, and they were formerly known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Then you've got the National Reconnaissance Office, which is a spy organization and they create spy satellites and provide imagery and signal intelligence to various agencies and military offices in the

United States. So this is the agency that's gathering lots of data from electronic communications, but then they end up funneling that data to other agencies. They're not necessarily um analyzing the information themselves. Uh. And again they report to the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense. Then we've got our our our darling are our buddies, the ones that will be talking about quite a bit.

We finally got to them and The only reason it's taken so long is because I've been going in alphabetical order. The National Security Agency the n S a centralized agency that produces and manages signals intelligence for the United States, gathers foreign intelligence through various means, including spying. Also in charge of communication security. They are experts in cryptanalysis and cryptography, meaning that codes and crypto, cryptograms, anything that has to

do with encoding information. They are experts at both doing that to protect our information the United States is information and also undoing that, yes, also on doing that to

figure out what the heck people are talking about. And they're experts, in fact, such experts that there's a famous there's a famous statue outside that has four sides, and each side is encrypted in a different a different way, right, So each cryptogram is is different, and each one, like if you were to number the sides one through four, one would be the quote unquote easiest to decrypt and

four would be the most difficult. Uh. And there was sort of a challenge that was thrown down to both the CIA and an essay to decrypt these sides, and the CIA decrypted the first three sides within a set number of years. I can't remember exactly what it is. I'm this is anecdotal. I didn't write them down in

my notes. So yeah, I think this was put up in the nineteen fifties or maybe the sixty which is I'm like, so there was sometimes well that this was this is just sort of an aside to everything else, which is why we don't have all the data in front of us. Uh, this would be its own kind of fun podcast. But at any rate, the CIA went to try and crack this. They really were taking this to heart and saying this, we want to be the ones to crack this information. And they started working on

and they were so proud when they announced it. And then fairly recently it came to light that the n s A had already done it about eight years before the CIA did, just didn't bother telling them, And you know that was apparently they the n s A director Ted told people like, if you want to do this, you should do it, and totally everybody else, but we're not doing it. But if you want to do it, you should totally go and do it. But you know, officially we are not doing this, but go and do

that thing. So and that's what they did. So it looks like they are really good at decrypting stuff, which that should give anyone pause. I mean, there are a lot of people who advocate that even just as a personal choice, day to day kind of activity, that you encrypt everything. Like you know, there are people who will not communicate with you if you do not use an emails service that allows you to encrypt your messages. UM. But their decryption abilities show that they're really really good

at breaking those codes. It might take some time, but they they have shown that they are capable of doing such things absolutely. Now that they are officially a part of the Department of Defense, yep. Yeah, they report to the Director of National Intelligence as well. Uh. They formed back in nineteen fifty one. They were originally a replacement

for the Armed Forces Security Agency or FSA. Right. They were created specifically by the order of US President at the time, Harry S. Truman UM and and began as a group of only UM seven thousand, six hundred military and civilian workers. Are there now, like, that's pretty big growth. They've they've been grown a lot actually in the past couple of years. Also, trivia question, was the S stand for and Harry S. Truman nothing it's just sent Harry S. Truman.

The S stands for nothing, but Truman stood for a lot. Uh. I have tiny little bits of historical trivia that I never get to use because they never invite me on stuff you missed in history class, So I have to save it all up for episodes like this. UM. And then we finally get to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Yeah, the the n s A is the important one that we'll be talking about for the most part when we get into the actual particulars for PRISM.

But this is the office that we often will say, there are sixteen agencies in the intelligence community, and this is the seventeenth office. This is kind of the the head.

This is where everything funnels up. So the idea here is that it oversees many other intelligence agents and offices, including the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, and its mission is to exploit and defeat adversarial intelligence activities directed against American interests, Protect the integrity of the U S intelligence system, Provide incisive, actionable intelligence to the decision makers

at all levels, Protect vital national assets from adversarial intelligence activities. Neutralize and exploit adversarial intelligence activities targeting the armed forces, and the Director of National Intelligence reports to the President of the United States. So this is the head of the intelligence community. Keeping in mind that every single one of these agencies we have mentioned has its own hierarchy, has its own leadership, and they all have different requirements

for what that leader can be. In fact, the n s A is is kind of cool, but we'll talk about that probably in the second podcast. So there we've laid it down, the Constitution, the different types of law enforcement and intelligence, the various members of the intelligence community. But we still have some more groundwork. From from here in it gets sticky. Yeah, this is where this is where we've That was the easy part, y'all. But before we dive into the really tricky part, let's take a

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dot com slash tech stuff when you sign up today. Alright, so we're back. We've laid out that that groundwork. Let's talk specifically about the n s A for a little bit because that's really what most of this this stuff involves. Right. Um okay, So, so, like we said, as of today,

they have about thirty thousand employees. They're working out of Maryland, um Fort Mead, Maryland specific and the NSA actually works alongside an organization called the Central Security Service, which is it's basically the n s A, but it's comprised of active military members. Now, the director of both of these organizations is appointed by the Secretary of Defense and approved by the President, and he must be a or here

she I'm sorry, that was terrible. I'm a bad feminist. Um. There must be a commissioned military officer with at least a three star rank, right, So, now that that could be of any of the branches of the military, doesn't I always think three star general, but you could also have an admiral or of course etcetera. Right this, uh, this leader also heads what's called the US Cyber Command UM, which was created in two thousand five and is a

network warfare unit that protects against terrorist data and network threats. Yeah. So in our cybersecurity podcast where we were talking about some of the reactions to cyber threats in the United States, that's really the organization that is adding that for in large part. There. Keep in mind they're also multiple organizations within other agencies that also investigate and tried to prevent cybercrime.

But this is one of the big ones right here, right especially or I mean you know, yes, kind of kind of during all of that panic that happened a few years back, this this one sort of floated to the top. UM So, so the n s A and the CSS, like we said earlier, work in UM information assurance or counter intelligence, and also in signals intelligence or signat so intercepting signet ring I don't know, I don't know signals intelligence at the n s A. And they just kind of looked at me and then they just

slowly shook their head and tapped your phone. Um, well, they I have no illusions they're already doing that. If I wasn't on a list before we started this podcast, I sure am on one now. Anyway intercepting the messages

and decrypting them. You know. That's that's easy to say. Uh, when it gets down to how they actually do that, it gets a little more tricky because you're wondering, all right, well, when I'm sending a message, if I were to send a message from myself to Lauren, then the way that would work, assuming that we were not on the same

email server, that was kind of a bad example. Let's say I'm sending a message to Chris who was not on our email server, and I was just saying, hey, what up, and what's would that red Roses comment you

used to make and then walk away. The way this works is my message would get broken up into packets, and each packet has a little bit of information in the header and footer that tell essentially computers one where that information is supposed to go and to how it fits together with the other packets, so that when all the packets get to their destination, they get put back together and then Chris can read the email or get the file or whatever it is that I'm trying to

send to him. So, Uh, the interesting thing about the Internet is it's designed in such a way so that this pathway can be. You know, there are multiple routes that this information could take, and that's a good thing because if one of the routes ends up being compromised, if something happens like a server goes down, then this information can go a different route to get to Chris. And each packet can even take different routes so that they're not all going in a line down one roadway.

They've kind of split up and they're all trying to get to the same destination. So that kind of leads to the question how does the n s A do this? And that In fact, we'll we'll go into more about that in the second podcast. But that's another one of those things that has people scratching their heads, like not just that you're intercepting and decrypting messages, but how are you actually doing this without getting help from entities like

internet service providers. More on that later, because it turns out they are spoiler alert, they are getting help from Internet service providers. Um. Not that there's necessarily anything the Internet service providers can do about it, but but but lots of that probably in the second podcast that we are going to do. Um. But but let's let's talk a little bit about the different legislation that has come

out that regulates and defines what they can and can't do. Sure, So one of the earliest things we want to talk about is the Wire Tap Act of nineteen sixty eight. Now, this regulates the collection of actual content of wire and electronic communications. And it was first passed as Title three of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of nineteen sixty eight, So we generally refer to it as Title three, although a lot of people will just refer

to as Act. And originally it only covered wire and oral communications. In other words, if you were sending something via some sort of like if you're using like a telegraph or if you're using a telephone, that's what it was covering. But Title one of the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of nineteen eight six extended this protection to electronic communications in general, so it went beyond just verbal communication over the phone to everything from email, instant messaging. All

of that was covered under this Act. Now, what this Act would do was it it created some broad prohibitions against international interception, use, or disclosure of wire and electronic

communications without a statutory exception. So you were supposed to if you wanted to get access to something, if if you had identified a target as being either if if you're intelligence and you're identifying the target as being of interest because they are, for some dangerous reason right there, an agent of a foreign government and you need to get information, or if you've identified them as someone who has committed a crime, then you needed to receive a

court order from the Department of Justice. It had to be signed by a US district court or a Court of Appeals judge, and that would authorize wire tapping for that specific target for up to thirty days. Agents had to meet some pretty tough requirements in order to get this authorization. It was and just go up to a judge and say, hey, can you sign this for me? I know you're busy, Just write it down here and I'll get out of your hair. They had to actually

show probable cause, meaning that it means different things. Within crime, probable cause means that you have a valid reason why you suspect that person to be involved in committing a crime, and intelligence it's that you have a reasonable suspicion that that person is an agent of a foreign government. So it's two separate things. The foreign agent part doesn't have to be involved in any crime whatsoever when it comes to intelligence gathering and wire tap if they are merely

an agent. Yeah. And in fact, that old that will come into play more when we get into a little bit later on one of the other acts, in fact, the next act. But um, I want to make sure do you have anything else you want to say about the wire tap before I jump on? Well, um, you know this, this was enacted in by the early seventies, n s A was tapping um, foreign cables under the oceans. As as you may or may not know, there is a lot of information that is zipping right along in

in in cables that are going across the Atlantic. And it turns out most of those messages say things like darling, it's better downwards weather under the sea, or are these days are just just videos of people's cats? But um, But but also it can contain very sensitive international information to um, that's another thing that can contain. And so before, by the way, before the Wiretap Act was passed, there weren't that many prohibitions about tapping phones or anything else

at all. I mean, it all depended upon the particular era and the particular area. So I think that part of this was in I think that part of the Act was in fact in response to folks like Hoover who were perhaps overstepping their bounds in terms of of surveillance and gathering. Yeah, the FBI had become infamous for gathering huge files on citizens and maintaining them, and uh, you know, then you had things like the House of

American Activities. Uh that all kinds of creepy post war stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that was going on that was it was definitely creeping up on people's freedoms, and in some cases more than creeping up, but just denying people their freedoms. So these kind of acts were a response to that to try and correct some wrongs and

to prevent it from happening again. So so in nineteen seventy eight, another big one that that is going to be coming back, especially amendments to it, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or UM Yeah FISA, nineteen seventy eight, that was introduced by Ted Kennedy and it was signed into

law by Jimmy Carter. Yeah. So, uh, both of them Democrats, both of them known as being liberal, which might surprise people when they're sitting there thinking about FISA and they've heard these other amendments to FISA, and how how the n s A is using that to um to gather all this information that has come to light. Uh. But you know, you could also argue that when this Act was introduced that was not the intent necessarily. However, it did establish the procedures or surveillance in an effort to

collect foreign intelligence between foreign powers and their agents. Right. It was hypothetically designed to ensure that the that the n s A and other federal intelligence agencies couldn't monitor American citizens electronic communications without obtaining a warrant based on probable cause first, right, Yeah, this was this was essentially saying that you can only do this kind of crazy spy stuff if you're talking about non people who are not American citizens and people who are not in the

United States. It was supposed to cover activity that occurred outside the US. Now, as we've seen, that's getting trickier and trickier because the way the world works now, and the way that the Internet works and and and our various communication systems work, it's global entity and sometimes that involves communications passing through the US sometimes involved passing between people in the US, but the pathway may actually go outside the US, and so that's caused some blurring of

lines as well. Absolutely. UM. This this act also created UM an independent court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and this was made up of eleven federal judges UM tasked with reviewing these warrant applications that would come in. Yeah, and we will talk more about that court in the next episode, because there's a lot to say about how that court is formed, what they do, and how much we know about it, which, by the way, that last a little bit I'll go ahead and spoil it, not

a whole lot. Yeah, the whole thing classified is a thing, and you know we are getting some leaked stuff. But but when it comes down to details, we only I mean, we know it exists, we know what it does, we know who is on it, and we know how they got there. That's about it, right, But a quick, quick fun teaser. UM. Supposedly, the court has denied only eleven of the nearly thirty four thousand warrant applications it's reviewed, between inteen sent right. They have said that they don't

just rubber stamp approval for these requests. But when you only have eleven denied requests, that causes me to wonder suspect rubber stamping, well, or at least wonder what they're sort of standards. Is that it can be either either that either their standards are incredibly low and then they approve pretty much everything, or all the warrants are extremely warranted. Right,

that's quite possible. That's the other possibility, right, So I shouldn't just say as a blanket statement that they approve anything. It may very well be that the the by the time the application gets to them, it's actually a valid application. I don't know because their secret. But anyway, so, yeah, the FISA requires the government to get search warrants and wire tap orders from a court even when investigating foreign threats to national security. So it can't just go out

and act on its own without court approval. But that or it is, like we said, a secret court and we'll we'll go into more detail. Also, by the way, if if you are served with a wire tap order or a warrant from FISA, it also comes with a gag order saying that you can never discuss the fact that you were served. Yeah, you can't talk about it at all. You can't indicate that it was served to you. You cannot indicate that you whether you gave information that

was relevant or not. You you have to just disavow that even existed. So that's kind of interesting. And then we have the last of our major points of legislation we wanted to touch on in this podcast, which is which is the US Patriot Active two thou one. Now, now, of course, to two thousand one was was when the

attacks of Septemper and leventh happened. Um. The n s A came up under a huge fire for failing to catch this plot and UM and they have said that they had intercepted two messages that something major was going to happen on that date, but had no information on what or where that action would be happening. Right, And you have to keep in mind again that traditionally a lot of these agencies UH work very much independently of

one another. So there's been a lot of criticism that said that if if there was more UH collaborative work, that we would catch more of this these potential attacks and stop them. And in fact, there there are plenty of people who have said, you don't even realize how many incidents have been prevented because of the changes that have happened. Uh. And the reason why you don't know about them is because they never never happened. Um, which is you know that could be that could be a

valid argument. It's hard to say because again, you know, we don't didn't happen, so we don't know. Lack of results is hard to uh, hard to prove a negative. Right. So the US Patriot Act is is the an Act of Congress as signed the law by President George W. Bush, And it's meant to detect, prevent, and combat terrorism by broadening the powers of intelligence gathering agencies. And it actually reduced quite a few restrictions that were placed on intelligence gathering.

Title five removes obstacles to investigating terrorism. It expanded FISA counterintelligence access to telephone toll and transactional records, which will come into play in our next episode. And it requires national security letters. What are national security letters their secret subpoenas. They're issued directly by the FBI without the involvement of a court, So the FBI does not have to go to a court judge in order to get a national

security led letter to h to submit to someone. They can actually demand an entity like an Internet service provider, that that entity must hand over information about customers as long as the FBI delivers to the entity a document stating that such information is part of an authorized investigation. But there's no court oversight, So really it just means that the FBI kind of has free reign to to

issue these orders. Now, people in the FBI say that there is a very strict process that must be followed and that it's not just that. Again, it's not like some low level FBI administrative person can rubber stamp one of these letters. But um, but it also has this gag order part to it where you can't talk about

it if you get one. Uh, then you've also got the Right to Financial Privacy Act of nineteen seventy eight, which gave the FBI authority to require financial institutions to provide information about their customers or any entities financial records, and um, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires a consumer reporting agency to provide the FBI the names and addresses of all financial institutions at which a customer maintains or has maintained an account. Now that of course they

have to have the justification to do that. But um, these are all the things that play into to this whole idea of privacy, data security, national security and spying and intelligence and counter intelligence. And now this Act received sweeping bipartisan support in Congress, and no one was really willing to argue with it after the events of nine eleven,

which is understandable. But but also you know, I I think it I think it did get pushed through a little bit too quickly, um, and a little bit too unanimously. There quite a few people who because because people were understandably upset, right, And there have been a lot of critics who have who have said that the changes uh in the with the Patriot Act were too great. They gave the government too much power, it took too much away from individual citizens. Uh. And you know that again,

that's a debate that continues to this day. And in fact, the Patriot Act is not something that was meant to exist in perpetuity. It has to be renewed every few years. Now. So far Congress has been renewing it. Yeah, but there are certain titles under the Patriot Act that may not be renewed. According to people who are now responding to the the controversy that has happened since the information was

leaked to the public about the n Essays activities. And in fact, one interesting thing that we should point out, and we will talk about it more in the next podcast, is that one of the architects for the Patriot Act has gone on record as saying this goes too far. So if the person who authored the act that gave the government broad uh release of restrictions says, hey, that's going too far, it's time to at least have a conversation about it. If not, you know, make some really

tough decisions. But we're going to save that for our next episode, right. I think that we've set the stage for everything that um that has happened in the past uh ten, ten eleven years. Yeah, and you and we understand this episode is not really tech heavy. Obviously, this is more like government stuff than tech stuff. But it really have a conversation about the tech stuff you have to understand all of this other stuff that's going on.

And also, I mean, you know, these these are all issues that that affect all of us and all of our our internet you said in Communications and Privacy every day. So yep, it's important so all right, so we're gonna wrap this one up, and we're gonna Lauren and I are going to take a quick break and take some time to drink some tea, and then we're gonna dive into the next episode, which you guys get to hear in a couple of days, unless you just save these

all up at once, in which case enjoy. So, if you guys have any suggestions for topics we should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff, I've got a great suggestion for you. What is it, Jonathan? Let us know, because we can't read your mind or your email, we're not the n s A. Send us a message, uh encrypted it you like? Send us a message. Our email is tex Stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us

a line on Twitter or Facebook. I warn you if you do use code, we may never know what you said, but you can find us with a handle tech Stuff hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.