1 day ago, kettch wrote

@wastingtimewithforums: While Sony hasn't built any infrastructure or APIs for DRM

Err.. All of Sony's games come with mandatory DRM, and have since the PSX. That's why it's hard to pirate Playstation games and why you won't be able to put Linux on a PS4.

The difference between Microsoft and Sony is not whether they have DRM. It's whether they prevent resale of games (because let's be honest, this is about the preowned section in games stores, not about sharing games with your buddies).

Don't hate at Microsoft for having DRM. Hate at them for making 2 years old xbone games $60 new instead of $6 preowned.

38 minutes ago, bondsbw wrote

*snip*

That is true with mainstream languages.  But if a programmer uses newer or lesser-known languages, like F#, that to me says a lot.

Says they spend too much time around academics and not enough time writing commercial quality programs?

1 hour ago, dahat wrote

@evildictaitor: First up... it's rather hard to have a conversation when you edit your comments after posting. Which post should I reply to?

Reply to either. Both contain the same content. Sometimes I rephrase my post to make it more clear, or if after re-reading it it needs to be redrafted.

IRS != NSA

Clearly. Care to cite above (or anywhere else) where I said they were the same?

When you use the fact that the IRS does unwarranted illegal access of people's tax records as proof that the NSA does unwarranted illegal access of people's intelligence records. The NSA is under a lot more scrutiny than the IRS. This is pretty obvious if you think about it, because the people who oversee the NSA (i.e. Congressmen, Senators, the Whitehouse and seniors at NSA) don't want junior analysts to be able to target their communications.

In theory yes, however given the events surrounding Bradley Manning & Edward Snowden show that it is very possible for even those under such scrutiny (or access) to do bad things. And when you consider how both were identified (ie being outted by themselves or by someone they confided in) ie NOT through the normal scrutiny channels... one has to wonder how much else may happen that we do not know about.

Neither Bradley Manning nor Edward Snowden had access to your personal information, and neither were staff at the NSA (Bradley Manning worked in the military, Edward Snowden worked as a civilian contractor overseeing internal internet forums).

They both had access to TOP SECRET information that they shouldn't have, sure, but neither had access to your phone records.

First 'any US official'... now 'anybody'... normally CYA claims limit scope, not expand them.

"I've never accused Apple of bribing anybody" is a superset of "I've never accused Apple of bribing US officials". The first statement implies the latter. It doesn't change the meaning of my words, no matter how firmly you pull your tin foil hat down over your eyes. Bribing a US official is the criminal felony of the two, hence my redrafting, but I'll put it back since you seem to have divined some huge imagined conspiracy out of my two word change.

No... you accused them of a crime, flat out. There is no evading that (the very thing you accuse them of... evasion (rather than the legal avoidance).

Yes. I accused them of, in effect, committing accounting fraud. I absolutely never accused them of bribing anybody. You change your tune faster than a child skipping tracks on a CD player.

"If Tim Cook lied to Congress"? You have accused him of that outright and called for the jailing of Apple officials... with there being no evidence to support your claim... while you say:

Well, firstly, "Tim Cook lied to Congress" and "If Tim Cook lied to Congress, he should go to jail" are not contradictory statements, and secondly I didn't actually accuse him of lying to Congress. I said he had provided evidence of Apple's tax evasion to Congress, which you then flat denied.

So either Apple is doing tax evasion (based on Tim Cook's evidence to Congress) or Tim Cook's evidence to Congress is wrong. My gut feeling is he wasn't lying when he admitted in front of Congress that $102bn of Apple Inc's profits were funneled through a company that has no employees and no offices and which files no tax return in any jurisdiction and which pays no tax to any government.

Again, your standard of justice for General Clapper (who acknowledged being deceitful) is rather different than the Star Chamber style justice you seek against various CEOs who you alone accuse of crimes. Good thing you aren't king.

WTF? I said "If. General. Clapper. Lied. To. Congress. He. Should. Go. To. Jail. For. Purjury". I have no bias here: In my mind anyone who lies to Congress, from the President of the United States to the CEO of Apple to the Director of National Intelligence to some low ranking person called in to give evidence in front of a committee should be stripped of any public office they hold and be sent to jail.

If General Clapper lied to Congress, he has forsaken his solemn duty to uphold the law of the United States and to faithfully present a true and accurate picture of how Intelligence is run in this country to Congress who oversee its effective operation, and he is a disgrace to the nation and should be stripped of his rank and his personal liberty. The intelligence community deserves better than to have their name tarnished by individuals at the top lying to Congress.

Edit: Fixing missing closing quote... and again.

it's rather hard to have a conversation when you edit your comments after posting. Which post should I reply to?

44 minutes ago, dahat wrote

*snip*

Many things are illegal... and yet they still happen... without strong enough enforcement mechanisms that can be used against the watchers abuse can/will happen.

Case in point, the IRS allegedly (and improperly) collected some 60 million personal medical records. Sure a good thing the law prevented such a thing from happening... and if/when it did, those responsible are punished!

Wait... neither of those things happened? Hrm...

IRS != NSA.

Clearly Apple has bribed many levels of the Federal government

Those are your words, not mine.

I never accused Apple of bribing anybody (EDIT: including US officials, since those people are people too). I suggested that their accounting practices (of failing to declare $102bn in profits to any tax authority by claiming that the money was made by an Irish subsidiary with no employees or offices) is tantamount to accounting fraud and tax evasion.

That is not even similar to suggesting that Apple Inc. bribed US officials (EDIT: Or other people. Or monkeys. Or foreign officials. Or civilians. Or soldiers. Or anybody else. As implied by the previous statement "I never accused Apple of bribing anybody". See Dictionary Anybody:

an·y·bod·y  

3 minutes ago, sysrpl wrote

@evildictaitor:

Devil's Advocate (check)

Someone needs to. Otherwise the discussion gets boring.

You get closer to truth by arguing the side you disagree with, because it forces you to investigate their claims, rather than just dismissing them.

1 hour ago, sysrpl wrote

@spivonious: More people die each year the hands of police than by terrorism. More people die each year by slipping in the bathroom than by terrorism.

Not in countries that don't have good intelligence agencies like Iraq and Pakistan.

1 hour ago, sysrpl wrote

@evildictaitor: Are you sure that analysts running queries only go through business records? How? Are you sure software doesn't search through other records when a query is run? How?

Because anything else would be illegal under FISA. We've been here before. Keep up.

18 seconds ago, sysrpl wrote

The Director of National Intelligence was caught lying to congress on this topic just last week 

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intel-dir-james-clapper-lie-congress-complicated/story?id=19390786#.UcCuz6BQl38

I think perhaps the operative word here is collect. If it can be shown that the NSA collects (rather than merely filters) data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, then Gen Clapper committed a crime by perjuring himself in front of Congress. If your journalists believe a crime was committed, I suggest they refer the matter to the police.

The NSA is overseen by Congress, and it is required by law to give honest and truthful accounts of its activities to Congress when asked (although it is not required to do so in open session).

It is absolutely not the DNI's job to lie, and lying to Congress under oath is a felony.

If General Clapper lied to Congress, he should go to jail.

DCS1000 ... filters Internet packets and looking for email headers and then copies off that data. That process in itself is reading your email.

No. It's looking at your email headers, and copying them if they match a selector. That's no more "reading your email" than your router is reading your emails to see where to send it, or Microsoft is reading your emails in order to decide that joe@hotmail.com is a different account to jane@hotmail.com.

And queries are run all the time. They do not need a warrant or any other order to run them (it's up to the discretion of the analyst):

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/dianne-feinstein-nsa-92760.html?hp=f2

That is searching through business records. It is not searching through your emails or phone records. To search through the emails or to listen to your phone conversations of a US citizen, someone inside the United States, or to get access to information that might have reasonably originated in the United States, a judicial warrant is required, as per the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Even then, the fact of interception is audited, needs authorization from one of 22 analysts at the NSA who are authorized to conduct such a search, and it is subject to judicial review by the House Permanant Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Any NSA analyst who breaks the law and conducts an unauthorized search is subject to criminal and civil penalties for doing so, as set out by FISA.

Just because journalists love to publish sensationalism rather than read the law that actually governs how all of this happens, doesn't mean that the bokum they dream up and publish as fact is somehow true.

8 minutes ago, figuerres wrote

only if the mass population knows what is done do they have any way to tell the government what they feel about the policy.

that IMHO is the real key, for the people to know enough so that they can ask the right questions and cast better votes.

But sadly the public will only know the scale of the investigations. They never hear about the scale of the successes.

If someone from the NSA had decided to leak in 1935 that the Allies were able to read encrypted communications from Germany, we'd have lost that war.

Some of the stuff Snowden is leaking just cripples our national interest without giving the American people anything of value in return. For example how does telling the world that the NSA was able to intercept and decrypt encrypted satellite phone conversations by Russian President Dimitri Medvedev help the American people? I'd put $10,000 right now on Russia having stopped using that overnight since his leak.

There might be years of crypto work and decades of positioning work needed to get an access like that. And Snowden just threw it away because he wants to be the center of attention for a day.

At least with the Verizon leak we got a debate out of it, even if it came at the cost of telling our enemies abroad the capabilities and scale we have to stop them from attacking the United States, making it easier for them to evade detection in future.

These more recent leaks do nothing for the public and dramatically aid our enemies. It's not even getting air time in America, that's how uninterested the public are. But it'll sure as hell be getting air time at the FSB and in the halls of power in China.

And if the NSA could listen to the leader of a country that invades its neighbours, kills our citizens and arms our enemies, well, thank you Snowden for destroying that capability, America sleeps less easily tonight thank you very much.

And what do we, the public get in return? A sensational story. Well whoop-de-doo. American soldiers will die, and we got a great story. Great. Thank you Snowden.

23 minutes ago, sysrpl wrote

Yes, no one human being at the NSA is reading your emails and chats, that is the job for their custom software running at their server farms. Just because a machine reads your conversations rather than a human doesn't make it any less illegal.

Well according to the head of the NSA, the records are held but not searched until a warrant is signed:

Alexander wants to debunk some media reports of "pattern analysis" –the notion that the NSA continuously reviews the metadata it collects, looking for suspicious patterns.

"That is absolutely incorrect," Alexander says. "We are not authorized to go into the data. There are no automated processes running in the background."

7 hours ago, wastingtime​withforums wrote

Premium price for premium DRM!

Not that I'm going to defend Microsoft's whole approach to XBox One, but in the interests of fairness, we should point out that PS4 puts DRM on their console too.

5 hours ago, DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

Also according to some people testing and QA cost untold millions without providing even the smallest bit of proof.

At Microsoft, the standard unit of development is a team comprising one PM, one dev and one test. That means for most projects at Microsoft, about two thirds of the cost of creating new code are the costs of managing the project and testing the code. And that's based on some pretty optimistic assumptions that the dev spends all of his time writing new code and never spends time refactoring or fixing bugs in the code.

That being said, whilst its quite likely that that not providing support for, say, Mac OSX, Linux or Windows XP are likely to be in the "not worth it" collection of feature requests, not having support for Windows 7 does look to me like a political decision.

37 minutes ago, kettch wrote

I know there's so many options, but how does the cost compare of doing the above with a VM vs Web Role, the same for SQL Azure vs SQL running in a VM.

It's just representative, but I have a VM on Azure that basically serves as a tiny custom web-server and DNS server, with fairly minimal traffic (< 1000 hits a day). It's the smallest VM, shared-core, with a 1GB SQL database on it.

That's on pay-as-you-go, and it's about £7 (~$10) a month. It's more expensive than you could get elsewhere (Linux VMs on EC2 are slightly cheaper), but it does what I want it to, Microsoft aren't going to lose my credit card details, and I don't really care about the $2pm difference in price to go hunting for a similar but slightly cheaper solution elsewhere.

15 minutes ago, DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

I wonder when desktop backgrounds and other customization will be labeled "dated" and removed? It seems like it's all about changing the light-bulbs (removing customization and adding others) more than giving users what they want. I mean the whole "WP8/W8.1 has more background colors to choose from" shtick is just ridiculous marketing BS IMO. 

Why don't you get a Macbook, or run Linux? Maybe then you would be less angry all the time.

Adding extra ports and so on would push the component price up, and the Xbox is already hurting from being so much more expensive than the PS4.

That's not to say you couldn't invent some component a bit like that yourself and sell it at $100 a pop to anyone who's interested. But it doesn't sound like Microsoft is likely to do anything like that for "out of the box" Xbox Ones any time soon.

I still find it ridiculous that you need to buy a mac to develop for iPhone. That's clearly abusing their huge position in the smartphone market to sell macbooks.

It'd be quite nice for Congress to come and stamp on the both of them. It's cynical and bad for consumers to engage in this kind of behaviour.

3 hours ago, Bass wrote

*snip*

Sure. Figure out how I can become a high powered investment banker or exploitative tech mongol. I figure if I can't stop it, I might as well profit from it.

OK.

http://www.goldmansachs.com/careers/

23 minutes ago, Bass wrote

I mean he's doing all the work, not them. So it is his property. I mean, its not like he is irrevocably assigning all his copyrights, moral rights and creative and intellectual output to their corporation in return for nothing more than fixed salary largely based on the overall labor market rates instead of anything remotely resembling the company's actual revenue.

Sounds like you need to get a new job.

I don't want a PS4 if the games suck, no matter how much I can share them.

And I don't want an XBox One so I can watch TV. I already have a TV that lets me watch TV.

5 hours ago, GoddersUK wrote

He didn't say they're not accessing prism, prism is legal, or anything like that. He said they're not figure out how to circumvent the law. They maybe just don't give a damn about the law, they maybe think it's legal and intended by the law. He did not deny the allegations that GCHQ have been using PRISM, nor did he say that any use of PRISM by GCHQ had been authorised by the UK courts. The fact is there are laws that allow the government to lie (and to compel others to lie) about this kind of thing. Not just fail to make known the truth but to actively lie.

There are two issues in here:

1. Is GCHQ using PRISM?

2. If GCHQ uses PRISM against UK citizens, do they do so in a lawful way?

The first one William Hague did not comment on (because the Government does not comment on leaked material). The second one he did (the full speech is here, you might find it interesting to listen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/house-of-commons-22846595)

It has been suggested that GCHQ uses our partnership with the United States to get around UK law, obtaining information that they cannot legally obtain in the United Kingdom.

I wish to be absolutely clear that this accusation is baseless.

Any data obtained by us from the United States involving UK nationals is subject to proper UK statutory controls and safeguards.

Malcolm Rifkind, head of the Intelligence and Security Committee has also been on the record to state something similar (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02m7fz5 at 2:16:30)

Can I make one comment if I may on the allegations themselves and about the legal background, because one of the big questions being asked is if British Intelligence Agencies want to seek to know the content of emails - can they get round the normal law in the United Kingdom by simply asking American agencies to provide that information?

The law is actually quite clear: if the British intelligence agencies are seeking to know the content of emails about people living in the United Kingdom then they actually have to get lawful authority. Normally that means ministerial authority, and that applies equally whether they are going to do the intercept themselves or whether they are going to ask somebody else to do it on their behalf.

The accusations were very specific (exactly 197 intelligence reports). 

Those allegations relate to whether GCHQ uses PRISM, not whether their use of it is legal. Frankly I don't really care if GCHQ uses PRISM legally, in much the same way that I don't really care if MI6 breaks into your house or the police arrest you and interrogate you, so long as them doing so is authorized by law.

It shouldn't really surprise you to learn that GCHQ listens to phone conversations and that MI6 break into houses. The agencies are designed to invade privacy. The only question that is important is whether them doing so is proportionate, necessary and legal.

If GCHQ got a lawful warrant to investigate somebody in this country or abroad, and then proceeded to use PRISM to obtain information on that person, who cares?

How sweetly naive you are. The very substance of Snowden's accusations is that the law has less bearing on this than we might believe (at least in any meaningful tested in open court sense ).

Being legal doesn't require it to be tested in open court.

The general question of whether GCHQ can invade your privacy in the interests of national security was debated and passed by your elected lawmakers in open parliament in front of television cameras, and the laws that govern it are public record.

The specifics of how and when GCHQ can invade your privacy are governed by that act, and the details on warrants are very clear. It is illegal for GCHQ to invade your privacy without a warrant, and that warrant can only be issued by the Secretary of State (it can't be delegated) and that warrant is overseen by the independent Intelligence and Security Committee.

These points of principle are public record. They were debated in the press and most people are pretty happy for GCHQ to tap the phone of a suspected terrorist to find out that he's planning to blow up a school tomorrow, or for MI5 to break into his house to make sure it won't go off tomorrow in front of that school; despite both of those otherwise infringing on that person's privacy.

Any terrorists or paedophiles worth their salt would already have been assuming the government is doing this. This wouldn't catch many competent criminals.

Says you without citation.

He who would give up a little essential liberty for a little temporary safety...

Well apart from the fact that it is truly incredulous to suggest that keeping your phone metadata from an entirely automated process is an "Essential liberty", Benjamin Franklin never had to deal with terrorists flying planes into buildings or putting explosives in Times Square or blowing up marathons. He also didn't have to deal with the United States losing billions of dollars through cyber-espionage against US companies.

I'm not convinced he would take the same view as you that what the NSA is doing is disproportionate.

One acronym: RIPA.

OK. Please post an example where RIPA was used by an intelligence agency to invade your privacy in a way you think was unreasonable.

Really, I think the biggest failure of RIPA was to not limit it's use to intelligence agencies. Local councils should never have been in a position to use it.

Let's turn the tables here shall we. If the government have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.

Sure. The government could declassify everything. The newspapers I'm sure would have a field day with all of the TOP SECRET stuff that would be bandied about.

But the problem is that the very next week the government would have no more aces up its sleeve. Any terrorist wanting to know how to hide from the NSA would only need to look through the archive, see the NSA's capability and then immediately circumvent it.

And that would mean being a terrorist you have the upper hand. You know the blind spots of the NSA, and you can now find exactly how to get a bomb past the TSA or which ports are blind spots that can be used for human traffiking. It means that you know how the NSA detects cyberattacks against US companies so you can circumvent it, and it means that you know exactly how to build a viable explosive device and get it into a crowded Times Square without the FBI ever finding out.

If the government have nothing to hide, we the public have a very great deal to fear.

I think Jack Straw put it best http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/house-of-commons-22846595 at 26:31):

Many of our allies are astonished by the degree of control and supervision of our system of ministerial oversight, oversight by judicially qualified commissioners and by the ISC in this country which surpasses that of most other western democracies.

Those in the agencies face an impossible dilemma. When things are relatively calm, then suspicions, fantasies and sometimes paranoia can take off about the so-called "Secret State". But the moment - the moment - there is a serious threat or actual terrorist outrage, often the very same people and newspapers turn on a sixpence - and their demand is not whether the safeguards were operated, but why it is there has been a failure by those agencies to track through intelligence of all kinds the miscreants involved.

We live on a continuum of privacy versus security. If we have absolute privacy, the intelligence agencies will not be able to protect us from some attacks and without a doubt the 2012 Summer Olympics would have been memorable for entirely different reasons.

14 hours ago, GoddersUK wrote

Hague's statement was very carefully worded. He didn't deny the allegations, he didn't say they're not breaking (and have never broken) the law. He just said they're not exploiting some obscure loophole.

He actually did deny the allegations. He said quite specifically that the UK intelligence agencies do not collaborate with US agencies to circumvent UK laws designed to ensure that UK intelligence agencies get warrants before spying on people in the UK. 

The called the allegations a fiction; utter nonsense, and gave his assurance that it did not happen.

Those are stronger words than you would get from a politician who might want some wriggle room later. If it turns out to be false, his career will hang on those words.

Of course that requires me to believe that William Hague is telling the truth and has been told the truth. Which I'm not sure I do.

Sure, maybe he's lying. But then again, maybe the journalists are just making stuff up too. Mr. Snowden didn't say that the US asks the UK to spy on US citizens in order to get around US safeguards. These accusations have just been pulled out of the air by journalists who apparently don't understand that how the law works (if a UK person asks a US person to spy on a UK person, the original UK person needs a UK warrant to ask the US person to do the spying. Warrants apply not to where you get the data from, but who is doing the surveillance and who is being surveilled. That's how it always worked in the police).

I think perhaps rather than assuming that William Hague is lying that the UK government doesn't circumvent the legal and executive oversight that they themselves put in place, I'd rather see the journalists actually post some bloomin' evidence about why they think that might be going on.

I mean, I haven't heard the UK government comment on my made-up accusation that all of their computers are made out of ground up children's bones. Perhaps we should ask William Hague to comment on that, and when he says "Don't be ridiculous" we'll say "well, you never know - he might be lying" and then just assume that it's true.

http://order-order.com/2013/06/08/d-notice-june-7-2013/

Well, I have to play devil's advocate, but the UK press are reporting slides marked as TOP SECRET NOFORN and stating things as fact that appear to be entirely baseless (like that GCHQ is using an NSA program to circumvent UK legal safeguards).

TOP SECRET information is TOP SECRET for a reason. And just because you think its too boring to actually cause harm if it's published on the Internet, doesn't mean that China and Russia and Al Quaeda haven't looked at those slides and seen something important that you and the journalists publishing it didn't see, and have changed how they operate based on the content of those slides.

And that might mean more cyber attacks against your company and more terrorist attacks against your cities.

And true or not, these slides hurt US companies. Microsoft is going to have a hard time selling Office 365 to Russian businesses this week when all of the Russian CEOs ask "but doesn't Office 365 just plug into the NSA's big database"? And Chinese companies might be more tempted to use Baidu than Google this week, for fear of leaking secrets to the US via some secret NSA backdoor, which may or may not actually exist.

That's real money lost to US companies, whether or not the slides are true, or out-of-context.

Also, publishing entirely fictitious stories such as the suggestion that the UK spies on US citizens and vice-versa in order to circumvent safeguards has no basis in reality. Edward Snowden didn't say that. Journalists just made it up to jump on the "everyone hates the NSA" bandwagon.

GCHQ and the NSA can't defend themselves by opening their doors and saying "come have a look how stuff actually happens". So when journalists make crap up and GCHQ and the NSA fail to defend themselves by saying how they actually work, people lose confidence in them.

I mean, when was the last time that you ever heard of someone's privacy actually being breached in a meaningful way by the NSA? When was the last time you went into a bar and a bunch of NSA people were there pointing at you and laughing at your emails on their phone? When was the last time you heard of the NSA losing access to a big database? Or the last time you heard the NSA analyst coughing down the phone whilst you're having a conversation with your mum?

It just doesn't happen. Even if you were a target, you'd simply never know until the bomb you very carefully put together fails to go off in times square and you get dragged away to jail.

You are just not psychotic, evil or important enough to even register on the periphery of what the NSA actually gives a stuff about. But they do stop bombs going off in the cities you live in, and they do make it less likely that your credit card ends up maxed out by a Russian gangster, and a little bit less likely that your company will win the contract and keep your employed rather than the Chinese company that decided to hack your client and read your tender.

Sadly you'll never know that they've protected you, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.

When journalists and Hollywood just pull accusations out of thin air, and then we the public decide that these entirely baseless accusations holds more weight than the government's firm denials that they are happening, we the public lose confidence in those agencies. And then we have discussions about dismantling the infrastructure that allows them to keep us safe.

At the end of the day, journalists publishing nonsense and TOP SECRET information causes people to die. People get identity frauded. Companies lose their IP through hacking. American and British companies become less competitive compared with Chinese ones by losing IPR and contracts more frequently, and American and British workers get laid off.

These leaks are reckless and irresponsible, but to be honest, the made up allegations are even more so.

That, I suspect, is why the Government put out a D-notice. It's not because of conspiracy so much as because journalists are undermining the protection they and you don't even know you have. And the irony is they are doing it under the pretense of protecting you from organisations designed to protect you that they have vilified for no better reason than it sells newspapers.

3 minutes ago, blowdart wrote

*snip*

Let's look at that wording. UK law. It's nothing about helping the US circumvent US law (spying on their own citizens), which is the current scandal ....

William Hague is only commenting on the UK side of the "scandal" (in which people are worried that GCHQ spied on UK citizens by asking the US to do it for them).

For a US equivalent statement (not that you even really need one - since the US asking the UK to spy on US citizens to circumvent US safeguards laid down in law would be illegal), you need look no further than the Director of National Intelligence's "facts sheet" here:

The Government cannot target anyone under the court-approved procedures for Section 702
collection unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the
acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear
proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States.
We cannot target even foreign persons overseas without a valid foreign intelligence purpose.

In addition, Section 702 cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other
U.S. person, or to intentionally target any person known to be in the United States. Likewise,
Section 702 cannot be used to target a person outside the United States if the purpose is to
acquire information from a person inside the United States.

Or in other words, the suggestion that US spies sit around in Fort Meade dreaming up ways to ask their foreign counterparts to spy on US citizens in order to avoid full oversight from the US legal system, Congress and the Executive branch is the stuff of Hollywood and not of reality.

1 minute ago, blowdart wrote

*snip*

Except they've been doing it for years. That's what ECHELON was for.

There is a difference between lawfully sharing information or building shared infrastructure and DavidJohnson's assertion that GCHQ and NSA target each other's citizens in order to bypass the specific safeguards in law designed afforded to UK and US citizens by their respective constitutions.

4 hours ago, DavidJohnson wrote

The NSA was prevented from collecting information from US citizens and this was closely followed by simply co-locating another country's employee i.e. GCHQ employee on the site, the NSA employee would take anything that had US citizens details and move it outside of their database, and the GCHQ employee would add it to their database.  This way the letter of the law if not the spirit of the law was enforced.

William Hague; Foreign Secretary in the UK made a completely clear statement that this is not the case:

Mr Hague added: "The idea that in GCHQ people are sitting working out how to circumvent a UK law with another agency from another country is fanciful, it is nonsense. I can give people that assurance."