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An interesting surveillance/cyber policy side angle in our new Durham story was how the Obama WH confronted the dilemma of whether FBI/intel officials could look at the stolen messages of hacking victims--when those victims were Obama & Congress. /1 nytimes.com/2020/02/13/us/politics/durham-cia-russia.html
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In 2015, the NYT and ProPublica teamed up for a story based on @Snowden docs about a secret expansion by Obama admin of 702 warrantless surveillance power to target foreign govt hackers, which meant copying the data of US victims as it was stolen. /2 nytimes.com/2015/06/05/us/hunting-for-hackers-nsa-secretly-expands-internet-spying-at-us-border.html
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@Snowden One of the key issues raised by this expansion of 702, besides the fact that the government kept is secret instead of being transparent about it, was that it raised the question of what should be done with the private messages of victims that was collected. /3
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@Snowden The story by the way also showed that in 2011 the FBI had started doing this, too, although it seemed to be getting a court order to target particular hacker IP addresses. /4
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@Snowden NSA or FBI searching of incidentally collected U.S. person data, gathered while targeting a foreigner (with or without a warrant), is sometimes called the backdoor search issue. One argument in favor of it is: most of the time those messages involve a target on the other end./5
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@Snowden With hacker victim data, though, it's not someone who is talking to a terrorist or spy or foreign government official. There's no implication of maybe-guilt. Plus the volume of data gathered can be huge - entire archives of messages or hard drive contents, not one email./6
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@Snowden So the documents showed that some lawyer in the NSA was worried about this, and flagged the question of whether US person hacker victim data gathered under 702 ought to be segregated and not fair game for searching. But it wasn't clear if anyone cared or acted on that idea. /7
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@Snowden So... to bring this back, when the hacker victims were the president and members of Congress, at least, that privacy issue appears to have carried the day./8 end