Mike Rogers: You Can't Have Your Privacy Violated If You Don't Know About It
from the say-what-now? dept
We already wrote a bit about yesterday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing concerning NSA surveillance. There were two sections to it: the first three hours were the top government spooks and lawmakers, and then the last half an hour or so involved three pundits outside of government (though with former government credentials). At the very very end of that, there was an absolutely incredible exchange between Intel Committee Chair Rep. Mike Rogers and law professor Stephen Vladeck (the only panelist the entire day who expressed concerns about what the NSA was doing). You have to watch the exchange to believe it, but it ends with Rogers insisting that “you can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated, right?” Vladeck immediately disagreed and Rogers seemed to find it astounding that anyone could agree, suggesting that it would upend the law. Watch the exchange:
Rogers: I would argue the fact that we haven’t had any complaints come forward with any specificity arguing that their privacy has been violated, clearly indicates, in ten years, clearly indicates that something must be doing right. Somebody must be doing something exactly right.
Vladeck: But who would be complaining?
Rogers: Somebody who’s privacy was violated. You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated.
Vladeck: I disagree with that. If a tree falls in the forest, it makes a noise whether you’re there to see it or not.
Rogers (astounded): Well that’s a new interesting standard in the law. We’re going to have this conversation… but we’re going to have wine, because that’s going to get a lot more interesting…
This is kind of astounding. According to Mike Rogers, you can apparently violate his privacy, so long as he doesn’t know about it. How is it that such a person is supposedly in charge of oversight of the intelligence community? He honestly believes that as long as the NSA spies on people privately, their privacy isn’t violated?
Filed Under: house intelligence committee, mike rogers, privacy, stephen vladeck
Comments on “Mike Rogers: You Can't Have Your Privacy Violated If You Don't Know About It”
New Standard?
Seriously? Doesn’t that dumbass know that the absence of evidence is NOT the evidence of absence?
Re: what about SCOTUS?
I wonder how SCOTUS feels knowing that things have been twisted in such a fashion, aka “you cannot sue due to a lack of standing”.
I bet the EFF is going to love quoting Rogers today.
Re: New Standard?
It’s not butt rape if you can’t see who is doing it.
Did that Rogers just invoked Murphy's law?
Cause sooner or later…
someone will get some dirt from his private life… without him knowing it…
Re: Did that Rogers just invoked Murphy's law?
Hey, psss, look into his wife business dealings and you see.
I’m honestly not surprised he’s claiming that something is only illegal if you get caught.
Re: Re:
Actually, that’s exactly what he’s claiming…though he may not realize it yet…
Re: Re: Re:
He totally realizes it.
Re: Re: Re: Too Much Credit
I think you are giving him too much credit.
Re: Re: Re:2 Too Much Credit
No, I’m more inclined to believe malfeasance, given that he and his wife have profited considerably from this operation, to the tune of multi-millions of taxpayers’ dollars.
Which is the really incredible aspect of all this.
Re: Re: Re:3 Too Much Credit
Indirect bribery under the seal of secret service secrecy. It is close to the perfect crime if he doesn’t tread incredibly lightly (the obscuration of the overview seems to suggest a serious bending of the law to avoid scrutiny!).
Furthermore, it is a good question if a person with so seriously vested economic interests on one side of an issue should be able to hold as high a position in political oversight of said issue! He will be unable to hold an opinion without vested interests to him in far too few matters to effectively hold the responsibility.
Re: Re: Re:2 Too Much Credit
How many patriotic references and quotes from beloved past leaders were in that video?
I only had to listen to 3 minutes of that guy to realize he’s a double talking shape shifting liar. He knows exactly what he’s saying and where his lies are and how to use language to manipulate. That’s the professional politicians do and it’s all very intentional. He could do it in his sleep.
Re: Politician... Duh...
He’s a politician, of COURSE he feels this way. And if you get caught, change the law.
I hear the faint sound of stealth feet in the landscape. What am I seeing? Am I seeing Anonymous leaking all sorts of private data from Rogers? All of it without violating it because, well, they are anonymous?
In his shocking quest to protect the totalitarian path the US is heading he is open breaches for serious attacks against him.
You’ve got to feel sorry for babies repeatedly dropped on their heads.
As I stated in a comment on the previous post about the when I first saw this, this means that he believes that a person who passes out and is raped but doesn’t know they were raped wasn’t actually raped at all. Making a comment like that publicly should automatically be grounds for censure because he is obviously to incompetent to hold the position that he does. I couldn’t believe that crap actually flew out of his pie hole. Astounding.
Re: Re:
And likewise, if you murdered someone, and nobody else found out about it, then no foul. Bonus points if it was someone that had no friends or living family.
It’s not like the murdered person is upset about it now, they’re dead, they can’t hold a grudge. If nobody (still living) was ever affected, then you never committed a crime.
Re: Re: Re:
which means it’s perfectly OK for a single mother who hid her pregnancy to kill her newborn. as long as no one digs up the garden.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Actually I see the argument he’s trying to make though (even if it is a stupid one). I think he was trying to tie the argument to the legal concept of innocent until proven guilty by saying you legally can’t hold someone responsible for something they allegedly did if no one else knows they did it and there is no proof of it so it from a purely legal standpoint is like it never happened as nothing really can be done about it. But that is not what he said.
“Well that’s a new interesting standard in the law.”
Pardon the French (we’re not still spying on them right), but holy shit.
My interpretation of the law (and I’m assuming the standard interpretation) is if you break the law you’re guilty of breaking the law, even if no one notices. However, you’re only penalized if someone catches you and proves it in the court of law. Just because you aren’t penalized doesn’t make the act right though…
I’m reading Rogers say, “Yes I know the NSA’s actions go against the law, but it hasn’t been proven illegal cause no one can prove it, so it’s legal.” That very clearly is an us against them attitude where you have to be secretive and selective to maintain control and that’s everything a democracy isn’t. If we have a leader with that mindset, there should be things in place to remove said person from any sort of power immediately before they do anything to take power from the public!
Re: Re:
You do not even need to be caught in the act. If you brag about it in enough detail you can end up going down anyway! Just makes his stance that much more philosofically inconsistent with a democratic country.
Now is a great time to plant a bunch of bugs in Roger’s home and office, and plant spyware on his computers. Obviously we aren’t invading his privacy unless he happens to find one of the bugs.
Biggest piece of shit in the House. Reading his comments I feel outraged. Watching and listening to him just gives me the creeps.
Rogers has been totally corrupted and has no regard for the Constitution, which he took an oath of office to uphold. This man has gone totally rogue against the American People.
?Just give me a one-armed economist.? President Harry S. Truman
President Truman was referring to the infuriating way in which economists would hedge themselves about their economic recommendations and prognostications. Classical economic theory is PERFECT for reviewing the data and telling you what HAPPENED AFTER THE FACT. A lot of good THAT does you…
http://americanenergycrisis.blogspot.com/2008/05/just-give-me-one-armed-economist.html
?Give me a one-armed economist!? That was the exasperated plea of former U.S. President Harry Truman in the late 1940s. Truman grumbled that whenever his economists advised him, they would inevitably say, ?On the one hand?but, on the other?,? accounting for the ambiguities of economic indicators.
The Nobel-Prize-winning Irish playwright, G. Bernard Shaw, said, ?If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.?
http://www.cotton247.com/article/2649/the-economists-tea-leaves-say
In the real world, “economists” are pretty much universally despised.
Mike claims to have a college degree in economics, can’t ya tell?
04:13:24[f-170-6]
Re: ?Just give me a one-armed economist.? President Harry S. Truman
Leave it to you to grasp on to the one part of the entire article that really has nothing to do with what the article is really about.
Re: ?Just give me a one-armed economist.? President Harry S. Truman
Do you sometimes lie awake at night in fetid sweats over the fact that there’s an entire nobel prize for a field you believe is ‘pretty much universally despised?’ It sounds like the kind of thing that would keep a kind of person like you up nights.
Re: Re: ?Just give me a one-armed economist.? President Harry S. Truman
Are you talking about the Peace Nobel Prize?
A new hero is born
“you can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated, right?”
Sorry, could you repeat that? I couldn’t hear you over the raucous applause from all these Peeping Toms.
Re: A new hero is born
To quote Lewis Black…
“Don’t think about that too long, or BLOOD will shoot out your NOSE!”
Re: Don't Get Caught...
So, Mike Rogers theory elevates childhood rules apply to the constitution, if you don’t get caught it never happened. No wonder he’s so pissed at Snowden.
Re: A new hero is born
That was immediately my thought: so, Rep. Rogers, you are saying that if the sweaty creep next door is peeking in your daughter’s window while she is undressing but she is unaware of it, her privacy has not been violated?
What an asshat.
so let me get this straight
I can go pick a hich hiker up, drive up to the middle of the desesrt and kill said hich hiker without anyone knowing?
good thing the NSA uses paradoxal zen questions to make loopholes in the law.
Not comprehend his point LIKE A FOX!!! He’s stumping. His points are laced with ad homs and false dichotomies.
He’s already told the american public “Lokk, shut up this is fine, stop complaining.” This is just more of the same.
Dear Mike Rogers,
Incompetency like yours far exceeded what I expected from you.
Your truly,
Anyone with any semblance of common sense
Rogers (astounded): Well that’s a new interesting standard in the law. We’re going to have this conversation… but we’re going to have wine, because that’s going to get a lot more interesting…
I feel so much better knowing our elected officials need to go get drunk in order to talk about the impact of the laws they pass. Rogers must hang out with all of those NSA recruits who get drunk, wear costumes, and go sing karaoke after work. Mandatory drug and alcohol testing for all members of Congress, and the NSA, seems to be in order.
He totally (and intentionally) misquotes Churchill.
?We can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.?
This guy is just a flag waving, slogan spouting moron. Get him out of office!
For a long time I’ve thought Rogers was conniving, maliciously exploiting a lack of oversight to further his own power.
Now, though, I’m starting to get the impression that he’s just a complete idiot. “Hurf durf, it’s only a crime if you get caught! Hyuk hyuk hyuk!”
At these hearings...
The point isn’t to gather information, it’s to get get the witness to make a response that can be used later. Rogers wanted an unequivocal “Yes” and didn’t get it. So he kept trying to rephrase – almost against his own point – until he did.
“Mike Rogers: You Can’t Have Your Privacy Violated If You Don’t Know About It”
And by the same reasoning. You can’t have committed a crime if you don’t know about it.
Locations = association
I think its worth digging into the ‘location’ from telephone records thing, because there’s a major untold story there and I don’t think we’ve been told the full story yet.
We have this:
“Mr. Wyden pressed General Alexander about whether the N.S.A. had ever collected, or made plans to collect, bulk records about Americans? locations based on cellphone tower data.
General Alexander replied that the N.S.A. is not doing so as part of the call log program, but that information pertinent to Mr. Wyden?s question was classified.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/us/politics/senators-push-to-preserve-nsa-phone-surveillance.html
He later clarified it as a test done on phone location data. I don’t believe that it was declassified, so I suspect the program still is classified, the ‘test’ is a deflection.
I believe NSA gets the phone metadata, not some filtered subset of the phone metadata that doesn’t include the tower data. The telcos bend over backwards to do NSA bidding to keep legal immunity, they would just give them the full metadata.
From that data, of course location can be determined.
If you have a track of the location of people, then you can derive the associations, who’s path mirrored who’s path. Who is sleeping with who (colocation late at night). Who went shopping with whom, who had a meeting with who, etc.
That a powerful weapon against normal people.
I don’t believe for a second General A, would have resisted the temptation to data mine location associations in secret.
So I think we have that revelation still to come.
“I would argue the fact that we haven’t had any complaints come forward with any specificity arguing that their privacy has been violated, clearly indicates, in ten years, clearly indicates that something must be doing right. Somebody must be doing something exactly right.”
Really? No complaints huh? Then WTF are you doing having this inquiry. Did you think it was supposed to be a Tupperware party? And WTF do you think all those lawsuits filed by the ACLU and EFF were all about? Did you think they filed those just because they were bored and thought it would be fun? You don’t think those weren’t complaints? Mr. Rogers, you really need to take a restroom break. The shit you are full of is starting to ooze out your ears.
Let's swap in some words and see if it changes it..
“Your husband can’t be cheating on you if you don’t know your husband is cheating on you, right?”
“You’re not sleeping with a hooker if you don’t know she’s a hooker, right?”
“You’re not infected with AIDS if you don’t know you’re infected, right?”
Lets have some fun with this!
If your privacy cannot be violated until you discover it then…
Peeping toms, eavesdropping, spying, document theft, being discriminated against for a job, or your Dr telling everyone about your health problems are only illegal if they get caught.
Sure in a general sense anything is only illegal if you get caught, but that is the law of criminals… are we sitting here seriously watching the very people placed to stop villainy, actively participating and excusing it?
This line of propaganda was invented to prevent “The People” from challenging these bastards. The very notion of bringing things to court sometime is to in fact “test” if people or an organization has overstepped their legal constraints. And when you are no longer allowed an avenue of “redress” against the government… its time to play hard ball.
I can see it now..
Terrorist: How did you know I was planning on blowing up Bozo’s Arena?
NSA: We read it off an email you sent to a supplier about some late deliveries of things that can go boom
Terrorist: I wish to press charges for invading my privacy and also throw the evidence out of court because I caught them doing something illegal.
NSA: Its only Illegal if you get…oh…crap
Re: I can see it now..
Unfortunately, Berenerd, parallel construction makes this exchange highly unlikely.
Really?
So, if I break into your house and install a hidden camera in your bedroom, I’m only invading your privacy if you find it? Do I have that right?
Epically Simpsonian Logic
It’s a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
So Mike Rogers is saying that I can hide in his closet, take pictures of him shagging his wife and distribute them on the internet and so long as he doesn’t find out, his privacy has not been violated?
Riighhht.
So... nothing wrong with hidden camera stalking?
So that means that there’s no harm done by a guy who spies on a woman taking a bath with a video camera as long as she never finds out?
… Mike Rogers, you’re a creep.
Does this aphorism apply elsewhere?
Like, say, patents, or copyrights or trademarks?
You can’t have your patent violated if you don’t know about it.
You can’t have your copyright violated if you don’t know about it.
You can’t have your trademark violated if you don’t know about it.
I like the sound of this, so I expect Rep. Rogers to introduce legislation to this effect.
So if I hack into his email accounts, but he doesn’t find out about it, then it’s ok?
If I steal his grandmas jewelery, but he doesn’t notice it’s missing, then it’s ok?
and so on?
I’d like to think that’s now how laws work.
WTF
Using his logic, he’s not retarded because he doesn’t realize it.
Just because you don’t realize something, doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Re: WTF
Hmm.. Maybe if I don’t open my bank statements, I wont be out of money, and I can keep buying stuff!! (Isn’t that what the government is doing too?!)
Who are the people who keep voting for this dude?
Re: Re:
Lansing, Michigan.
Popehat has an amazing parody of this interview up right now, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Re: Re:
A parody? That sounds as unambitious as making fun of a clown.
Re: Re:
here’s the link http://www.popehat.com/2013/10/30/rep-mike-rogers-angrily-defends-bathroom-spycam
Yay!
Voyeurism is now legal… so long as no one will know.
Let me get a closer look at that...
“You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated”
OK, so if I plant a camera in the women’s changing room at the leisure centre then it’s OK so long as nobody knows I’ve done it? Riiiiiiiiight.
What a plan!
I love this. I have a cunning plan…. clearly many US judges have no concept of the internet so if I arrange for compromising pictures of them doing rude things in their own homes and post them all over the internet where they themselves will never see them, I’m totally in the clear… right? I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that plan?
Don't Tell Mike
Don’t tell Mike Rogers that I watch him shower. I don’t want to invade his privacy.
Rogers' new legal defense tactic
You can use everywhere, whether is a embezzlement or a date rape. Just make sure victims are unaware of what’s happening to them…
Good News
I can now leave my phone at home when I go out. Then commit a crime that didn’t happen because no one saw it, and then use their location data, that they don’t collect, to provide me with a rock solid alibi, that I don’t need….Fucking awesome!
Unbelievable. If this were true multitudes of laws should probably be reviewed to add a clause like “subject to the victim or the authorities being aware of the incident”.
Has anyone told Mike Rogers about the webcam installation above his shower?
Not that he needs to know, of course.
Ok. We know about it now, so stop. Kthxbai.
Extend that reasoning, and all terrorists will disappear if the NSA stops looking for them. Boom. Three problems solved.
So ask him this
Ask this man this.
If the NSA installed a camera in his bedroom and watched him make love to his wife, but his wife didn’t know about the camera, would her privacy had been violated? Would her privacy have been violated if the NSA had 500 staffers sit there and watch the video?
Intelligence?
OK Mike…We’ll shoot you in the back of the head.
That way you won’t know, which means you weren’t shot.
Fair enough…
I believe Chuck Berry did time for that – installing cameras in the ladies toilets in Berry Park..
LoL this made my day!
Government persons remark.comment
Intel Committee Chair Rep. Mike Rogers “you can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated, right?”
Every so often someone in government says something so idiotic it should result in his/her instant removal.
I think what Rogers was trying to say to the question “Who would be complaining?” is that “You can’t -COMPLAIN- about your privacy being violated if you don’t know your privacy is being violated.” To which I would agree. You would not know the tree fell unless you watched it happen or observed it thereafter.
Whether or not he said what he meant or meant what he said, I don’t know. But from his statements about the necessity of transparency, I feel it is meant that the NSA should be telling its Americans what data exactly is being analyzed and to what extent so that Americans can determine if their privacy is being violated.
Re: Re:
Or rather if the significance of the violation is worth the security tradeoff or even necessary.
So if i hadn’t watched this video, that would mean Rogers isn’t an idiot, to use his own logic. Am I correct? The whole tree-in-the-forest deal and all.
chilling
That was one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard a government official utter.
“If a tree falls in the forest, it makes no sound, because you didn’t know about it.”
Mike Rogers
Seriously?
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