How do you protect yourselves from becoming part of the USA's internet surveillance network? You're exposed to National Security Letters and you lost the case with the Ninth.
Ironically, the U.S. is the safest place from the USA's surveillance network, when no warrant whatsoever is required to collect information by hacking into a foreign entity.
The NSA was tapping glass of inter-DC links of all the major online players without their permission on US soil.
Not only that, the NSA was undermining NIST-approved algorithms by giving dishonest advice, thereby compromising the security of US institutions that used those algorithms:
> Ironically, the U.S. is the safest place from the USA's surveillance network
Only in the sense that one has the strongest theoretical argument for a legal remedy against surveillance after it happens, not in the sense that one is actually safe from being subjected to it in the first place, and only even then if one excluded “i’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” from the other five eyes members when you say “U.S. surveillance network”.
The "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" theory has been written about ad nauseam, but isn't substantiated. The U.S. government can get the information faster by using the warrant power enumerated in the Constitution.
> The U.S. government can get the information faster by using the warrant power enumerated in the Constitution.
Not without presenting probable cause that the surveillance would produce evidence of a crime to a judge it can't.
Of course it can (and is well documented to have, on many occasions) just ignore the statutory and Constitutional restrictions on domestic surveillance. And that will probably, in most cases, be easier than going to a third party. Information sharing is most likely to be efficient when the other agency had a targeted surveillance operation already in place covering a target of interest, rather than in the naive “on demand” form.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ninth-circuit-rules-on-nsl-gag-o...