The result? Won some, lost some, and the world moved on.
What's different now is that this surveillance is legal at scale because the majority of the populace wants it to be. They're more afraid of terrorists than having privacy. Look at the polls: Hacker News (and techies in general) seem to be in quite a bubble in this regard.
We have more clout than we did in the 90s, but the difference now is that there's a big Terrorism counter argument to anything we say. A majority of the USA prefers to have the electric eye of Sauron to watch over them, because the alternative -- more freedom that might lead to more terror attacks -- is too scary for them to accept. In that sense, the terrorists have won.
There are two viable paths going forward, in my view: (a) Work to convince people they want privacy, and don't want Brin's transparent society - this slows what appears to be the inevitable; (b) Work to ensure accountable oversight of surveillance. No more FISA secret courts, but real public courts and judges and warrants.
What's not likely viable is (a) encouraging people to stop using social networks -- they won't, we broadly LIKE being noticed by others, it gives meaning to our otherwise alienated capitalistic existence; (b) encouraging government to stop tracking people -- they're just getting into the game that Google and Facebook is in.
If a company can track people, so will the government. The key is that government can and must be held accountable to a degree that companies don't have to be. The US public has chosen not to exercise this power to date out of ignorance, laziness, and/or lack of desire.
The likely outcome of all of this is a resurrection and growth in the "darknet", where younger techies go to hide.
Debatable. See polling at http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/12/us-usa-security-po... as discussed on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5871423
Of course, the people who support him may still think that the spying is a good thing, just shouldn't be secretive... and maybe the 46% undecided will end up against him. But certainly doesn't seem as clear-cut as you suggest - do you have any examples of the polls you reference?
The main example is a Pew Research Poll showing that objection/support is partisan or age-based (though all sub-groups still support it): http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph...
Alternatively, Rasmussen says a majority do not approve. However, keep in mind the house effect of Rasmussen polling more republicans and the partisan divide may be driving this. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gene...
http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/14/nsa-confidential-we-lo...
I don't know why so many people can't understand that a bad law is a bad law, and judge it as such. The criteria for whether a law is any good ought to be (at least partially) based on whether or not you'd support it if your opposition party were able to use it. If the answer is 'No', then it's bad, simply.
As a guy who has never set foot in the States I found it strange when I first heard Dakota Fanning asking Tom Cruise "Is that the terrorists?" in Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" (when an airplane falls over the house they're in), I was asking to myself "why does the Americans' first instinct in case of unknown danger focus on terrorists?".
And talking about "the eye of Sauron", there is of course this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kytDzjuBGJI , which still gives me the chills. An under-estimated movie, IMHO.
What surprised me most at the time was the line of questioning of more or less all of the audience members. Against a background of shock and befuddlement that this had happened to an essentially benign US by an unknown extra national entity, the main question that followed was as to why the US was hated that much. It was simply incomprehensible to the audience. There appeared to be no awareness of the trouble brewing outside the country, even though the US government was engaged in one way or another.
Watching through this portal I was struck by how little the average American was aware of the real politics that existed in foreign policy terms visa vi the US. I thought at the time that the US would have a very difficult time developing a viable strategic response when the general population either misunderstood or simply hasn't any perspective at all on the place of the US in geopolitical terms. Observe George W Bush confusing Austria and Australia.
It was a massive shock, and the following response against an unknown enemy is partly based in that lack of perspective I'd say.
It may help, if this is at all right, to inform and educate the citizenry of these geopolitical nuances. Perhaps then some change to this general idea of 'terrorism' might occur in the public psyche, and as a consequence, expectations of viable strategy. But it's a tough ask. In lieu of that I'd expect a continuation of the dragnet.
Anyways, only underrated because expectations of Spielberg are deservedly high.
What we should, and can justifiably, be afraid of is "black swan" security events (such as 9/11). The Boston Bombers were horrible people, but they weren't threats to national security, and the bombing wasn't a "black swan" event. If (and these are big "ifs") the NSA is meaningfully restricted to defending the U.S. against foreign governments, and meaningfully restricted to uncovering plots to kill thousands, then I don't see where the privacy concern is.
We don't even need to talk about terrorism for that. Drug cartels and organized crime have for decades required the legal system to occasionally resort to gag orders and secrecy to avoid tipping off the "bad guys" before the legal system is able to act.
After all, the legal system is deliberate on purpose as to do otherwise would invite abuses of its own. I would be worried to live in a country where you could be locked up, arraigned, indicted, tried and convicted in just a day.
Public interest requires us to have enough due process that the system is inevitably slow. But a completely public system must operate much much faster to be effective against some types of "menace to society". This includes terrorism but is hardly limited to terrorism.
So absolutely we should have that public debate to figure out under what criteria we would operate NSA intel intercepts, what would be public, and what would be secret. But just don't be surprised if there are still secrets when it's all said and done, with a select group of persons to provide the accountability required to keep the system safe.
We do use similar systems for other very dangerous programs after all (e.g. nuc weps).
I believe that prior to Bush, some such system did exist with respect to some types of records.
The political equilibrium keeps things as they are. Those in power can't do what needs doing because they'll get thrown out for it (ex.: total spending must be cut in half, but nobody is going to make such draconian across-the-board cuts and survive). Something has to break to disrupt that equilibrium, something like defaulting on debt maintenance or onset of hyperinflation.
Yes, we're stuck in a rut. There comes a point where you have to get out of the car and start walking, leaving the driving paradigm behind.
OK, just to cite one example: The population of North Carolina as of 2012 was 9,752,073. 23.7% are under 18 and therefore ineligible to vote. That leaves approximately 7,440,831 eligible voters[1] (I'm ignoring convicted felons and other edge cases for now).
According to the State Board of Elections, there are currently 6,438,531 registered voters. 2,764,322 Democrats, 1,984,251 Republicans, 20,901 Libertarians and 1,669,057 unaffiliated.[2] So that gives us around 1,002,300 potential voters who aren't even registered. So around 13% of the eligible voters aren't even registered and obviously don't vote.
Now that's just one state, and that doesn't even attempt to account for people who are registered, but don't bother to vote, or vote infrequently. But it does suggest that there's a not-insignificant number of people who are sitting on the sidelines during elections.
Edit: Also, as one might expect, there's a Wikipedia page on this topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_Sta...
http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...
Your North Carolina example still stands, as only (only being relative here) ~80,000 people are disenfranchised due to felony status. But, in states like Florida, Mississippi and Kentucky, it can be as high as 10% of the voting age population.
I bet most of them are people who don't care about politics. Good luck trying to engage them, people have been trying to do so for decades and have failed. The simple reality is that life is comfortable enough for most. Few are starving, few are persecuted- if you're earning enough to live a relatively comfortable life, why bother voting?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/05/0...
(Local discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5880156 )
Lawrence Lessig for President?
So, rather than say that it's broken, just admit that the way the system is structured (first past the post) is what causes a two-party system.
But Australia tempers this with preferential voting in the house which is simply better than the US electoral system (because small parties can still sway the outcome without actually getting members into parliament -- e.g. the greens can say they prefer X over Y and then direct their votes to X or Y, but if they actually get a big vote they can still win).
New Zealand has a really nice system which is a little proportional but not too proportional and wastes very few votes without turning some tiny nutcase party into the tie breaker.
My point is that each system has both pros and cons. You cannot create a perfect electoral system. No matter what rules you make, some smart guy is going to figure out a while to exploit those rules to their advantage.
Of course, I will admit that some systems do have fewer downsides than others, or there are tradeoffs of eliminating one downside in exchange for a different downside that's arguably less bad.
This is vague enough as to be meaningless. In what precise ways is using range voting (and otherwise leaving things the same) worse than our current system?
"My point is that each system has both pros and cons. You cannot create a perfect electoral system. No matter what rules you make, some smart guy is going to figure out a while to exploit those rules to their advantage."
Sure, of course; Arrow's theorem says there is no voting system that's "perfect". Therefore, calling a system "broken" can't mean simply "not perfect" or it's meaningless. However, I think it's fair to call a voting system "broken" when there is an alternative that's better along some axes while worse along none.
No it doesn't, its says that there is no system limited to rank-order inputs and outputs that meets certain criteria.
There are plenty of actual and potential voting systems that aren't within its scope, and it is also debatable whether the criteria it applies are the correct ones for a "perfect" voting system.
Your comment would benefit from elaboration. Are there any of the criteria you think are strong candidates for dismissal as elements of a hypothetical "perfect voting system"?
I don't think I'm currently grokking universality with the depth I need to assess it. I remember it seeming reasonable when I did dig deep in all this, ages back.
The fix is instant run-off voting, like Australia has.
A party has to have a platform -- that's the whole point of a party: shared core values. But those values have to be actionable otherwise they are just platitudes.
It's all about money: who pays and how is it spent. Gods, Guns and Gays are distractions, but they have to be addressed in some way or they will remain distractions. The "right" uses those tactics because they are very effective. It just needs reframing.
That is why the Libertarian and Green parties, both of which receive quite a few votes, are never elected. And that is why the proposed new party has very little chance. If its platform is defined by San Francisco hackers, there's a good chance that I will agree with half of the platform and strongly disagree with the other half, and most of the country will have the same reaction.
you just cant name it pirate party. In the us that would probably work against you.
"It's like libertarianism meets communism but with promiscuous transparency and cryptography instead of classlessness.
Get ready people, Libercommusharepunkism is about to disrupt!"
Your acceptance is not required for the spying programs to continue operating. The sooner you realize that is the sooner you'll realize that your choices are currently very limited.
This event is already having that effect in EU. Governments is already creating policy/laws that favors national services over Google. If they go a step further and make a law that forbids moving privileged information to a US data cloud to be picked and prodded by spies and advertisers, that will have a real effect on Google, Microsoft, amazon and Apple. Suddenly, doctors can not use iphones connected with icloud for their practice. Lawyers can't use Microsoft 360 with mails going through Microsoft servers or store their mail in the cloud. Government can't purchase amazon cloud for developing. Even schools can't use Google docs when working with student records.
I have no doubt in me that the us government would listen to Google, Microsoft, amazon and Apple if such law was ever created.
http://export.gov/safeharbor/eu/eg_main_018365.asp
US companies that want to hold EU data in the US have to guarantee the same level of protection the EU provides.
Ie, can someone use that law to sue a doctor who happens to use gmail/microsoft/icloud for communicate with his patients?
Sure we can perhaps get them to change their minds by boycotting, but try asking a regular American citizen to fully disconnect from the internet.
This is a fallacy that gets repeated a lot.
First of all, the EU is not a single entity, but rather a hydra with many heads. The competency and resources of "intelligence agencies" varies a lot by country, the privacy laws and the wire-taping/surveillance culture too.
If you are speaking about the UK, sure, but try doing this in Germany. Also, in my country (Romania) the government wouldn't have the resources for it and they are too incompetent to cooperate with other agencies without people finding out about it. I also cannot see France doing this, since the French get pretty violent when they get upset. So what EU are you talking about exactly?
Second, even if snooping of online activity does happen in an EU country, at least it's an EU intelligence agency you're talking about. This is relevant for US companies, because I don't know how much EU's governments care about our privacy, but I can assure you that they care about leaks to the US or China or other non-EU countries. Which means US companies will suffer for it.
The USA was and is still seen as the benevolent dictator of the Internet. That's why we've been accepting your governance of TLDs, or your online services. That's why we've been blaming China for their tight control of online access. But if the US government keeps jerking around much, things will change.
Not that much.
The is a single EU privacy directive, (95/46/EC), and an extension to provide better privacy for online data (2002/58/EC). All the member state have implemented the same directive. What changes among states are just implementation details (as a programmer would say).
The thing to note here is that the EU directive provides a blanket exception for almost all governmental organizations and for all the police branches. This means that something like PRISM, if architectured in a proper way, would be completely legal.
Truth be told, in EU most telcos and ISP are forced by the law to keep track of all the communications and forward them to the relevant authorities either in batch or on demand.
The state of the political part of the EU is not the mess many politicians say.
However, my main point is that in EU a program like PRISM would be totally legal under current laws. And it is probably already in place if you think about the SIREN program and you make it access the wealth of data harvested through the data retention directives.
I'm not saying that they can't do that. I'm saying that they are thinking twice about it.
The separation of powers -- separated into judicial, legislative, and executive branches -- no longer applies. We're seeing unprecedented cooperation between all three branches and, put simply, American democracy is dead.
Our congressional representatives are in on it and they're fine with it, the judiciary approved it all, and the executive branch uses it for their own selfish benefit.
When we heard Obama say "no more illegal wiretapping" then we thought he was going to discontinue it all, but he actually looked the other way while congress made it perfectly legal and accepted instead. Very insidious.
Hyperbolic bullshit like this is reason #122783278 why I hate to see politics on this site.
[1] http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU
[2] http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l2sWTwbzAcw "Let them do what they are going to do"
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/court-order-veri... "in case they became terrorist suspects in future"
No shit!
Things were never "right", starting from the constitution defining slaves as 3/5ths of a human being. Women couldn't vote 100 years ago. In a lot of southern states, things were still pretty bad 50 years ago, and the idea of a black person being president was science fiction.
You can dig up similar dirt on pretty much any country with enough history. Did you know that in Switzerland, universal suffrage for women wasn't fully approved until the 1970ies? Italy? Berlusconi - need I say more?
Not right, however, does not mean "dead", and those who conflate the two come across as ill-informed, at best.
Having to argue that the US is not just like North Korea as part of any political debate leaves little room for any serious, nuanced considerations.
Labeling the whole thing as "dead" is pure hyperbole, and probably a lame excuse not to get involved and do the hard work that is necessary to change broken stuff.
If it were dead and nonexistent, then people would not have been able to liberalize marijuana use in Colorado and Washington, nor approved measures allowing gay people to marry the people they love in several states.
Wow, tell that to someone who can finally have all the legal rights that most married couples enjoy. Or all the folks on the other side who are convinced that their own marriages are forever ruined and the country on the road to hell because some people can get married.
EDIT: To clarify, I fully understand that it's a problem that needs to be addressed. I'm against any injustice against any group of people, based on arbitrary historical prejudices or otherwise. I'm just expressing my opinion on how the people who decide which issues to address and how to address them are motivated by political convenience vs actual priority.
As a vindictive mofo, my approach now is to help them step on the nail so I can say 'told you so'. This approach was very fun in respect to the Patriot Act, HLS, etc and the now resulting NSA crap. Join me on the dark side.
#edit well the second bit was addressing the previous rampant down-voting you had received.
Voting isn't meant to grant them power; it's meant to be a check on their power.
Change isn't easy, but it can be effected.
The first big story here is the extent to which the US government has been (and continues to) compel big internet businesses and telco's to do their spying for them. This is an important thing to keep in mind, and I think that it is important when we look at what products we as founders develop. One of the huge threats that Google poses is the degree to which disparate sources of tracking information are tied together. With Android, for example, your cell phone is connected to an email address.
The second is the degree to which companies are being forced to make things intelligence-friendly. Here I think another point here is to build products which are intelligence-unfriendly as a way of pushing back. I have some ideas for start-ups I would be interested in participating in, in this area. My time availability is less than I would like but....
The first would be a verifiable secure telephony platform, resistant to in the middle eavesdropping, ideally incorporated in a country with strong protections for such things (Switzerland sounds nice).
The second would be decentralized cryptography services of some sort.
All projects I think would have to be open source because this would help put pressure on governments not to interfere.
The politicians that the people want in office is not the same person that you want to work under or believe in.
On that note - it should also be an opportunity for any experts here who do security reviews to get some exposure.
I'm curious where the line is you're trying to draw.
Since you ask:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...
In particular see the 3rd slide down for the type of information the NSA claims it can collect.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-in...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/12/snowden-...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/nsa-part...
I'm curious where the line is you're trying to draw.
Can't speak for the OP, but I imagine for most people that line is somewhere well before the mass surveillance of phone records etc which the US is currently engaging in. Are you genuinely confused about why people might oppose that or care about it?
The difference is forcing private businesses to place unmarked rooms inside of buildings with vampire fiber taps at All of the major domestic interconnects. That's a problem and completely unnecessary.
I object to dragnets, I do not object to lawful intercepts. The distinction might be moot, but if there wasn't a secret fisa court signing all of these documents the monitored parties could even sue.
Remember when the NSA got caught monitoring those Arabic students when they sent them their own call records? The students sued the NSA but the court case was thrown out because the NSA argued that even though the students had possession of the call records, they couldn't use them in court because they were classified.
What I want is security through tireless effort not through dragnet expediency. It's hard to be the NSA. It's hard to stop terrorists. I believe our country has enough skilled intelligence officials to deliver security without sacrificing liberty. Is that cynical?
Just wonderful :-) Have all the up votes I can give you
Same sh*t, different politicians.
Supporters of such surveillance have a fairly simple test, and one that's more or less supported by current law and Constitutional jurisprudence: If it's metadata that must be voluntarily exposed to a third party (e.g. a pen register) it's unprotected by the Fourth Amendment. As to actual data, if it crossed national boundaries because one participant can be reasonably determined to be outside the U.S., it can be examined for the same reason your luggage can when you cross the border.
I would prevent the NSA from backdating warrants.
I would prevent the NSA from being able to wiretap for 7 days without a warrant.
I would prevent the NSA from using Vampire Taps in Fiber Optic networks.
I would allow the disclosure of National Security Letters and I would block indefinite duration gag orders (10 years is fine; infinity is not).
I would hold our intelligence organizations accountable for lying to the public.
I would enact a new wiretapping act to prevent these domestic abuses.
I would only apply these changes to domestic surveillance.
Would I trade security for this liberty? In a heartbeat.
The punchline for all of this is simple: all of the ridiculous intelligence and security apparati we've developed since 9/11 don't make us any safer, and, in fact, inspire the very terrorism we seek to disrupt. The $X0Billion dollars we spend every year could be used for much better purposes, like going to Mars.
More specifically:
I would prevent the NSA from being able to wiretap for 7 days without a warrant.
How do you deal with a "hot" investigation, wherein some subject of intense interest calls/emails a previously unidentified subject, who then calls/emails a third party? For the sake of argument, assume they're all from IPs outside the U.S., but using Skype through U.S. servers. (If your definition of "domestic" doesn't fit this, adjust as needed).
It seems to me you have three choices:
- Don't intercept the latter communication. Wait (minutes, hours?) until you get a judge's order on the new subject, while hoping the latter two subjects communicate again, and that no critical intelligence is lost.
- Allow for broad-ranging warrants that either give an agent discretion to follow leads regardless of the actual individual involved, or instead allow for "drag net" style intercepts that are later filtered for relevance per a FISC-approved process (this is essentially what we have now, as I understand it.)
- Allow backdated or 7-day-forgiveness warrants. (Again, what we have now.)
Is there an alternative?
Many of your other points I agree with, or at least agree they're proper grist for an intelligence oversight bill. Separation of powers is a real issue, though: Congress can't tell the executive how to run national security operations any more than it can tell the executive how to run a war. It has the power of the purse, but we don't live in a parliamentary system. If you don't like the way the President uses his Constitutional powers, vote for another guy/gal.
A "Hot" investigation is one that will likely have a judge standing by, if that becomes the standard by which the NSA must conduct its business. What I am objecting to is the idea of anonymous, unquestionable, omniscient wiretapping. That's quite different from pursuing a case.
To put it explicitly: It is not an equitable social compromise to tap all of the data at a switch versus tapping a known session or known port. The NSA has the capability to tap anything they want, it's just easier to take everything.
What I'm pissed about is not that the NSA is wiretapping people. You should know the NSA is wiretapping people. What I'm pissed off about is that the NSA is so lazy that they dragnet everything instead of tapping the stuff they need. Sifting through everything looking for an indication of crime is very different from tactically selecting specific instances for evaluation.
Again, I believe in the capabilities of the US Intelligence agencies and I believe they are smart enough to not require a dragnet to do their work. It's not really Voldemort evil, they want to protect us. The problem is laziness; the banality of evil.
Personally as a foreigner my opinion is probably unimportant to you, but I don't think the NSA should be attempting blanket surveillance at all, foreign or domestic, whether data crosses borders or not - there should be public courts deciding on each request on an individual or organisation, with search warrants granted where it is deemed in the public interest, connected directly to an ongoing investigation - decisions could be kept secret for n days. What I would allow are tapping of all devices/contacts for a single person over an investigation. This would dramatically limit the effectiveness of the NSA by design. The most effective spying or police agency is one with a camera in every room and a tap on every phone - that's not a world I want to live in, and I see no problem with limiting their effectiveness, just as we ban certain arms from warfare because they are indiscriminate and awful in their effects.
I also think the analogy with pen registers that you are drawing is not appropriate given the advances in technology meaning data can be mined and kept for lifetimes, collated, and cross referenced globally in an instant. That's an entirely different world of surveillance, and one we are just coming to know. It makes old distinctions obsolete, and demands new rules for a world without frontiers - borders are now permeable, whether we like it or not, and they don't have as much meaning as they used to.
Your argument about data crossing borders is a great example of this. So many Americans use services overseas and vice versa that drawing some distinction between foreign and domestic traffic in this world is meaningless - if you say things that cross the border are fair game, you're giving the NSA power to perform dragnet sweeps of virtually the entire world, as virtually everyone's data will cross borders as some point in its existence. Imagine an American company with London offices - suddenly all their correspondence is now acceptable for surveillance without a warrant.
Mining global internet traffic and telephone metadata is extremely dangerous and potentially wide-reaching in its effects. It could easily be used to reveal any journalists' sources (no more free press), politicians' past affiliations private or public, people's donations, health details, reading preferences, purchases etc. Worse than that data collected in 2001 could be used in 2021 by a hostile NSA director against annoying journalists/rivals/judges to destroy their career for some sexual peccadillo irrelevant to their professional work. To have that much data collated on someone over a long period of time is very dangerous - for the person concerned, and for the organisation which does so. I simply don't trust any one organisation with that sort of power.
So I'd draw the line a bit closer to personal privacy and public transparency than the OP I think, but that's ok, it's great to have this conversation at last, and we have Edward Snowden to thank for having a little more knowledge with which to do so.
I agree that surveillance of any kind is wrong, but I can't see a world without foreign surveillance of some kind. That's not to say that one can't exist, but I don't see how it would come to fruition.
Therefore, I agree with the spirit of your argument but disagree with its practicality.
I accept it might sound idealistic but it seems impossible to me to draw distinctions (particularly of rights) with borders any more, given that data flows so extensively across them, and the American distinction between citizens and others with no rights starts to sound particularly callous if the country's institutions arrogate the right to decide on global issues.
I think I use a lot of those words every day. It's hilarious to me that 2600 and Phreaking are both on there when they haven't been a serious threat since the 5ESS switches hit back in the 70's and 80's...
Every now and then we have defining moments of global consciousness. This has the potential to be one of those moments and we should never let a good crisis go to waste.
The danger here is that if we do nothing, that will be seen as tacit acceptance of the world's largest spying apparatus. While I acknowledge there's some necessity globally, domestic spying through secret courts is more synonymous with the Gulag than the American dream.
Stand up for what you believe in; this is one time you can.