But contrary to your suspicion, there is no law requiring companies to misreport info to the public. Even AT&T, which illegally opened its network to the NSA, never lied about it, as I showed here earlier this week: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589012-38/nsa-surveillan...
The odds of Facebook handing over your data to a government agency are similar to the odds of dying from a shark attack or lightning...
source : http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/how-scared-should-w...
I still find these numbers fairly high. If cops need a warrant to get into my home why don't they need one to get into my "facebook home"?
Because there is no such thing as your Facebook home.
If you're associating Facebook with "your home", they have you by the balls. Google is trying desperately to grab your balls too, so that your Google profile is the center of your online persona. They make incremental, subtle changes to push users towards Google+ to achieve this. The latest change happened this week, where you can no longer have a profile picture on Youtube unless it comes from Google+. They actually removed my profile picture, and popped a message up saying I have to go to Google+ to set up the profile picture again. They replaced my avatar with a generic blue pattern that looks like crap. Bastards. I don't want a Google+ profile. I don't like being forced to use social media services just to have a profile picture on Youtube, or just to rate an app on the play store.
Your "home", digital or otherwise, should be under your control, not sold out to a company. IMHO there needs to be new laws designed to protect our "digital homes" from the very tech giants who facilitate them and change the rules at their choosing, absent user preference and input.
Imagine not being able to get into your own house without first logging into Facebook? Or not being able to use the internet without first checking in with Google? Far-fetched? Not really, it's slowly heading that way in baby steps. The needs and wishes of companies and government first, citizen freedoms and user-control and true privacy second or third, or not at all.
They make incremental, subtle changes to push users towards Google+ [...]
It's not like someone goes around with a random number generator deciding whether you'll have horrible things happen to you. They depend on your specific circumstance.
How do yo know that? What if I have friends, relatives or clients in the middle east and I'm known to be unhappy about particular political issues but never swim in shark infested waters?
I don't think it matters that there are 1 billion users worldwide. I think it's fair to assume that a majority of local, state, and federal requests affected US users. That number is more like 165 million [1]. Which means the likelihood you are affected assuming a random distribution of requests and you live in the US is closer to one in a thousand.
And that only accounts for Facebook requests. Consider if you regularly visit 10 websites. That might make the odds much closer to one in a hundred.
[1] http://www.quintly.com/blog/2013/02/facebook-country-stats-f...
Anyone else, world wide, could have their data accessed without any need for special secret orders.
Am I mistaken? I honestly thought that was the case.
That still leaves the possible loophole of having those 2000 orders cover a huge number of people in a manner similar to the Verizon metadata order (which is a FISA order, but isn't a FAA 70* order and isn't counted among the 2000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5879366 ). But this Facebook disclosure along with earlier statements from Google and others allows us to cautiously rule that out (though we probably don't have the same clarity on the situation of all 9 PRISM firms).
Of course, none of this tells us much about what they're doing (or able to do) using "upstream collection" at the telcos. Or indeed through similar "direct collection" from non-US Web companies running non-US servers, which I'm guessing (IANAL) would probably be outside US law altogether.
Entire books have been written about the legal standards required. It's difficult to summarize here. One short answer is that the Fourth Amendment is not viewed as applying to non-U.S. citizens abroad. Check out the NSA director's 2006 testimony on nsa.gov for more on this.
The COPS do - they are required to get warrants for data requests and those warrants can't be overly broad.
The NSA are not cops, though, and somehow ended up with different rules.
The odds can only be determined by how many requests they rejected. If they approved 100% of the government's requests, then the odds of them handing over data requested by the government are notably higher than lightening or shark bites. All they're waiting for is the request.
Are they false signals? There are non-negligible priors that support his accusation, such as gag orders and a proven and recent history of lies and obfuscation. I personally think the simpler model of Facebook telling the truth holds more weight -- to the point of a conspiracy of this magnitude sounding more than a little silly -- but there will always be a shadow of doubt to some, and not fully without reason.
Or walk the line by conveniently reporting your data for a six month period that doesn't include the NSA request for all user data now and in the future.
>The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand [user data] requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.
Is a "user data request" a request for data about a specific user? Would the request "give us the names and birthdays of everyone that has searched for 'discontent with government'" constitute a user data request? Or would that be a "search term request"?
I'm not sure I think this is slippery language, but there's definitely room for that interpretation.
The stuff about Snowden doesn't even make any sense. The fact that he's a high school drop-out doesn't matter. Some people who drop out of high school have a lower intelligence, but that doesn't imply the Snowden does. The fact that he worked for the CIA, the NSA, and as a NSA contractor actually implies that he is either intelligent or the CIA/NSA are incompetent. Even if Snowden was of lower intelligence, it would imply that there is less likelihood that the documents are elaborate fakes, and more likely to the be the real deal.
...>this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request
The only wiggle there is "subject to", and it's not much. So right, they could always be lying, but I don't see much room for interpretation.
More broadly, at some level, we're always going to be dependent on companies to be honest about what they do with our data. Not trusting them is fine, but that's not really a question of transparency or policy; it's just a question of corporate integrity. We should instead focus on what we can concretely hope to control:
- Transparency, which means a) we know exactly what the rules are governing what the government can ask for, b) a detailed accounting of what they actually do ask for, and c) the range of data that can be requested and a precise account of what the standard for requesting the various kinds of data.
- Reform, by which I mean changes to the rules about what can be accessed by whom and under what conditions, with an eye towards individualized requests for specific data, the way wiretaps have been handled (until recently) for a long time. The domestic/foreign distinction should also be removed as part of this point.
- Accountability, by which I mean that companies should never, ever get any form of immunity from law suits. Companies should be liable to their customers about privacy issues, and they should face real consequences if they lie about it. I think this might be the heart of the trust issue.
- Oversight, which is largely colinear with transparency, wherein there is a meaningful adversarial process for balancing the issues of privacy and security, as opposed to the lame, secretive rubber stamping we have now.
- Scale. Last but not least, the relative values of privacy and security are way out of wack, especially given how few people terrorism has really killed and how small of a threat thoughtful analysis reveals it to be (or even the extent to which "terrorism" is a coherent concept). So we just need to raise the bar on what constitutes a reasonable seizure of data.
All of that is stuff you could reasonably pass laws on, so some of the nihilism in this thread is unfortunate. Maybe we'll get all of those reforms, or some of them, or maybe none of them; I don't know. But if those are genuinely our aims as a people, we should see Facebook's release as a real step in the right direction on three of those fronts. If they're lying, of course that sucks, but I'm not sure what we hope to do here besides pushing for more accountability. But in meantime, kudos to Facebook.
That's because everyone has already denied that claim. If you didn't believe them the first thousand times they said they don't do that, why would you believe them if they said it yet again?
The only thing that would work is some kind of widespread ban on the use of gag orders, non-disclosure agreements, and similar legal devices by our government. And for what, so we can trust our own corporations to at least say what is in their own best interest? So then you also have to ban the use of funds to keep them silent. Really, the whole thing is a mess.
Hunted down? In the bay area? As a software engineer? You must be new here.
Personally, I won't trust any of these companies until the entire Homeland security dept is dismantled and its component agencies restored to their pre-9/11 statuses.
And although the TSA is not directly part of this spying issue, they need to go away as well. It's all part of the same shadowy cabal and its time for a clean slate.
I'm not against the principles of the FBI and NSA. They do a lot of good work. But there's too much dry brush and weeds cluttering up their mandates and it needs to be burned out.