House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk surveillance

Re:House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk ... by tenpoundhammer on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @04:37PM (#6092733)

While this is a nice gesture and I certainly support it, it's hard to believe it would have significant impact. It's clear the NSA is willing to lie to both the public and congress and bend whatever rules they have to. So this will probably just force them through a new loop hole to get where they are today.

When you have your own private supreme court(FISA Courts) to rubber stump rules for you, it's pretty easy to find and/or create loop holes.

On the plus side, if it gets stopped at least we will know who to throw out of office.

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Re:House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk ... by grabhive on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @07:07PM (#6093501)

The NSA continues to be viewed as a shadowy government agency, limited in its capabilities by federal law. But what do we really know about that? Besides trivial inconvenience, is there any real disadvantage to taking the most paranoid and defensive stance against it?

I continue bringing this up whenever a submission like this appears, because I am very much afraid that the technical community will accept a congressional victory as "okay, let's continue business as usual", when we need to be reinventing everything that has made mass-wiretapping possible in the first place.

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Re:House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk ... by krapp on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @07:16PM (#6093534)

when we need to be reinventing everything that has made mass-wiretapping possible in the first place.

Are you suggesting we somehow roll back the last sixty-odd years of telecommunications and information technology? What do you suggest we replace it with?

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Re:House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk ... by grabhive on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @07:33PM (#6093595)

It probably isn't necessary to replace the hardware infrastructure if privacy and security again become fashionable in software development. A great deal of important peer-to-peer, encryption and general data-obfuscation research has been done already. The trouble is, as Schneier so eloquently put it, that spying is the business model of the Internet.

But we can take another approach.

If this REALLY matters, we should be directing our attention not to some nebulous and almost certainly unenforceable government action, but rather to the eye of the storm: the very things we are building.

This is good mind-fodder if you have a moment to spare: http://zeroknowledgeprivacy.org/

[ Parent | on HN ]