I think your focus on 'the people vs the government' is misplaced, because government is just a sort of social technology which can be used and abused like any other technology depending on who controls it at the time. What about Barack Obama, for example? Do you seriously think he will refuse to relinquish power in 2 years? You probably don't, just' just expressing your cynical (and entirely justifiable) opinion about the political class. But that's not much different from a Marxist asserting that business is fundamentally antagonistic towards workers or similar monolithic abstractions. When you make arguments like this you've opted for ideology over empiricism.

Bringing it back to technology, certainly the ubiquity of digital technology makes it easier to establish mass surveillance of a kind that would have seemed nightmarish a few generations ago. But the same technology has also facilitated a significant number of populist uprisings in recent years, and made it far easier for marginalized communities to get their message out in relatively short order, as well as facilitating organizations with both benign and malicious intentions (eg MSF and ISIS, who both leverage social media but for wildly divergent ends).

The internet of things isn't 'coinciding with the dragnet surveillance trend'; the latter is an emerging property of our increasingly networked society. When we use metaphors like a 'world wide web' traversed by 'spiders' and so on, we should not be surprised that such technologies are going to amplify the capabilities of institutional actors in at least the same proportion that they amplify the capabilities of individuals.

Maybe you didn't mean it literally but it's a popular expression in this context. I don't think a desire for privacy is paranoid; it is normal, healthy behavior.

But to address the gist of what you say, I think you assume an understanding of data security that is far beyond most end users. How many even know what "metadata" means, or how 'cloud' computing actually works? Go down to the mall (assuming you are not in a tech hub) and ask. On top of that, they would need to understand the confidentiality implications of the system, and then the political, social and other implications of confidentiality.

The public is not able to make an informed decision, and government and industry are taking advantage of that:

If people don't mind, why are so many of these practices kept secret or obscure?

But to address the gist of what you say, I think you assume an understanding of data security that is far beyond most end users.

I don't think I do. I've met plenty of non-technical people who worry about the possibility that their phone could record them when its swtiched off or suchlike - you don't need to understand how something functions in order to understand its potential as an instrumentality. But unless you have a fundamentally antagonist view of government (which most people in the US don't) then there's little overlap between the set of 'stuff the government could do me' and that of 'stuff that would advance the government's purpose' for the average person. This is what I mean when I say most people don't feel culpable enough; there isn't anything sufficiently illegal going on in their lives that they perceive a significant government interest in intruding upon them in the first place.

When I talk about paranoia I mean the idea that government is going to fuck with you no matter how blameless of a life you lead, and that the more blameless you are the less leverage you will have to push back against the inevitable intrusion. In other words, they overestimate the probability of oppression just as optimistic or authoritarian people may underestimate it, depending on context. While that possibility certainly exists, I think something like this Amazon product only marginally increases it because anyone who buys this probably already has a smartphone and keeps it close by at all times already.

I hear this refutation quite often. I find it typically comes from people in a place of privilege that the system largely ignores. I've read far too many accounts from people who are not Caucasian or are Muslim to believe that innocent people are not the targets of mass surveillance and do not notice its effects.

It's designed to watch anyone.

The legal apparatus is designed to watch anyone.

Have you been under a rock the last few years?

That's really well put. People seem to miss the fact that in a surveillance society it's not necessarily your privacy that you will most regret losing, it's the privacy of those groups you agree with who are opposed to some powerful faction.

Speaking of empiricism, there's abundant evidence that your statement is incorrect:

http://www.pewresearch.org/key-data-points/views-of-governme... (and this one was before Snowden!) http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/18188-pol...

We on Hacker News spend our free time criticizing anyone we perceive as complicit in surveillance, bemoaning centralization, and championing Bitcoin and Uber for disrupting authority. To HN, a desire for privacy is literally normal: it is a social norm of this community.

That doesn't mean that people outside this community do (or should) care nearly as much as we do.

Part of the reason we care more is because we understand more.

But, in general, I think there is not nearly enough emphasis put on what's right vs. what people care about. That is, the former doesn't dictate the latter.

I think it's healthy to choose how private you keep each aspect of your personal life. I make tradeoffs all the time. When I think that sharing some aspect of my personal life (whether with an individual or an organization) will give me more benefit than the cost of losing that privacy, I'll do it.

Insane paranoia is hearing "cloud-based audio processing device and service" and instantly jumping to "the NSA" absent a single damned fact to support that conclusion.

Downvotes don't make me wrong or you right.

Cell phones are routinely used as listening devices, what makes you think this device would not be? If I were a government agency intent on omniscience (i.e. the NSA), this device, along with televisions and computers with always-on microphones controlled remotely, would be a very welcome development - all it takes is one secret order to the company concerned, with a warrant covering the entire country, and their entire product line is useful for surveillance on demand.

Given the world we live in, where GCHQ for example claims the right to capture all information, including privileged communications between lawyer and client, wondering about how our devices protect against government intrusion is not insane paranoia at all.

Citation? I'm really interested, presumably there's a hacker convention talk or somesuch where they install a hidden service on a standard phone and upload all voice input even when the phone is off?

Clearly I use burner non-smart phones for my criminal activities (that's a joke!) so they're going to have to use other means. Obviously they can still sniff the data at the operator for phone calls.

http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000001733041/the-pro...

Here's another article about real-world use:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3522137.stm

William Binney [ex-NSA]: "Yes. [... goes off on a tangent about data analysis]

He doesn't really mention it. Indeed the vid is considering electronic communications and information which is put in to the public sphere. Other than that one question which Binney responds to only with "Yes" there's no other mention of private audio being covertly sniffed.

The BBC article is very sparse and jumps from being able to eavesdrop mobile->basestation and decrypt that to being able to listen in on all conversations within range of a phone. Clearly ludicrous.

I don't at all doubt that phones can be modified remotely to covertly listen and that some phones could enable this when switched off (though that seems unlikely to meet with normal design requirements, it seems that this covert listening would need to be designed in). I guess maybe you could make "off" only appear to be off whilst listening - my phone gets hot when doing anything extended like recording a talk or something and drains the battery quite a lot - even with the screen off. Seems that using this sort of surveillance on a widescale is highly unlikely.

>"all it takes is one secret order to the company concerned, with a warrant covering the entire country, and their entire product line is useful for surveillance on demand" [grey-area, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569217]

Only, IMO, if it's already been designed in and you can hide the power usage (and data-store usage).

Anything better?

That quote was about this Amazon device anyway, which doesn't have power usage or data usage requirements that would be noticed by the average user if recording was only for significant audio. You've jumped from there to cell phones.

The access is blanket given warrants like the FISA verizon one, and there's nothing to stop targeted surveillance like that which we know goes on on gmail/skype/etc accounts when requested. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that cell phones or this device are all constantly recording what we do and transmitting direct to the NSA right now, but that they could in a targeted manner be used to do so if someone became of interest, and that this Amazon device would be a particularly powerful bug given the great microphones, constant power and fixed location in a home.

Re cell phones, I don't think it would be very hard to present a blank screen and wake up only on significant audio to record/broadcast on a hacked phone. I'm sure a paranoid user would eventually notice, but the capability is certainly there - probably that sort of thing is very rare and sophisticated, it's not something I worry about personally, but I do think it is quite possible. If you control the software on the device, I don't see why it seems impossible to you that you'd be able to control the phone completely and use it as an audio bug (except when battery removed etc). You wouldn't even have to rely on faking switch-off - the majority of people leave their phone on and carry it around.

Anything better?

Well, I'm inclined to believe Binney (and others) when they explicitly say cellphones are used as bugs, but here's another example for you of actual use, they are not hard to find:

http://news.cnet.com/FBI-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdroppin...

Thank you for the clarification, and I apologize if my tone earlier was excessively acerbic - the angle you just mentioned appears to be an undertone surrounding this discussion.

but that they could in a targeted manner be used to do so if someone became of interest

Here's where we diverge: This is an argument that can be applied to any internet-connected device, anywhere, anytime. We're dealing with a group of people that have proven themselves adept at twisting a device's programming to their own ends.

So: Why is this so special? Why are so many people sitting here in this thread slagging on this particular internet-connected mic when most of us carry one with us and work in front of one every single day?

I'm sure I'm not alone in growing weary of hearing the constant "NSA!!" bogeyman brought up anytime a new device featuring a microphone comes out. There's no new information here, no interesting discussion, just the same usual "X might do Y" scaremongering. With the previous paragraph in mind, these concerns ring hypocritical in addition to just hollow.

It's going to take a high-profile case to show people how wrong this is. Wait for it.

Here's some potential scenarios:

* An author who is researching dangerous-sounding stuff and discussing it with his friends for a book is SWAT teamed and shot dead. Later investigation reveals overzealous "parallel construction."

* Someone at one of these companies is busted insider trading on information from these sources. Surveillance targets include lawyers, CXO-level personnel, etc.

* Creepy misogynistic black-hat hackers break into the network behind one of these devices and start using it to engage in cyber-stalking against women and record their sexual encounters, posting the results to 4chan and Reddit.

* HIPAA or other similar regulations are spectacularly violated, resulting in large cash damages.

* Someone is busted pwning the "cloud-enhanced Internet of things" (surveillance) devices of police officers and selling feeds to drug traffickers and the mob.

... I could keep going.

It's very unlikely that there would be a single turning point case a la Pearl Harbor or 9-11. More likely it's an aggregation of small cases followed by slow adjustments in a different direction. As an example of the latter, consider how incarceration seems to have peaked in the US and we're seeing the beginnings of a fall as well as a shift away from incarceration as the default response. I would predict the fraction of the population that is incarcerated to fall by 10% in 10 years and by 50% in 25 years. Likewise we're seeing pushback against the militarization of police, but how that particular pendulum swings is going to be measured out over budgetary cycles rather than in real time. I think that if you were to plot utility vs security on a graph you'd see a random walk of incremental fluctuating changes rather than massive discontinuities.

For instance, most people understand cameras - they've been around since birth. And, most would be uncomfortable if there was a visible camera on every surface, pointed at them. There's an understanding that there's a 'watcher' at the other end of that picture or video. In fact, as cameras emerged, some cultures rejected them as a technology that could 'steal the soul'.

But, today, most people don't understand the 'sensors' that are everywhere, tracking their behavior. Not only are the sensors invisible, they're not something that most people are even aware of or understand. Many of us are in this business, and I'd suggest that most of us aren't even aware of all of them.

These sensors are similarly 'stealing our souls', but we don't even know that it's happening.

What economical benefit is this thing bringing its users

Empiricism _is_ an ideology. People seem to forget that around here.

Just because I can legally have sex with my wife doesn't mean I want the government to have a recording of it. Some things are meant to stay private.

The point I'm making, though, is not what level of privacy you should be happy with (a decision only you can make), but how people in the aggregate make decisions about using technology that could have privacy implications - and my theory is that most people don't care.

"Most people don't care [about privacy] because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid."

Let be honest, I don't have a sex life.

If you're willing to accept changed chip silicon as a possible attack vector, then you need to start worrying about a rather large set of devices. Your laptop is internet connected and has a microphone. So is your phone. Your TV is probably internet connected, and if you're fiddling with the production line, why not add a tiny microphone? I could go on.

An attacker with a good budget, influence and capability like the NSA is always going to be able to snoop on an individual if the requirement is strong enough. Some hardware limitations probably set the bar high enough that you don't need to worry unless you're an international terrorist.

> you don't need to worry unless you're an international terrorist.

Or a person with a conscience who could be threat to people in power without one. For some reason I doubt that, say, people involved in extra-judicial killings, are really worried about being caught. At least one of them is known by name and proud holder of a peace nobel prize. So I'd say if you are a heavyweight criminal already on the payroll, you have nothing to fear period. Small fish and decent people, on the other hand, well. Do you think people like Poitras or Appelbaum don't get snooped on? Would you call them international terrorists? All sorts of activist groups get monitored, and no, it's not because they're all terrorists in spe. You may believe that, I don't buy it for one second.

> Your laptop is internet connected and has a microphone. So is your phone. Your TV is probably internet connected, and if you're fiddling with the production line, why not add a tiny microphone? I could go on.

Don't have a laptop, if I did, killing the crappy microphone in it would be trivial and not a big loss since when I use a mic, it's one I connect manually. Don't have a smartphone, though I doubt that matters; but my phone doesn't have 7 microphones in it, and I doubt you could record anything useful with it while I have it in my pocket. Last time I had a TV was in the 90s. So maybe actually do go on?

And even if none of that was true, I don't see how it constitutes an argument; as I said, it's a bit like saying I shouldn't worry about the poison I just ate because I also have cancer. How about I worry about, and try to undo, both? I don't care about chance of success either, I can still get washed downstream when I am a dead fish, there will always be infinite time for that.

In the past, you used to have to have physical access to the location to install the device. You also needed a listening post close by and a power source to hook the device into, if you wanted long term monitoring.

After you install the listening device, you needed to pay someone to listen to the conversations for hours and take note of anything that needed closer analysis.

All of that is incredibly expensive and difficult to scale.

Now, the device is already installed in the home or carried around on the person (via smartphone). The target takes care of charging the device for you and the information is transmitted across the country via internet connection. Massive computer networks process the data and flag the important parts of conversations.

The cheaper and more automated spying gets, the easier and more indiscriminately it can be done. Criteria for snooping drops because it's so dramatically cheap, the resources are no longer a bottleneck.

I mean, when you visit your friend, stop at a girlfriends apartment, or hang out with people at the pub, are you checking if they have any of these devices? Do you search their shelves for an Echo? Do you ask everyone at the restaurant if they have a smartphone with a microphone connected to the internet?

It's impossible to avoid things like this in your life. The second you walk outside, you're surrounded by cameras and microphones that can be streaming anything, to anyone.

Facebook is another example. You might say, I don't want to enter where I live, or where I went to school, I feel that's sensitive information. Well, since you refuse to give up that information, Facebook just encourages your friends to squeal. Hey, does John Doe live in X or Y city? Did you go to university with John Doe? Hey, why don't you upload more photos of John Doe, and tell us the time and location that photo was taken. Actually, no need to tag him, we'll just detect his face, and use the date the photo was created.

It's not going to be long until you can search a person, and see a timeline of their life based on data from third parties. Let's watch John Doe's life for 2018. Oh look, Jan 15, he appears in the background of a tourists photo by the Eiffel tower. Jan 21st, we detected is face on the metro in southern France. Oh, Jan 28th, a car dash cam finds him walking down a street in Italy. Oh, his phone was on and we can see he was in Jane's apartment Feb 1st. Let's pull the audio from the microphone on Jane's television for that day.

You have an excellent comment, but you fail at ponting at how this info may be used against you and providing usecases. Should sound like: "On Feb 1st your car is recorded on the leftish party's parking lot" "On Feb 2nd you are arrested in person at a friend's place for the speed excess of Jan 26th. Police automatically suponead your network's Echos".

What you do can be construed as criminal if the prosecutor is interested enough.

Do you have any computers in your house? A TV made in the last few years? A smartphone?

> Do you have any computers in your house? A TV made in the last few years? A smartphone?

Neither the first nor the last of those is necessarily always on or Internet connected. (For example, I have both of them, and, with brief exceptions, neither is Internet connected while in my house.)

(Also, to be fair to chatmasta (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568265), I think that s/he was suggesting that the Internet connection / voice-recording function is on whenever the device is, not that the device itself can never be turned off.)

“She’ll get years for that. Off switches are illegal.”

— Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6: “The Blanks”, 1987

The echo has a better mic and is guaranteed to not be in a pocket, but that isn't the multiple order of magnitude difference that the cell phone has brought to dragnet surveillance.

I have a running joke about this with my mom. The particular list that people like you and me get put on is called the "patriot file." Fortunately, it's way too big of a list for them to follow up on thoroughly, so if your phone conversation (or comment) ends up there, you're really OK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

Define "thoroughly."

Despite whether either threat is real or not, I'm less concerned about my facebook privacy being violated and more concerned with foreign and domestic threats of violence.

I have a choice not to use facebook or amazon echo, or whatever. Problem solved on that front. I don't have a choice if somebody wants to fly a plane into dense metro areas with the goal of killing as many people as possible.

Are you telling me that you feel amazon echo is a larger potential threat to your security than alleged terrorist organizations?

Ostensibly. In real life these powers have been used for all sorts of activities outside this sort of apparently existential threat - for example spying on lawyers in civil rights cases. It's not clear they are useful against well-organised terror, that terror is actually the existential threat you seem to think it is, or that any usefulness outweighs their dramatic effect on our civil society.

Your fear of the extremely unlikely event of you being killed in a terror attack is being used to blind you to the other consequences of surveillance.

while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast.

False. The people's paranoia is that these powers will be used to spy on innocents who are rightly or wrongly suspected of any sort of wrongdoing, collect their communications with their politicians, lawyers, and accountants, and undermine the very democracy and open society spy agencies claim to be defending.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/intelligence-ag...

You don't have a choice about this, it's already happening, with or without your consent, because our spy agencies are determined to dominate every aspect of your digital life.

Amazon, get me all the queries from the leeber household for the last 25 years containing the word 'drugs' or 'taxes' - perhaps you are the ex-girlfriend or potential partner of someone at the NSA, perhaps you just annoyed someone with access or got in the way of a project they think is vital for their org.

Amazon, please commence recording all audio activity on the leeber household device, using this handy secret global warrant from the FISA court, you don't need to know why, just that I ticked the box saying it is necessary for an ongoing investigation.

As for Amazon the corporation, this device would put you very much in their hands when you want to know anything about the world, be it about media, products or news, in the same way that relying exclusively on google search does for google. I imagine their motivation is having a huge amount of customer data about trending devices/brands/news etc in order to sell things to you better. Perhaps you'd be happy in the warm, smothering embrace of Amazon corp, but I prefer to limit my exposure to corps to small doses, and ideally not to ones which want to sell me everything I ever wanted, along with a few things I didn't know I wanted.

As for NOT everyone is...trying to enslave all humanity etc, your arguments would have more force if you resisted wrestling with tinfoil men of your own invention and talked about what is government agencies and corps actually do in the real world, instead of credulously repeating their excuses for working towards global realtime surveillance of all communications.

Do yourself a huge favor and pick a god damn book. I suggest 1984 by George Orwell.

To be effectively paranoid like the grandparent commenter, one would have to opt out of a _lot_ of convenience. If you're actually a person of interest to the point of being surveilled with an Echo, you'll be surveilled with all your other digital devices as well.

Hell - the Echo would be incredibly limited relative to those other devices. It only captures specific rooms in your home. Those other devices follow you throughout the day.

I wouldn't put something like the Echo in my house. Similarly, my Smart TV isn't connected to the internet. But I'm not afraid of carrying a smart phone with me wherever I go.

Two completely different things in my opinion. One requires specific targeting (which I'm OK with to a point), and the other can be collected with a dragnet.

That's irrelevant. That's merely one of the possibly ways that triggers transmission, but not necessarily the only way. Do we know that remote triggering over the network (perhaps implemented for testing) isn't possible?

You just described many peoples computers

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...

What if the government mistakenly determines that based on your pattern of activities, you're likely to engage in a criminal act? What if it denies you the right to fly? What if the government thinks your financial transactions look odd—even if you've done nothing wrong—and freezes your accounts? What if the government doesn't protect your information with adequate security, and an identity thief obtains it and uses it to defraud you? Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm.

Is there a good book or site with a nice list of scenarios that don't involve an evil government and a heroic anti-conformist fighting the system, that show that a mass surveillance system can do already enough harm because of factors that can be explained by Hanlon's razor alone?

Btw, the freezing of bank accounts happened to me once in Italy, curtesy of my bank and theoir automatic implementations of anti money laundering laws; promptly sorted out after calling in in the bank, but I was actually quite annoyed that I had to let people see me give fail to complete the ATM transaction at a till. Call it first world problem, but I think there should be more transparency with these things, at least they should notify people when they block accounts.

Also, I find it very difficult to relate to the whole, "I have nothing to hide, so fuck all the other people who do," attitude that many people seem to have.

"Doing X benefits me. Sod everyone else"

I am fully aware of this attitude that many people seem to have.

> What if the government doesn't protect your information with adequate security, and an identity thief obtains it and uses it to defraud you? Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm. It comes down to whether you trust your government. The government is here to protect its people, not screw them up.

But I don't.

Neither do you.