7 ms·

Ask HN: After the Paris Attack, have your feelings changed on NSA surveillance?

27 points by steven2012 11y ago

ant6n 11y ago
Nope, not really. Snooping on people to find terrorists is reacting to the problem - while we continue to create it (for example via drone strikes). We should be preventing terrorism, which we can only with peace.
emocin 11y ago
Not a single bit.
lastofus 11y ago
What does illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA have to do with recent attacks across the pond? Are you asking if we now feel more ok with our rights being violated, because we are so damn scared for our own safety after what happened in Paris? I personally will take liberty/privacy over supposed security any day.
steven2012 11y ago
FWIW I don't believe that the NSA programs actually help keep us secure, similarly to how I don't believe the TSA or any part of the "Freedom" Act has helped us significantly. I believe in 30 years, children will be reading about this "terrorist-scare" the same way we were taught about the "Red Scare" during the 50s. That said, it certainly is an easy security blanket for some people, to believe that "if we were monitoring everything, all those lives could have been saved". I just don't believe it, and for example, it didn't help stop the Boston bombings, even when that information was available. But I'm curious if other people feel otherwise, and if so, what are their reasons. Maybe I can be convinced otherwise.
Phlarp 11y ago
Yes-- My feelings have become even more negative as this is yet another instance where there was undoubtedly plenty of evidence within existing surveillance programs to have prevented this. As usual nobody could stop playing bureaucrat long enough to find it, but now that it's happened NSA will surely have no problem helping france find targets to hit in Syria and Iraq. To say nothing about how various agencies will use this event as a flagrant power grab.
- gizmo 11y ago
  Time and time again the terrorists turn out to be people who were already being monitored by conventional intelligence strategies. However, the difficulty is in spotting the difference between people with terrorist sympathies and people who are an imminent threat. Harvesting more data won't help with this at all.
  - chrisbennet 11y ago
    Actually, more data probably hurts - adding more "noise" to hunt through.
  - jrowley 11y ago
    I'm genuinely curious, if it's not more data, what do we need to differentiate between a would be terrorist and a run of the mill extremist? Like better systems for prioritizing, filtering people?
    - Phlarp 11y ago
      The argument wasn't that we should be doing things better in order to make these systems "valuable". The argument was that these types of things simply cannot be done with the current state of tech, and any attempts by governments to do so should be viewed by the public as both useless wastes of public funds and thinly veiled power grabs-- similar to how we view authoritarian regimes that try to extend their own term limits or institute a national curfew in response to political protests.
      - jrowley 11y ago
        ahh thank you! So instead of trying to prevent attacks by intercepting them (which is probably doomed to fail anyway), we should work on the greater issue of diplomacy in general.
bko 11y ago
I can't help but feeling reactionary when something upsetting happens. It is true that early reports suggest that encryption was being used and obviously low-tech communications like meeting in cafes. But despite the rather extensive surveillance state that exists, it still did not prevent such a massive, coordinated attack. So yes, I am still skeptical of NSA style surveillance, however I am now more likely to keep my opinion to myself as the issue is now so caught up in emotion.
- ant6n 11y ago
  Downvotes seem unwarranted. And slightly ironic.
mindcrime 11y ago
No, not at all. Freedom is its own end, and State sponsored mass surveillance is inimical to freedom. Even IF this stuff kept us safer, which I doubt, it wouldn't be a trade-off that makes sense to me. If you're not free, why live at all? To me, agency, the freedom to make our own choices, to live our own lives, is the most fundamental essence of what it means to be alive.
dragonwriter 11y ago
No, and I'm not sure why anyone would expect they would, given that the flowering of mass surveillance and crystallization of opinions around it happened in the wake of the much larger attacks of September 11, 2001. Well, except that US global mass surveillance, presumably targeting groups including IS, has existed for many years, and is least restrained when it comes to non-US targets, and yet failed to provide information sufficient to prevent this attack (apparently, the information that an attack in the West was planned did turn up, but from Iraqi intelligence, not our mass surveillance, and not specific enough to identify even the targeted country.)
contingencies 11y ago
Fundamentally, you can't read people's minds, so you can't use surveillance to stop individual actions. A single motivated individual could likely have pulled off the worst of these (the theater shootings). The barrier of entry is low: any of [peculiar mental configuration], [willingness to die], [overwhelming frustration or disenfranchisement with society] or [extreme anger] plus access to a firearm (or some chemicals, a machine shop and time... even access to a vehicle might be enough). Given that many statistics indicate that mental health is deteriorating globally across the developed world (not just due to aging population or drugs, either, but due to fundamental structure-of-society issues), Donald Trump's "this would have been different if there were more weapons on people" takes the cake as the most idiotic response. We can't stop these things, we can only make them universally reviled, and that's already the case. What I find interesting is the response of leaders: France has said it will ignore EU rules, increase its prison and military budget, and refuse to drop the latter for another 5 years citing 'national security' (following the destructive and viral American model obviating respect for treaties, as China and others now do). Simultaneously, it redoubles bombing of already suffering Syrian targets, presumably on suddenly fortuitously acquired intelligence. One of tens of remote wars since the mid 20th century in which vastly powerful western militaries permanently shatter the fabric of societies half-way around the world, deploying nationalist rhetoric that wouldn't have been astray in Rome, and often leaving power vacuums that cause chaos for decades or longer, one is forced to ask the question: who are the real terrorists? Read some Chomsky. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.” http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/ http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte...
decasteve 11y ago
Yes. I've become more disgusted by those who use this attack as opportunism to push for more surveillance.
Smushman 11y ago
It is interesting this is being asked here. Even more interesting is/are the responses. My first thought (after the initial thoughts of OMG and etc.) when I heard about the Paris attacks (lower case on attack is mine - when did attack stop being a verb?) was the upcoming attack that would be perpetrated against civil liberties in the name of freedom. Maybe I am in the minority, and honestly my assessment is that readers here are likely to be in the same minority group; but from a philosophical point of view the rapid reversion to tightened control and monitoring by governments was a significant setback to our race as a whole and the great strides made in last 200-300 years regarding personal freedoms. We can marry whomever we want in the US now, but heaven forbid I wanted to have a private conversation. I don't know what our future holds; but I am quite sure that this won't bode well. Knee jerk reactions are now a specialty of all governments and critical analysis and discussions are no longer in vogue. I sincerely hope that Edward Snowden has nothing he was looking forward to in the US.
marssaxman 11y ago
No. Why should they? Surveillance has nothing to do with this.
bawana 11y ago
Shame on the CIA chief for grandstanding on the cover of the NYTimes. 14 years after 9/11 and we are no further along. Isn't he ashamed of himself? Why should we have more of people like him? Terrorist activity is borne out of desperation. Where does the money come from? What has that not been traced and revealed?
rnovak 11y ago
This is probably going to get super downvoted, possibly flagged, but what evidence does anyone have that they could not have stopped it? I think it's PLAUSIBLE that the intelligence community knew and identified this attack ahead of time, and chose to ignore it. I'm not saying that's what happened, but it wouldn't surprise me (let's be clear here: I'm not saying they caused it, I'm saying they knew and chose to do nothing). That move 'The Imitation Game' raised a good point: If you have the ability to read 100% of your enemies comms...what's the best approach for defeating them? The second you stop 100% of every attack you know about, the jig would be up, they'd know that their comms had been compromised, they'd switch to a different technology, and you'd be on the defensive (instead of offensive). It's not like we'd even know how many they stopped, I'm sure that material is so classified not even analysts have access to it, let alone would it be open to FOIA requests. Anyway, just a thought.
- x1798DE 11y ago
  I think the major problem is that it's easy to fill yourself into thinking that you could have stopped it in hindsight because you already know what happened. If you took this one report more seriously you would have stopped it, sure, but how does that help you going forward? It's the same kind of thinking that makes you feel like you could have made a killing buying Microsoft stock or Google or something. Easy to make a post hoc rationalisation that explains the observed facts, likely impossible to do ex ante.
staunch 11y ago
A few assholes with guns shouldn't scare you into giving up the rights that millions of brave people have devoted their lives to defending.
- carterehsmith 11y ago
  Ok... when exactly did millions of brave devoted their lives to defending privacy? There were all kinds of reasons for fighting (many of them including being drafted) but we never ever had a War For Privacy.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    Yes, we did. Justice Roberts in his opinion for Riley v California. Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding generation's response to the reviled "general warrants" and "writs of assistance" of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact on of the driving forces behind the Revolution itself. [...] Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans "the privacies of life." The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worth of the protection for which the Founders fought.
    - carterehsmith 11y ago
      So you are saying that we fought for independence because British were invading our privacy? They were opening our snailmail and were reading it and that's why we fought for independence. Right. I have never seen any credible historian claim that. Good luck with that line of reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
kbart 11y ago
Not. But I hate NSA&Co even more as they use such tragedies to further their agenda[0]. If spy agencies did their primary job and focused more resources on actual spying and infiltration of terrorist organizations (not mass surveillance as they do now), I'm sure results would be much better. 0. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/encrypted-messaging-apps-face-new-scrutiny-over-possible-role-in-paris-attacks.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/encrypted-mes...
lovelearning 11y ago
It has for me. When the Snowden revelations first came out, as an engineer, I was in awe of the NSA's capabilities. But slowly, the awe has reduced to "meh, they're just another inept government agency" levels. If they were so capable, how does one explain the rise of groups like ISIS since 2003? It's hard to believe such a well trained well financed group can rise and take over vast territories without emails, IMs and mobile calls.
openfuture 11y ago
No.
mbrock 11y ago
I feel more strongly that such massive violations undermine the legitimacy of the government(s) involved. They say the terrorists hate "us" for our freedom and democracy... but we don't even have that.
shoo 11y ago
Apologies if this is blunt, but the western media obsesses over incidents of terrorism where relatively small numbers of westerners are the victims. Particularly if they die in unexpected and graphic ways. Far more people die all the time due to many other reasons that we could decide to care about. E.g. 1.5 million people died from tuberculosis in 2013 [1]. E.g. in 2014, 45% of deaths of children under five were due to malnutrition - 3.1 million deaths per year [2]. E.g. 15 people die in my wealthy western country - Australia - every day, due to alcohol [3] [4]. E.g. my hobby-horse issue political issue, climate change, will probably directly or indirectly lead to the deaths of billions over the next century or so, due to long-term lock-in decisions that have been made in the past, and are being made now. Unfortunately the changes are gradual, most of the victims haven't died yet, most of the victims won't be relatively powerful and rich westerners, and there isn't a clear "other" for our society to demonise and blame, and it would require the status quo to change, so there isn't much of a fuss about it in the media - nobody in a position of power particularly wants to hear about it, let alone do anything, and it isn't particularly newsworthy as nothing much changes - it's just consistently bad news, getting gradually worse over time. [1] - http://www.who.int/gho/tb/en/ http://www.who.int/gho/tb/en/ [2] - https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats [3] - https://theconversation.com/australias-daily-alcohol-toll-15-deaths-and-430-hospitalisations-29906 https://theconversation.com/australias-daily-alcohol-toll-15... [4] - I am drinking a glass of wine as I write this. edit: to become even more drearily pragmatic, as a society i think it is for the best not to be concerned or distracted with relatively small losses due to terrorism or any other cause. we cannot be completely shielded from risk. we cannot bear the cost of being completely shielded from risk. the risks are probably going to ramp up over the next few decades, as population continues to grow, resource stocks decline and are exhausted, natural disasters increase, climate changes, and global society becomes increasingly interconnected, more efficient, and less resilient to damage.
- bordercases 11y ago
  In the case of Paris it's not just about the losses. It's at least partially about trust, meaning, can we trust millions of people who are profoundly like us to integrate smoothly or are we instigating risks of further attacks as a result. I don't particularly like it when terrorist attacks are contextualized in terms of deaths that are not political in nature at all. Everything you mentioned are close to being "random processes" in the statistical sense. Terrorist attacks may be somewhat chaotic in distribution (a brief arxiv.org search shows researchers trying to prove otherwise); but terrorists are adversarial, people who actively want to see you dead. On the other hand, tuberculosis, malnutrition and alcohol could only be construed as adversarial in a weak sense at best. A much more non-intentional perspective is better suited for the latter than the former.
ionised 11y ago
No, my feelings remain completely unchanged. I'm still very much against it. I'm not convinced terrorists are the ultimate, primary target of this surveillance, honestly. Even if it were, we know this type of mass surveillance has been in use for years now and it seems utterly ineffectual in preventing the kind of incidents they are supposedely meant to prevent. Also, seeing the exploitative opportunism in some politicans and the media since the Paris attacks in spouting their thinly veiled fascism and demagoguery really pisses me off. It just makes me that much more resistant to any attempts to curtail our civil liberties. The whole point of terrorism is to change the country it is inflicted upon through fear tactics. This is exactly what is happening by spying on people, censoring websites and introducing police-state like controls on our freedoms. So you could say that by allowing ourselves to be led down this path we are in essence 'letting the terrorists win'. Fuck that shit.
jiantastic 11y ago
As with most things, I think that it is a trade off. There is a very delicate balance between security and privacy. Too much surveillance - General public feels incredibly uncomfortable due to lack of privacy - An incredibly scary amount of power in the hands of whoever has access to that information ( and who knows what they will do with it ) - Reduced risk of terrorism and security concerns Too little - Increased risk of terrorism + massive security concerns due to lack of intelligence ( it's like trying to find a needle in a huge haystack ) - Public feels safe due to perceived increased privacy and yet feels unsafe due to ( potentially ) increased number of terrorist incidents. It's a rather difficult problem to solve. How can we extract critical security information without invading people's privacy?
saluki 11y ago
I expect all/most communications are and will continue to be monitored/recorded by someone (NSA, gov, fbook, goog, etc.) If this monitoring does prevent an attack from happening that's great but I don't think we have or will have a choice or even will know what is being monitored and logged or by who. I mean we are all paying to carry around tracking devices (phones) 24/7. If someone told you 10 years ago that in the near future everyone would be forced to carry a device to track their every move and that could listen in on their communications what would you have thought? The privacy ship has sailed.
kardos 11y ago
Not at all

27 points by steven2012 11y ago

ant6n 11y ago

Nope, not really. Snooping on people to find terrorists is reacting to the problem - while we continue to create it (for example via drone strikes). We should be preventing terrorism, which we can only with peace.

emocin 11y ago

Not a single bit.

lastofus 11y ago

What does illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA have to do with recent attacks across the pond? Are you asking if we now feel more ok with our rights being violated, because we are so damn scared for our own safety after what happened in Paris? I personally will take liberty/privacy over supposed security any day.

steven2012 11y ago

FWIW I don't believe that the NSA programs actually help keep us secure, similarly to how I don't believe the TSA or any part of the "Freedom" Act has helped us significantly. I believe in 30 years, children will be reading about this "terrorist-scare" the same way we were taught about the "Red Scare" during the 50s. That said, it certainly is an easy security blanket for some people, to believe that "if we were monitoring everything, all those lives could have been saved". I just don't believe it, and for example, it didn't help stop the Boston bombings, even when that information was available. But I'm curious if other people feel otherwise, and if so, what are their reasons. Maybe I can be convinced otherwise.

Phlarp 11y ago

Yes-- My feelings have become even more negative as this is yet another instance where there was undoubtedly plenty of evidence within existing surveillance programs to have prevented this. As usual nobody could stop playing bureaucrat long enough to find it, but now that it's happened NSA will surely have no problem helping france find targets to hit in Syria and Iraq. To say nothing about how various agencies will use this event as a flagrant power grab.

gizmo 11y ago
Time and time again the terrorists turn out to be people who were already being monitored by conventional intelligence strategies. However, the difficulty is in spotting the difference between people with terrorist sympathies and people who are an imminent threat. Harvesting more data won't help with this at all.
- chrisbennet 11y ago
  Actually, more data probably hurts - adding more "noise" to hunt through.
- jrowley 11y ago
  I'm genuinely curious, if it's not more data, what do we need to differentiate between a would be terrorist and a run of the mill extremist? Like better systems for prioritizing, filtering people?
  - Phlarp 11y ago
    The argument wasn't that we should be doing things better in order to make these systems "valuable". The argument was that these types of things simply cannot be done with the current state of tech, and any attempts by governments to do so should be viewed by the public as both useless wastes of public funds and thinly veiled power grabs-- similar to how we view authoritarian regimes that try to extend their own term limits or institute a national curfew in response to political protests.
    - jrowley 11y ago
      ahh thank you! So instead of trying to prevent attacks by intercepting them (which is probably doomed to fail anyway), we should work on the greater issue of diplomacy in general.

bko 11y ago

I can't help but feeling reactionary when something upsetting happens. It is true that early reports suggest that encryption was being used and obviously low-tech communications like meeting in cafes. But despite the rather extensive surveillance state that exists, it still did not prevent such a massive, coordinated attack. So yes, I am still skeptical of NSA style surveillance, however I am now more likely to keep my opinion to myself as the issue is now so caught up in emotion.

ant6n 11y ago
Downvotes seem unwarranted. And slightly ironic.

mindcrime 11y ago

No, not at all. Freedom is its own end, and State sponsored mass surveillance is inimical to freedom. Even IF this stuff kept us safer, which I doubt, it wouldn't be a trade-off that makes sense to me. If you're not free, why live at all? To me, agency, the freedom to make our own choices, to live our own lives, is the most fundamental essence of what it means to be alive.

dragonwriter 11y ago

No, and I'm not sure why anyone would expect they would, given that the flowering of mass surveillance and crystallization of opinions around it happened in the wake of the much larger attacks of September 11, 2001. Well, except that US global mass surveillance, presumably targeting groups including IS, has existed for many years, and is least restrained when it comes to non-US targets, and yet failed to provide information sufficient to prevent this attack (apparently, the information that an attack in the West was planned did turn up, but from Iraqi intelligence, not our mass surveillance, and not specific enough to identify even the targeted country.)

contingencies 11y ago

Fundamentally, you can't read people's minds, so you can't use surveillance to stop individual actions. A single motivated individual could likely have pulled off the worst of these (the theater shootings). The barrier of entry is low: any of [peculiar mental configuration], [willingness to die], [overwhelming frustration or disenfranchisement with society] or [extreme anger] plus access to a firearm (or some chemicals, a machine shop and time... even access to a vehicle might be enough). Given that many statistics indicate that mental health is deteriorating globally across the developed world (not just due to aging population or drugs, either, but due to fundamental structure-of-society issues), Donald Trump's "this would have been different if there were more weapons on people" takes the cake as the most idiotic response. We can't stop these things, we can only make them universally reviled, and that's already the case. What I find interesting is the response of leaders: France has said it will ignore EU rules, increase its prison and military budget, and refuse to drop the latter for another 5 years citing 'national security' (following the destructive and viral American model obviating respect for treaties, as China and others now do). Simultaneously, it redoubles bombing of already suffering Syrian targets, presumably on suddenly fortuitously acquired intelligence. One of tens of remote wars since the mid 20th century in which vastly powerful western militaries permanently shatter the fabric of societies half-way around the world, deploying nationalist rhetoric that wouldn't have been astray in Rome, and often leaving power vacuums that cause chaos for decades or longer, one is forced to ask the question: who are the real terrorists? Read some Chomsky. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.” http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/ http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte...

decasteve 11y ago

Yes. I've become more disgusted by those who use this attack as opportunism to push for more surveillance.

Smushman 11y ago

It is interesting this is being asked here. Even more interesting is/are the responses. My first thought (after the initial thoughts of OMG and etc.) when I heard about the Paris attacks (lower case on attack is mine - when did attack stop being a verb?) was the upcoming attack that would be perpetrated against civil liberties in the name of freedom. Maybe I am in the minority, and honestly my assessment is that readers here are likely to be in the same minority group; but from a philosophical point of view the rapid reversion to tightened control and monitoring by governments was a significant setback to our race as a whole and the great strides made in last 200-300 years regarding personal freedoms. We can marry whomever we want in the US now, but heaven forbid I wanted to have a private conversation. I don't know what our future holds; but I am quite sure that this won't bode well. Knee jerk reactions are now a specialty of all governments and critical analysis and discussions are no longer in vogue. I sincerely hope that Edward Snowden has nothing he was looking forward to in the US.

marssaxman 11y ago

No. Why should they? Surveillance has nothing to do with this.

bawana 11y ago

Shame on the CIA chief for grandstanding on the cover of the NYTimes. 14 years after 9/11 and we are no further along. Isn't he ashamed of himself? Why should we have more of people like him? Terrorist activity is borne out of desperation. Where does the money come from? What has that not been traced and revealed?

rnovak 11y ago

This is probably going to get super downvoted, possibly flagged, but what evidence does anyone have that they could not have stopped it? I think it's PLAUSIBLE that the intelligence community knew and identified this attack ahead of time, and chose to ignore it. I'm not saying that's what happened, but it wouldn't surprise me (let's be clear here: I'm not saying they caused it, I'm saying they knew and chose to do nothing). That move 'The Imitation Game' raised a good point: If you have the ability to read 100% of your enemies comms...what's the best approach for defeating them? The second you stop 100% of every attack you know about, the jig would be up, they'd know that their comms had been compromised, they'd switch to a different technology, and you'd be on the defensive (instead of offensive). It's not like we'd even know how many they stopped, I'm sure that material is so classified not even analysts have access to it, let alone would it be open to FOIA requests. Anyway, just a thought.

x1798DE 11y ago
I think the major problem is that it's easy to fill yourself into thinking that you could have stopped it in hindsight because you already know what happened. If you took this one report more seriously you would have stopped it, sure, but how does that help you going forward? It's the same kind of thinking that makes you feel like you could have made a killing buying Microsoft stock or Google or something. Easy to make a post hoc rationalisation that explains the observed facts, likely impossible to do ex ante.

staunch 11y ago

A few assholes with guns shouldn't scare you into giving up the rights that millions of brave people have devoted their lives to defending.

carterehsmith 11y ago
Ok... when exactly did millions of brave devoted their lives to defending privacy? There were all kinds of reasons for fighting (many of them including being drafted) but we never ever had a War For Privacy.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  Yes, we did. Justice Roberts in his opinion for Riley v California. Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding generation's response to the reviled "general warrants" and "writs of assistance" of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact on of the driving forces behind the Revolution itself. [...] Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans "the privacies of life." The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worth of the protection for which the Founders fought.
  - carterehsmith 11y ago
    So you are saying that we fought for independence because British were invading our privacy? They were opening our snailmail and were reading it and that's why we fought for independence. Right. I have never seen any credible historian claim that. Good luck with that line of reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

kbart 11y ago

Not. But I hate NSA&Co even more as they use such tragedies to further their agenda[0]. If spy agencies did their primary job and focused more resources on actual spying and infiltration of terrorist organizations (not mass surveillance as they do now), I'm sure results would be much better. 0. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/encrypted-messaging-apps-face-new-scrutiny-over-possible-role-in-paris-attacks.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/encrypted-mes...

lovelearning 11y ago

It has for me. When the Snowden revelations first came out, as an engineer, I was in awe of the NSA's capabilities. But slowly, the awe has reduced to "meh, they're just another inept government agency" levels. If they were so capable, how does one explain the rise of groups like ISIS since 2003? It's hard to believe such a well trained well financed group can rise and take over vast territories without emails, IMs and mobile calls.

openfuture 11y ago

No.

mbrock 11y ago

I feel more strongly that such massive violations undermine the legitimacy of the government(s) involved. They say the terrorists hate "us" for our freedom and democracy... but we don't even have that.

shoo 11y ago

Apologies if this is blunt, but the western media obsesses over incidents of terrorism where relatively small numbers of westerners are the victims. Particularly if they die in unexpected and graphic ways. Far more people die all the time due to many other reasons that we could decide to care about. E.g. 1.5 million people died from tuberculosis in 2013 [1]. E.g. in 2014, 45% of deaths of children under five were due to malnutrition - 3.1 million deaths per year [2]. E.g. 15 people die in my wealthy western country - Australia - every day, due to alcohol [3] [4]. E.g. my hobby-horse issue political issue, climate change, will probably directly or indirectly lead to the deaths of billions over the next century or so, due to long-term lock-in decisions that have been made in the past, and are being made now. Unfortunately the changes are gradual, most of the victims haven't died yet, most of the victims won't be relatively powerful and rich westerners, and there isn't a clear "other" for our society to demonise and blame, and it would require the status quo to change, so there isn't much of a fuss about it in the media - nobody in a position of power particularly wants to hear about it, let alone do anything, and it isn't particularly newsworthy as nothing much changes - it's just consistently bad news, getting gradually worse over time. [1] - http://www.who.int/gho/tb/en/ http://www.who.int/gho/tb/en/ [2] - https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats [3] - https://theconversation.com/australias-daily-alcohol-toll-15-deaths-and-430-hospitalisations-29906 https://theconversation.com/australias-daily-alcohol-toll-15... [4] - I am drinking a glass of wine as I write this. edit: to become even more drearily pragmatic, as a society i think it is for the best not to be concerned or distracted with relatively small losses due to terrorism or any other cause. we cannot be completely shielded from risk. we cannot bear the cost of being completely shielded from risk. the risks are probably going to ramp up over the next few decades, as population continues to grow, resource stocks decline and are exhausted, natural disasters increase, climate changes, and global society becomes increasingly interconnected, more efficient, and less resilient to damage.

bordercases 11y ago
In the case of Paris it's not just about the losses. It's at least partially about trust, meaning, can we trust millions of people who are profoundly like us to integrate smoothly or are we instigating risks of further attacks as a result. I don't particularly like it when terrorist attacks are contextualized in terms of deaths that are not political in nature at all. Everything you mentioned are close to being "random processes" in the statistical sense. Terrorist attacks may be somewhat chaotic in distribution (a brief arxiv.org search shows researchers trying to prove otherwise); but terrorists are adversarial, people who actively want to see you dead. On the other hand, tuberculosis, malnutrition and alcohol could only be construed as adversarial in a weak sense at best. A much more non-intentional perspective is better suited for the latter than the former.

ionised 11y ago

No, my feelings remain completely unchanged. I'm still very much against it. I'm not convinced terrorists are the ultimate, primary target of this surveillance, honestly. Even if it were, we know this type of mass surveillance has been in use for years now and it seems utterly ineffectual in preventing the kind of incidents they are supposedely meant to prevent. Also, seeing the exploitative opportunism in some politicans and the media since the Paris attacks in spouting their thinly veiled fascism and demagoguery really pisses me off. It just makes me that much more resistant to any attempts to curtail our civil liberties. The whole point of terrorism is to change the country it is inflicted upon through fear tactics. This is exactly what is happening by spying on people, censoring websites and introducing police-state like controls on our freedoms. So you could say that by allowing ourselves to be led down this path we are in essence 'letting the terrorists win'. Fuck that shit.

jiantastic 11y ago

As with most things, I think that it is a trade off. There is a very delicate balance between security and privacy. Too much surveillance - General public feels incredibly uncomfortable due to lack of privacy - An incredibly scary amount of power in the hands of whoever has access to that information ( and who knows what they will do with it ) - Reduced risk of terrorism and security concerns Too little - Increased risk of terrorism + massive security concerns due to lack of intelligence ( it's like trying to find a needle in a huge haystack ) - Public feels safe due to perceived increased privacy and yet feels unsafe due to ( potentially ) increased number of terrorist incidents. It's a rather difficult problem to solve. How can we extract critical security information without invading people's privacy?

saluki 11y ago

I expect all/most communications are and will continue to be monitored/recorded by someone (NSA, gov, fbook, goog, etc.) If this monitoring does prevent an attack from happening that's great but I don't think we have or will have a choice or even will know what is being monitored and logged or by who. I mean we are all paying to carry around tracking devices (phones) 24/7. If someone told you 10 years ago that in the near future everyone would be forced to carry a device to track their every move and that could listen in on their communications what would you have thought? The privacy ship has sailed.

kardos 11y ago

Not at all