5 ms·

I think a lot of libertarians miss the fact that many of the communications monitoring aspects that the administration is proposing includes authorization by co

I think a lot of libertarians miss the fact that many of the communications monitoring aspects that the administration is proposing includes authorization by court order. It's not like your communications are being monitored by random government employees at will for no reason. There's a specific safeguard here for personal privacy, and that's through a court order. If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed good reason, as determined by a judge. Sure, you might call that final safeguard as not enough or susceptible to corruption, but once you do that, you cease to be able to function in a society. Judicial review is the "trust zone" that citizens are expected to have on society. If you don't trust judicial review, then there's no hope left for you to function in a normal society filled with other people. If you don't have such a "trust zone" in government, then you are basically forced to build your own army to protect you, since you don't trust government. Since having your personal army is stupid, your best option is to make sure judicial review cannot be corrupted.

tehwebguy 11y ago
Communications are already being monitored by random government employees with no judicial review. The FISA court is already a rubber stamp. Encryption is one of the only ways to non-passively protest. Edit: Can't reply to my replies, likely because of the down votes on my parent's comment. Re: FISA, yes to both. That anecdote may be truth but I am still hung up on NSA employee looking up ex-girlfriends' emails the day he got access to do so. Re: Army, you aren't wrong but that's not encouraging. It's true, at the end of the day the most powerful military will win. But it's an argument that only wins against those with something to lose, like people who care about their family or nation states with a future. I guess that's why the ultimate response over a long enough timeline to an unbeatable military force is terrorism.
- mozumder 11y ago
  Again, good luck building your own army. My army can beat your army. As a citizen, you are expected to trust the FISA court.
  - ross-life 11y ago
    > As a citizen, you are expected to trust the FISA court. This opinion is just nuts. Trust a court that you were told for years didn't even exist? A secret court? How about no. Secret courts lead to abuses: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jo-shaw/secret-courts-8-nightmare-scenarios-now-possible-in-britain-0 https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jo-shaw/secret-cour...
    - mozumder 11y ago
      Would you prefer if there were NO judicial oversight? Because the only way to oversee top-secret data is with a top-secret court.
    - schoen 11y ago
      The existence of the FISA Court has never been a secret. It was created by FISA in 1978 and is right there in the text of the statute. Even the members of the FISA Court are publicly disclosed (they're all existing Federal judges who are appointed to temporary terms). What is secret about the FISA Court is its decisions, not its existence (and that should change slightly as a result of the USA Freedom Act's requirement to release "significant" opinions).
      - ross-life 11y ago
        As a European that still effectively screams "secret court" to me, just with some word games around it. Part of the problem is the US also broadly applies "Top Secret" to too much information, even the mundane, so then it "has to go to the secret court because it's "Top Secret".
        schoen 11y ago
        Oh, I'm happy with the description of the FISA Court as a "secret court"; I just wanted to answer the misconception that this means people didn't know that the court existed. Interestingly, regular courts can and do hear cases involving classified information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_Information_Procedures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_Information_Procedu... It's not that cases involving classified information somehow get transferred to the FISA Court; instead, the FISA Court only hears cases involving surveillance requests arising under FISA.
- arkem 11y ago
  I hear this a lot, what is the basis of considering the FISA court merely a rubber stamp? Is it the approval rate? Is it the lack of transparency? If it's the approval rate, in my experience the reason why court warrant approvals are so high is because intelligence / law enforcement are very risk adverse and will not submit requests that are likely to be rejected. Anecdotally, the officers I talked to considered it career poison to submit a request that got rejected by a court.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    In 35,000 requests, they denied 12. Either the NSA is really accurate or something smells.
    - arkem 11y ago
      I think it shows that they have an excellent understanding of their authorizing legislation. It also reflects that unlike other types of warrants the court can request revisions or additional information before making a decision and requests can be withdrawn before a formal rejection can take place. Some estimates put the reject/withdrawal rate closer to 25% Some more information: https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants-court-tougher-media-says https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants-court-t... https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/courts/fisc/honorable-patrick-leahy.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscour...
  - arkem 11y ago
    tehwebguy: I'd prefer if you replied to me in a separate post rather than editing in a reply to your post. It makes it hard for me to respond. In a way I'm heartened by stories about NSA employees acting inappropriately, it means that they're being caught and disciplined and the Office of the Inspector General is doing its job. If it was routine and accepted it wouldn't be a newsworthy story and the inspector general. That said, I don't think employee abuses have much bearing on the effectiveness of the FISA court as a source of judicial oversight for intelligence operations inside the United States.
  - Findeton 11y ago
mythz 11y ago
Nothing is being missed other than the premise that you can only create a back door that just compromises your privacy and security to the FBI/NSA. A backdoor available to the US Govt, is a backdoor available for everyone.
- mozumder 11y ago
  This is more fundamental than any "back door". The question here is: do you place any trust in government? If not, then you really can't function in a normal society. Good luck building your own army. And my army can beat your army.
  - XJOKOLAT 11y ago
    Way too sweeping a question. I can have trust in a government, but not in some of the individuals that make up that government. And I would want necessary protection from said individuals. Enter: encryption.
    - mozumder 11y ago
      Right, which is why we have judicial review of communications monitoring, since we don't trust the executive branch with that power alone.
  - mythz 11y ago
    > The question here is: do you place any trust in government? The Snowden leaks have shown the NSA's system-wide abuse and sealed courtroom judgements allowing rampant abuse and overreach by the NSA where they're able to operate free from oversight where even most of Congress had no idea what they were doing. > If not, then you really can't function in a normal society. Good luck building your own army. This ridiculous conclusion tantamounts to we either have to trust the US Govt or we need to build a private army. We are already functioning in a society without the need of a private army. We also live in a time where we can protect our sensitive information from the US Govt with readily-available strong encryption. Do I trust the US Govt with my most sensitive information? No I don't. Do I need a private Army? No, no I don't.
cheald 11y ago
> It's not like your communications are being monitored by random government employees at will for no reason. There's a specific safeguard here for personal privacy, and that's through a court order. That argument had weight pre-Snowden. It carries no water now.
- mozumder 11y ago
  You mean the Snowden revelations that show filters that filtered out communications of US citizens without a court order?
  - titzer 11y ago
    Yeah, the ones that were badly misconfigured and easily circumvented, like how NSA employees were caught snooping on their love interests. I for one do not want to live in a society where the government is one .conf file away from putting my entire life story in plaintext under scrutiny.
  - ross-life 11y ago
    A. The Snowden revelations show the US has spent years being dishonest about their programs. You'd be silly at this point if you think there is not a huge database of American communications too. B. "Filtered". Do you really believe that? Considering it's coming from the same government that also uses the words "enhanced interrogation"? C. The US seems to consider the rest of the world people with no rights at all. People understand spying on other countries, not spying on every other single person in the world with a phone and/or an internet connection. D. Your reasoning is faulty: > If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed good reason, as determined by a judge. Just because an "authority" says/does something does not mean it is right. It should be expected to explain its reasoning, openly and transparently. Then I can trust it. The current programs do not do that and have no intention of doing that. E. Random US government employees are literally reading your communications.
ericHosick 11y ago
> If you don't trust judicial review, there's no hope left for you to function in a normal society I would like to hear your definition of normal society. I personally feel that there are thousands of unique societies in the world. Considering that technology knows no borders, I hope you and the "society filled with other people" have normal society figured out for us all.
rdlecler1 11y ago
The U.S. government has already shown that it is willing to abuse the law and create loopholes. Maybe the FBI will need a court order, but once the back door exists, what's to stop the NSA, or North Korea, from using it and finding ways to exploit that vulnerability. Freedom has a cost and we need to accept that. There are no free lunches here.
- afarrell 11y ago
  But without a valid court order, the evidence collected by the NSA cannot be used against a defendant in a trial. If a defendant feels a court order was improperly issued, he can appeal his conviction on those procedural grounds. If the data is not used in a criminal case, then there is no mechanism for 4th amendment protection and the spied-upon has no recourse.
  - khedoros 11y ago
    1. Data is collected without a court order, by an otherwise trustworthy government (for the sake of argument). 2. Time passes and government policies change 3. Information that was previously inadmissible, and which should have never been collected in the first place, is now admissible. When we talk about law, we can't just consider how the current government will use it. We need to restrict how a future government could abuse it. You see the same pattern all the time in software: Some assumption is made in an earlier version. The basis of that assumption becomes invalid after further development. Now the thing that didn't matter before gets a bug added to your queue.
  - learc83 11y ago
    >But without a valid court order, the evidence collected by the NSA cannot be used against a defendant in a trial. Ostensibly, but in reality the FBI or local agency will use parallel construction to find another way to introduce evidence without even mentioning the NSA.
  - deathanatos 11y ago
    Except that this isn't correct in the face of parallel construction. You can't fight the evidence at trial if it either isn't presented, or its origins are misrepresented by the prosecution, which is what parallel construction leads to. (You use the stuff from the NSA to find other stuff, and build a plausible story about how you found the other stuff. The illegal search is never presented in court, so you can't fight it; the other stuff is, but is should be fruit of the poisonous tree, if the full truth were told.)
shmageggy 11y ago
> If you don't trust judicial review, then there's no hope left for you to function in a normal society filled with other people. This is an extreme statement and a false dichotomy. I think there's plenty of room between "completely trust government" and "unfit for society". If I'm uncomfortable with the potential for abuse of monitoring (which has already happened plenty of times), that means what exactly? I should remove myself from public discourse?
- mozumder 11y ago
  Right, which is why we have Judicial review of communications monitoring, since we don't trust the executive branch (a political entity) with that power alone.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    So you're suggesting that the sole legitimate check on governmental power is the government itself? And that anyone outside the government attempting to challenge abuses of power is by definition unfit for society?
    - mozumder 11y ago
      The ultimate oversight is the voter. And the voters have decided that the courts should be trusted.
      - ross-life 11y ago
        But the voters are being purposefully misinformed by that very same government. It's literally circular reasoning. Your argument would hold more weight if the people voting were actually well informed and educated about what the implications of their votes would be. If the government came out and said "everything you do, say, click and load will be saved for latter analysis" do you think they would vote the same way?
        11y ago
hendler 11y ago
> Your best option is to make sure judicial review cannot be corrupted. This is the problem Snowden exposed. There is not enough transparency to verify judicial processes. Secondly, it's seems that if information collection, safety, and exchange were working well, the FBI wouldn't be asking for more. Obama's ability to unite and create dialog is welcomed. However, I don't think phones are fetishized. There's simply a lack of education everywhere. As Jobs said, “Privacy means people know what they are signing up for”.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
First, it doesn't matter what process governments (plural) have in place to protect backdoor access mechanisms or escrowed keys. That those mechanisms exist at all means they can and will be abused by people who do not go through those mechanisms. Beyond that: > If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed good reason, as determined by a judge. Not even close to true. We have documented evidence at this point that the government is monitoring all communications. They have no discretion. For the moment, I trust that the government has not yet descended so far that it will arbitrarily arrest or detain everyone who attempts to maintain the security of their information. That doesn't mean I trust the government to unilaterally decide whose information it can access. Government brokenness is not binary. There's a spectrum from "theoretical perfection" to "absolute tyranny". The US and UK governments are currently attempting to take a step in the wrong direction; that doesn't immediately imply that anyone opposing that step "ceases to be able to function in a society". Or are you seriously attempting to suggest that the government is entirely infallible and incorruptible? The safeguard for privacy isn't just the court system. That provides a modest amount of protection against abuse of information that was left insecure to begin with, such as information left unencrypted with a third party. However, for information that truly needs security, the privacy of that information is maintained by the system holding it; that system neither has nor needs any concept of "a user other than the owner who somehow has access". Let's ignore the Apple case for a moment, since Apple fundamentally does have access to the device. Even additions like the more recent security chip have potential ways to bypass security, albeit by dissecting a tamper-resistant chip; that's a tradeoff for supporting insufficiently long user PINs, and wouldn't be needed with a secure passphrase. Whether Apple wins or loses, the much more interesting question is whether challenges arise to the construction of devices that genuinely cannot be accessed by anyone other than the device owner. As a simple example, consider an encrypted device, using a key and passphrase, where the passphrase uses an appropriate strengthening technique to make it computationally intensive to test a single possibility. Easy to get in if you know the passphrase, but if done right, computationally infeasible to brute force even with NSA-level computing resources and centuries of time. Laptops regularly use that level of security today (modulo the user's chosen passphrase). Phones should as well. If I had a perfect eidetic memory, I could memorize huge volumes of information and keep no records of them; in that case, that information is completely secure (against anything except rubber-hose). Encryption provides an amplification mechanism there: instead of memorizing gigabytes of data, I can instead memorize a passphrase, and gain access to arbitrarily large amounts of information that nobody else can access (modulo security bugs, or physical device compromise followed by my continued access).
musha68k 11y ago
Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space. We are talking about introducing back-doors to what essentially already is an extension to our brains. If you understand computers, you know that analogies between the "real world" and our abstract world of modern information systems usually don't hold well. Please try to think through all the subtleties, you clearly don't have to be labeled "libertarian" to foresee a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our civil liberties (as with democracy, the US still sets global trends btw).
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space. That's an interesting question to evaluate by analogy, though. Suppose you could, relatively easily, build a safe that nobody can enter without the combination (including the safe manufacturer). The government could serve a warrant to the person who has the combination, and you might even have to choose between opening the safe or going to jail, but if they chose the latter, they still can't get into the safe. They could point a camera at the safe, or rig the dials, so that the next time you open it you get the combination and can open it themselves; however, if you know or suspect they've done so, you can avoid ever touching the safe again, and they still don't have access. And serving a warrant to the safe manufacturer does no good at all, because everyone already knows everything about the safe except the combination.
  - musha68k 11y ago
    Have you played "The Room"? I might just install it again right here on my smartphone after reading your comment - "fetishist" that I am :) With that statement of mine I was mostly trying to convey how some things shouldn't be easy. Let me try to paraphrase: I'm sure that Sherlock would find a way to open that safe without a computer doing it for him! To a certain degree I can understand the frustration of executive agencies over their apparent missing-out on all the shiny low-hanging fruit - but they shouldn't worry so much as the promises of most tech be it the use of "big data" or accessing our all-encompassing "personal assistants" ultimately won't free them of doing their jobs.
dllthomas 11y ago
It is exactly like some communications are being monitored by random government employees at will for no legitimate reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT Note that "most incidents are self reported" kinda sounds good, but really means "we don't have any good systems for finding it", and probably means many incidents are never discovered.

tehwebguy 11y ago

Communications are already being monitored by random government employees with no judicial review. The FISA court is already a rubber stamp. Encryption is one of the only ways to non-passively protest. Edit: Can't reply to my replies, likely because of the down votes on my parent's comment. Re: FISA, yes to both. That anecdote may be truth but I am still hung up on NSA employee looking up ex-girlfriends' emails the day he got access to do so. Re: Army, you aren't wrong but that's not encouraging. It's true, at the end of the day the most powerful military will win. But it's an argument that only wins against those with something to lose, like people who care about their family or nation states with a future. I guess that's why the ultimate response over a long enough timeline to an unbeatable military force is terrorism.

mozumder 11y ago
Again, good luck building your own army. My army can beat your army. As a citizen, you are expected to trust the FISA court.
- ross-life 11y ago
  > As a citizen, you are expected to trust the FISA court. This opinion is just nuts. Trust a court that you were told for years didn't even exist? A secret court? How about no. Secret courts lead to abuses: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jo-shaw/secret-courts-8-nightmare-scenarios-now-possible-in-britain-0 https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jo-shaw/secret-cour...
  - mozumder 11y ago
    Would you prefer if there were NO judicial oversight? Because the only way to oversee top-secret data is with a top-secret court.
  - schoen 11y ago
    The existence of the FISA Court has never been a secret. It was created by FISA in 1978 and is right there in the text of the statute. Even the members of the FISA Court are publicly disclosed (they're all existing Federal judges who are appointed to temporary terms). What is secret about the FISA Court is its decisions, not its existence (and that should change slightly as a result of the USA Freedom Act's requirement to release "significant" opinions).
    - ross-life 11y ago
      As a European that still effectively screams "secret court" to me, just with some word games around it. Part of the problem is the US also broadly applies "Top Secret" to too much information, even the mundane, so then it "has to go to the secret court because it's "Top Secret".
      - schoen 11y ago
        Oh, I'm happy with the description of the FISA Court as a "secret court"; I just wanted to answer the misconception that this means people didn't know that the court existed. Interestingly, regular courts can and do hear cases involving classified information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_Information_Procedures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_Information_Procedu... It's not that cases involving classified information somehow get transferred to the FISA Court; instead, the FISA Court only hears cases involving surveillance requests arising under FISA.
arkem 11y ago
I hear this a lot, what is the basis of considering the FISA court merely a rubber stamp? Is it the approval rate? Is it the lack of transparency? If it's the approval rate, in my experience the reason why court warrant approvals are so high is because intelligence / law enforcement are very risk adverse and will not submit requests that are likely to be rejected. Anecdotally, the officers I talked to considered it career poison to submit a request that got rejected by a court.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  In 35,000 requests, they denied 12. Either the NSA is really accurate or something smells.
  - arkem 11y ago
    I think it shows that they have an excellent understanding of their authorizing legislation. It also reflects that unlike other types of warrants the court can request revisions or additional information before making a decision and requests can be withdrawn before a formal rejection can take place. Some estimates put the reject/withdrawal rate closer to 25% Some more information: https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants-court-tougher-media-says https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants-court-t... https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/courts/fisc/honorable-patrick-leahy.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscour...
- arkem 11y ago
  tehwebguy: I'd prefer if you replied to me in a separate post rather than editing in a reply to your post. It makes it hard for me to respond. In a way I'm heartened by stories about NSA employees acting inappropriately, it means that they're being caught and disciplined and the Office of the Inspector General is doing its job. If it was routine and accepted it wouldn't be a newsworthy story and the inspector general. That said, I don't think employee abuses have much bearing on the effectiveness of the FISA court as a source of judicial oversight for intelligence operations inside the United States.
- Findeton 11y ago

mythz 11y ago

Nothing is being missed other than the premise that you can only create a back door that just compromises your privacy and security to the FBI/NSA. A backdoor available to the US Govt, is a backdoor available for everyone.

mozumder 11y ago
This is more fundamental than any "back door". The question here is: do you place any trust in government? If not, then you really can't function in a normal society. Good luck building your own army. And my army can beat your army.
- XJOKOLAT 11y ago
  Way too sweeping a question. I can have trust in a government, but not in some of the individuals that make up that government. And I would want necessary protection from said individuals. Enter: encryption.
  - mozumder 11y ago
    Right, which is why we have judicial review of communications monitoring, since we don't trust the executive branch with that power alone.
- mythz 11y ago
  > The question here is: do you place any trust in government? The Snowden leaks have shown the NSA's system-wide abuse and sealed courtroom judgements allowing rampant abuse and overreach by the NSA where they're able to operate free from oversight where even most of Congress had no idea what they were doing. > If not, then you really can't function in a normal society. Good luck building your own army. This ridiculous conclusion tantamounts to we either have to trust the US Govt or we need to build a private army. We are already functioning in a society without the need of a private army. We also live in a time where we can protect our sensitive information from the US Govt with readily-available strong encryption. Do I trust the US Govt with my most sensitive information? No I don't. Do I need a private Army? No, no I don't.

cheald 11y ago

> It's not like your communications are being monitored by random government employees at will for no reason. There's a specific safeguard here for personal privacy, and that's through a court order. That argument had weight pre-Snowden. It carries no water now.

mozumder 11y ago
You mean the Snowden revelations that show filters that filtered out communications of US citizens without a court order?
- titzer 11y ago
  Yeah, the ones that were badly misconfigured and easily circumvented, like how NSA employees were caught snooping on their love interests. I for one do not want to live in a society where the government is one .conf file away from putting my entire life story in plaintext under scrutiny.
- ross-life 11y ago
  A. The Snowden revelations show the US has spent years being dishonest about their programs. You'd be silly at this point if you think there is not a huge database of American communications too. B. "Filtered". Do you really believe that? Considering it's coming from the same government that also uses the words "enhanced interrogation"? C. The US seems to consider the rest of the world people with no rights at all. People understand spying on other countries, not spying on every other single person in the world with a phone and/or an internet connection. D. Your reasoning is faulty: > If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed good reason, as determined by a judge. Just because an "authority" says/does something does not mean it is right. It should be expected to explain its reasoning, openly and transparently. Then I can trust it. The current programs do not do that and have no intention of doing that. E. Random US government employees are literally reading your communications.

ericHosick 11y ago

> If you don't trust judicial review, there's no hope left for you to function in a normal society I would like to hear your definition of normal society. I personally feel that there are thousands of unique societies in the world. Considering that technology knows no borders, I hope you and the "society filled with other people" have normal society figured out for us all.

rdlecler1 11y ago

The U.S. government has already shown that it is willing to abuse the law and create loopholes. Maybe the FBI will need a court order, but once the back door exists, what's to stop the NSA, or North Korea, from using it and finding ways to exploit that vulnerability. Freedom has a cost and we need to accept that. There are no free lunches here.

afarrell 11y ago
But without a valid court order, the evidence collected by the NSA cannot be used against a defendant in a trial. If a defendant feels a court order was improperly issued, he can appeal his conviction on those procedural grounds. If the data is not used in a criminal case, then there is no mechanism for 4th amendment protection and the spied-upon has no recourse.
- khedoros 11y ago
  1. Data is collected without a court order, by an otherwise trustworthy government (for the sake of argument). 2. Time passes and government policies change 3. Information that was previously inadmissible, and which should have never been collected in the first place, is now admissible. When we talk about law, we can't just consider how the current government will use it. We need to restrict how a future government could abuse it. You see the same pattern all the time in software: Some assumption is made in an earlier version. The basis of that assumption becomes invalid after further development. Now the thing that didn't matter before gets a bug added to your queue.
- learc83 11y ago
  >But without a valid court order, the evidence collected by the NSA cannot be used against a defendant in a trial. Ostensibly, but in reality the FBI or local agency will use parallel construction to find another way to introduce evidence without even mentioning the NSA.
- deathanatos 11y ago
  Except that this isn't correct in the face of parallel construction. You can't fight the evidence at trial if it either isn't presented, or its origins are misrepresented by the prosecution, which is what parallel construction leads to. (You use the stuff from the NSA to find other stuff, and build a plausible story about how you found the other stuff. The illegal search is never presented in court, so you can't fight it; the other stuff is, but is should be fruit of the poisonous tree, if the full truth were told.)

shmageggy 11y ago

> If you don't trust judicial review, then there's no hope left for you to function in a normal society filled with other people. This is an extreme statement and a false dichotomy. I think there's plenty of room between "completely trust government" and "unfit for society". If I'm uncomfortable with the potential for abuse of monitoring (which has already happened plenty of times), that means what exactly? I should remove myself from public discourse?

mozumder 11y ago
Right, which is why we have Judicial review of communications monitoring, since we don't trust the executive branch (a political entity) with that power alone.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  So you're suggesting that the sole legitimate check on governmental power is the government itself? And that anyone outside the government attempting to challenge abuses of power is by definition unfit for society?
  - mozumder 11y ago
    The ultimate oversight is the voter. And the voters have decided that the courts should be trusted.
    - ross-life 11y ago
      But the voters are being purposefully misinformed by that very same government. It's literally circular reasoning. Your argument would hold more weight if the people voting were actually well informed and educated about what the implications of their votes would be. If the government came out and said "everything you do, say, click and load will be saved for latter analysis" do you think they would vote the same way?
      - 11y ago

hendler 11y ago

> Your best option is to make sure judicial review cannot be corrupted. This is the problem Snowden exposed. There is not enough transparency to verify judicial processes. Secondly, it's seems that if information collection, safety, and exchange were working well, the FBI wouldn't be asking for more. Obama's ability to unite and create dialog is welcomed. However, I don't think phones are fetishized. There's simply a lack of education everywhere. As Jobs said, “Privacy means people know what they are signing up for”.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

First, it doesn't matter what process governments (plural) have in place to protect backdoor access mechanisms or escrowed keys. That those mechanisms exist at all means they can and will be abused by people who do not go through those mechanisms. Beyond that: > If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed good reason, as determined by a judge. Not even close to true. We have documented evidence at this point that the government is monitoring all communications. They have no discretion. For the moment, I trust that the government has not yet descended so far that it will arbitrarily arrest or detain everyone who attempts to maintain the security of their information. That doesn't mean I trust the government to unilaterally decide whose information it can access. Government brokenness is not binary. There's a spectrum from "theoretical perfection" to "absolute tyranny". The US and UK governments are currently attempting to take a step in the wrong direction; that doesn't immediately imply that anyone opposing that step "ceases to be able to function in a society". Or are you seriously attempting to suggest that the government is entirely infallible and incorruptible? The safeguard for privacy isn't just the court system. That provides a modest amount of protection against abuse of information that was left insecure to begin with, such as information left unencrypted with a third party. However, for information that truly needs security, the privacy of that information is maintained by the system holding it; that system neither has nor needs any concept of "a user other than the owner who somehow has access". Let's ignore the Apple case for a moment, since Apple fundamentally does have access to the device. Even additions like the more recent security chip have potential ways to bypass security, albeit by dissecting a tamper-resistant chip; that's a tradeoff for supporting insufficiently long user PINs, and wouldn't be needed with a secure passphrase. Whether Apple wins or loses, the much more interesting question is whether challenges arise to the construction of devices that genuinely cannot be accessed by anyone other than the device owner. As a simple example, consider an encrypted device, using a key and passphrase, where the passphrase uses an appropriate strengthening technique to make it computationally intensive to test a single possibility. Easy to get in if you know the passphrase, but if done right, computationally infeasible to brute force even with NSA-level computing resources and centuries of time. Laptops regularly use that level of security today (modulo the user's chosen passphrase). Phones should as well. If I had a perfect eidetic memory, I could memorize huge volumes of information and keep no records of them; in that case, that information is completely secure (against anything except rubber-hose). Encryption provides an amplification mechanism there: instead of memorizing gigabytes of data, I can instead memorize a passphrase, and gain access to arbitrarily large amounts of information that nobody else can access (modulo security bugs, or physical device compromise followed by my continued access).

musha68k 11y ago

Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space. We are talking about introducing back-doors to what essentially already is an extension to our brains. If you understand computers, you know that analogies between the "real world" and our abstract world of modern information systems usually don't hold well. Please try to think through all the subtleties, you clearly don't have to be labeled "libertarian" to foresee a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our civil liberties (as with democracy, the US still sets global trends btw).

JoshTriplett 11y ago
> Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space. That's an interesting question to evaluate by analogy, though. Suppose you could, relatively easily, build a safe that nobody can enter without the combination (including the safe manufacturer). The government could serve a warrant to the person who has the combination, and you might even have to choose between opening the safe or going to jail, but if they chose the latter, they still can't get into the safe. They could point a camera at the safe, or rig the dials, so that the next time you open it you get the combination and can open it themselves; however, if you know or suspect they've done so, you can avoid ever touching the safe again, and they still don't have access. And serving a warrant to the safe manufacturer does no good at all, because everyone already knows everything about the safe except the combination.
- musha68k 11y ago
  Have you played "The Room"? I might just install it again right here on my smartphone after reading your comment - "fetishist" that I am :) With that statement of mine I was mostly trying to convey how some things shouldn't be easy. Let me try to paraphrase: I'm sure that Sherlock would find a way to open that safe without a computer doing it for him! To a certain degree I can understand the frustration of executive agencies over their apparent missing-out on all the shiny low-hanging fruit - but they shouldn't worry so much as the promises of most tech be it the use of "big data" or accessing our all-encompassing "personal assistants" ultimately won't free them of doing their jobs.

dllthomas 11y ago

It is exactly like some communications are being monitored by random government employees at will for no legitimate reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT Note that "most incidents are self reported" kinda sounds good, but really means "we don't have any good systems for finding it", and probably means many incidents are never discovered.