11 ms·

Tech Companies Fight Back After Years of Being Deluged with Secret FBI Requests

263 points by uptown 10y ago

rhizome 10y ago
A more-detailed exposition on the topic: https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/06/21/key-details-about-the-mitch-mcconnell-bid-to-expand-fbi-surveillance/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/06/21/key-details-about-the-...
bgentry 10y ago
The FBI’s decision to ask companies for everything and let them figure out what they’re required to turn over has had the effect of potentially putting smaller companies with fewer resources at a disadvantage, say national security attorneys. Without expensive legal representation and a familiarity with the law, companies might turn over more content than is necessary. You'd think the FBI wouldn't be able to just demand all kinds of stuff they have no legal right to. It's sad that the current state of our legal and political systems allows this sort of tactic to be effective and go unpunished.
- iamdave 10y ago
  You'd think the FBI wouldn't be able to just demand all kinds of stuff they have no legal right to. Paying some respect to established history for a moment, I-personally speaking-am not shocked at all. This sort of clandestine activity is how the FBI was born.
  - bgentry 10y ago
    Yeah, I realize they have a very long history of this sort of behavior (pioneered by J. Edgar Hoover).
    - iamdave 10y ago
      I suppose what I was trying to imply was that the FBI was born of these tactics, emboldened by Hooover, condoned by the courts until they-the bureau-grew to such a size that (combined with McCarthyist politicking and language waged over nebulous concepts like "terrorism" and "drugs") that this is just a par 3 course for them. It doesn't make these things right of course, but I can't feign apoplectic over it either. You should expect better, but those expectations should be tempered just a bit. I don't think any amount of coverage or outrage is going to make a dent in this problem as long as the system the FBI operates in refuses to keep itself in check.
- crazy1van 10y ago
  Seems like a case of imbalanced consequences. If a company doesn't properly comply with a request, the company and some of its workers could quite possibly face criminal consequences. If the FBI's request is eventually found out to be invalid, very little of consequence will happen to the Bureau and even less to the employees. Unfortunately, this imbalance isn't unique to the FBI or even law enforcement. Even most government regulatory agencies seem to enjoy a presumption of acting in good faith which gets the agency, and even more crucially the employees, out of trouble when they overstep.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Leading people to forfeit their rights, to motivate them to offer more information than they are legally required to provide, is a long-standing law enforcement strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Liberal democracies usually operate under the principle that you can ask anything you want of someone, and it's up to them to say "no" if they find it disagreeable. The law is then there to step in when there is a dispute and say which party is right. Even the Bill of Rights depends upon people specifically asserting their rights; if a person voluntarily chooses to incriminate themselves, they've still incriminated themselves, the 5th amendment just states that if the government asks them to bear witness against themself and they refuse to speak, they have done nothing wrong. While this can lead to unfortunate power imbalances and information asymmetries, it's hard to see how the legal system could operate otherwise. If people were forbidden from asking - who would do the forbidding? What if this is used to prevent contracts that would legitimately be in the best interest of both parties? What if it were used to prevent emerging power centers from challenging the power of the organization that can determine what's legal to ask? How would you even know that such a question has occurred, if one party says "Don't talk about this"? Probably the best we can hope for is for Congress to pass a law specifically enumerating what electronic records the FBI may request. That seems to be what this article is calling for - consciousness-raising, and public debate. There's plenty of precedent for this, eg. the Miranda rights came from a court case where it was determined that police could not simply assume that a suspect was aware of their constitutional rights, and had to explicitly have them enumerated. But the fact that this needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis is a feature of the legal system, not a bug.
  - ianstormtaylor 10y ago
    Great level-headed response! It sounds like there could be an interesting side project for someone—a mini-site that explains each of the things the FBI is allowed to request via each type of request. Or even sponsored by the EFF.
  - schoen 10y ago
    Your reply might be inadvertently equivocating on meanings of "request", although I can see an interpretation where you're right. Bear in mind that in many government data requests, the government is really demanding or instructing someone to provide the data, in a manner calculated to make the recipient think that complying is not optional and that refusing to comply would be punished. In other contexts, the courts have at least created suppression remedies when law enforcement agents order people to do things that aren't really legally required. And if you as a private party make an improper legal demand of someone, there could be a legal remedy against you just because of that (although maybe that falls under "[t]he law is then there to step in when there is a dispute"). I think there are also cases where people have maintained civil rights challenges against law enforcement officers who gave improper orders (for example, improperly ordering someone to stop doing something -- like photography!). I would think the legal system could pay attention in a broader range of situations to the difference between law enforcement requesting people consent to something and making people believe that they have no choice.
- rayiner 10y ago
  > You'd think the FBI wouldn't be able to just demand all kinds of stuff they have no legal right to. The police are entitled to ask for cooperation from people to help with investigations. If there is a crime in my neighborhood, should police be banned from asking me about what I saw just because they can't compel me to do so? And if you set the boundary for what police "may ask for" == to what police may "compel you to provide" don't you think that'll lead to undesirable growth in the latter?
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    IMO they should be allowed to ask for whatever they want, but they must also clarify if it is a lawful order or a request. Then it is up to the requestee to decide whether or not to comply. That is the whole point of living in a democracy and not a police state, correct? Also that is the actual law. Tricking people into doing more than required by law is fraud in my opinion.
  - imh 10y ago
    How about a nice compromise where if the person asks whether they have to comply to a request, the government has to respond truthfully? As far as I know, there are no such requirements.
  - simonh 10y ago
    What they are doing is the equivalent of demanding that people help with the investigation and threatening them with legal consequences if they don't. The fact is that even if a police officer doesn't have the right to arrest you for refusing to comply, they can absolutely threaten to do so and as a matter of fact if they choose to cuff and detain you that is what will happen regardless of your legal rights regarding any information you might have.
- syngrog66 10y ago
  It is this that is a huge part of how I react negatively to the recent issue where Facebook has suddenly decided to push heavily on me to install a Facebook Messenger Android app on my phone. You know: the functionality that already worked, that was already a cleanly solved problem in their mobile web app. But yet with a native Android app the store says they "need" to access my camera, my microphone, my GPS, all my contacts, all my photos, videos, my file system, my phone, my wifi interface, etc etc. Because... you know. Just trust us. In order for me to type in a short ASCII text message and hit ENTER and have that delivered to another person. A problem solved with much less code, and much less permissions, both in SMS, email, Usenet, etc, for the prior 30+ years. I glance over to Shirer's Rise & Fall on my bookshelf, for a second or two, before falling asleep tonight. "Trust us." - 1932 Germany/Europe is calling
vonklaus 10y ago
> The FBI’s decision to ask companies for everything and let them figure out what they’re required to turn over has had the effect of potentially putting smaller companies with fewer resources at a disadvantage, say national security attorneys. Without expensive legal representation and a familiarity with the law, companies might turn over more content than is necessary. Tech companies should jst turn over more than they're required. If they demand info on 5 users, send 10K gzipped blend of fake & real users and random images from imgur.
- bllguo 10y ago
  It's fun to speculate on things like this but when in the shoes of a small company faced with that request, without the clout of places like Apple and Google, I would not want to piss off the FBI.
  - nxzero 10y ago
    Who's the FBI?
- progressive_dad 10y ago
  It works for FOIA
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    The prevailing strategy if FOIA requests now seems to be sprinkle some 'personal' information in with the rest and then you get to pick and choose what to release. So it's kind of the reverse of this.
    - bpchaps 10y ago
      Eh, column A and column B. I'm convinced that the only reason this happens is because of bad wording in FOIA requests, combined with a lack of pushback after rejections or missing/redacted information. A great way to get around that prevailing strategy is to simply chain requests - particularly since "unduly burdensome" is such a popular rejection. For example, I've been after the Chicago mayor's communication records and a recent request for communication records of three companies was rejected for being "unduly burdensome". My response to that is to request their DNS resolution logs and the domains/times/from of sent email. I honestly don't actually care that much about the DNS logs - the information is (mostly) just for finding significantly narrower windows for when communication is likely to have happened. Having an exact time for an email will get rid of their claims of burden. It still makes me chuckle that their obstinance only makes me request more, and each time it results in more information than I was originally seeking. If done right, FOIA is a lot more useful than you might think.
rsync 10y ago
The rsync.net warrant canary is 10 years old this year. https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  You must have very boring customers.
- rms_returns 10y ago
  Just curious, why is a latest newpaper headline part of a warrant canary?
  - null0pointer 10y ago
    The idea with a canary is that some government request can stop you from disclosing that request ("hey everyone we got subpoena'd") but they can't stop you from NOT updating a page. Putting a newspaper headline on the page basically provides a timestamp so anyone checking can go "hey, their canary hasn't been updated in 6 months... maybe something happened". At least that's my understanding of it.
    - ViViDboarder 10y ago
      Would a date not suffice?
      - null0pointer 10y ago
        You can't put the headline in there before it's been published, whereas you can put any date you like.
kyledrake 10y ago
One not-perfect trick: Stop retaining sensitive information. There is nothing in law that forces you to do retain things like IP addresses. https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention/us https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention/us Then they can harass you for data all the time with illegal shit "court" orders and you can give them garbage and they can do nothing about it. This is the best method I've seen for dealing with this problem on a budget. Unfortunately the tradeoff is losing a lot of not-especially-effective tools for dealing with spammers and the like.
- strathmeyer 10y ago
  You may want to learn about how Lavabit was shutdown.
  - function_seven 10y ago
    Lavabit's shutdown revealed the flaw in its premise. That encryption-at-rest was good enough for email security (while using a single TLS key for all in-flight data). Turns out it's not. Only end-to-end encryption—with keys only held by the end-users—can provide that. As despicable as FBI's actions in that case may be, they did the public a service by showing Lavabit's security proposition to be less than what users may have assumed. EDIT: Nothing I wrote above detracts from your point, though. Re-enforces it, in fact. Lavabit held little or no data, which caused the FBI to escalate to the nuclear give-us-your-master-key option.
- abraae 10y ago
  As far as IP address goes, you could store a cryptographic hash of the IP, rather than the IP itself. That would prevent you from, say, identifying entire subnets used by spammers, but would be better than nothing. You'd just need to do the hashing with some kind of tamperproof keystore that exploded when the FBI fiddled with it.
  - woodman 10y ago
    This wouldn't work without some really bizarre implementation that would make it less of a hash and more of a cipher. The range of potential values is too small and highly structured, generating a rainbow table would be braindead simple. > ...tamperproof keystore that exploded... So not one way hashes then?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nxzero 10y ago
It would be curious to know if given the choice of supporting mass surveillance or not being able to use services and products from brands like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Wikipedia, etc. - what consumers would choose. If they'd opt to use those brands, seems like the answer to change maybe very simple.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  I feel like the public has already implicitly chosen convenience over privacy and freedom. IMO it is up to us techies to come up with a private and open system that offers the same conveniences without the privacy problems. The perfect system to me would support: - distributed (p2p) to avoid isolated silos and censorship - Tor-style privacy - encryption - multi-user database support to allow dynamic sites (ie users have access to store their own posts/data on a site), not just static pages - distributed torrent-style downloading and streaming of large files - some kind of bitcoin payment system for people mirroring sites? Zeronet combined with Tor is very interesting to me, although currently it doesn't support large file chunking or payment-for-storage. IPFS is good but doesn't have the privacy or multi-user database support.
  - Qantourisc 10y ago
    Freenet comes close, no database or torrent iirc though. Or dynamic sites(to my knowledge).
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      It also seemed very complicated to put your own sites up on Freenet. Seems like it's pretty easy for an individual to put something up on IPFS or Zeronet.
jfoutz 10y ago
I wonder if companies could just invoice the FBI for document processing or administrative fees. Just follow the FOIA fee structure. Or, charge a whole lot. You can't make the NSL public, but it's not like you're complying with a warrant or something that would be immune from fees. Of course the government will refuse to pay, so you sue. Presumably you could subpoena the emails around the NSL without disclosing the NSL. "We need to get this information from $tech_company", $tech_company provided the information. pay me.
arca_vorago 10y ago
The FBI et al issue NSL's without a court order and on their own prerogative correct? In that case the FBI can get a warrant like the constitution they swore to uphold demands of them. I'm tired of people bending over backwards for unconstitutional poppycock like warrant-less surveillance. It's a fundamental part of the supreme law of the land, the constitution!
walid 10y ago
“Had the FBI put a reasonable position on the table … five years ago they probably would’ve got that through,” Gidari argues. “They’re their own worst enemy on this stuff.”
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
beedogs 10y ago
At this point, I honestly fail to see why the FBI is allowed to continue existing. They seem antithetical to a democratic society.
ianpurton 10y ago
Just playing devils advocate but... Aren't the FBI the good guys going about catching criminals and terrorists? So aren't we morally obliged to help rather than stamp our feet and say no and then publish a blog post about how we are fighting back against the tyranny of law enforcement. FFS.
- brianpan 10y ago
  Is the President a good guy that we are obliged to follow? I think you have it backwards. The FBI derives it's power from the people it serves. It is in all our interests to have healthy functioning governments that serve their communities well. (Is there any other role of a government?) That happens through discussion and debate, not through doing whatever they tell us to do.
- thrkw123456789 10y ago
  The (incorrect) concept of the world consisting of good and bad guys whilst dangerous and leading to flawed reasoning about society (of which this post is an excellent example) is fascinating. I'd be really interested in how it became so prevalent in US society.
- simonh 10y ago
  Do you think that government agencies are beyond reproach and should not be held accountable for their actions? Unfortunately the FBI has a long history of activities clearly contrary to the public good.

263 points by uptown 10y ago

A more-detailed exposition on the topic: https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/06/21/key-details-about-the-mitch-mcconnell-bid-to-expand-fbi-surveillance/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/06/21/key-details-about-the-...

bgentry 10y ago

The FBI’s decision to ask companies for everything and let them figure out what they’re required to turn over has had the effect of potentially putting smaller companies with fewer resources at a disadvantage, say national security attorneys. Without expensive legal representation and a familiarity with the law, companies might turn over more content than is necessary. You'd think the FBI wouldn't be able to just demand all kinds of stuff they have no legal right to. It's sad that the current state of our legal and political systems allows this sort of tactic to be effective and go unpunished.

iamdave 10y ago
You'd think the FBI wouldn't be able to just demand all kinds of stuff they have no legal right to. Paying some respect to established history for a moment, I-personally speaking-am not shocked at all. This sort of clandestine activity is how the FBI was born.
- bgentry 10y ago
  Yeah, I realize they have a very long history of this sort of behavior (pioneered by J. Edgar Hoover).
  - iamdave 10y ago
    I suppose what I was trying to imply was that the FBI was born of these tactics, emboldened by Hooover, condoned by the courts until they-the bureau-grew to such a size that (combined with McCarthyist politicking and language waged over nebulous concepts like "terrorism" and "drugs") that this is just a par 3 course for them. It doesn't make these things right of course, but I can't feign apoplectic over it either. You should expect better, but those expectations should be tempered just a bit. I don't think any amount of coverage or outrage is going to make a dent in this problem as long as the system the FBI operates in refuses to keep itself in check.
crazy1van 10y ago
Seems like a case of imbalanced consequences. If a company doesn't properly comply with a request, the company and some of its workers could quite possibly face criminal consequences. If the FBI's request is eventually found out to be invalid, very little of consequence will happen to the Bureau and even less to the employees. Unfortunately, this imbalance isn't unique to the FBI or even law enforcement. Even most government regulatory agencies seem to enjoy a presumption of acting in good faith which gets the agency, and even more crucially the employees, out of trouble when they overstep.
rhizome 10y ago
Leading people to forfeit their rights, to motivate them to offer more information than they are legally required to provide, is a long-standing law enforcement strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique
nostrademons 10y ago
Liberal democracies usually operate under the principle that you can ask anything you want of someone, and it's up to them to say "no" if they find it disagreeable. The law is then there to step in when there is a dispute and say which party is right. Even the Bill of Rights depends upon people specifically asserting their rights; if a person voluntarily chooses to incriminate themselves, they've still incriminated themselves, the 5th amendment just states that if the government asks them to bear witness against themself and they refuse to speak, they have done nothing wrong. While this can lead to unfortunate power imbalances and information asymmetries, it's hard to see how the legal system could operate otherwise. If people were forbidden from asking - who would do the forbidding? What if this is used to prevent contracts that would legitimately be in the best interest of both parties? What if it were used to prevent emerging power centers from challenging the power of the organization that can determine what's legal to ask? How would you even know that such a question has occurred, if one party says "Don't talk about this"? Probably the best we can hope for is for Congress to pass a law specifically enumerating what electronic records the FBI may request. That seems to be what this article is calling for - consciousness-raising, and public debate. There's plenty of precedent for this, eg. the Miranda rights came from a court case where it was determined that police could not simply assume that a suspect was aware of their constitutional rights, and had to explicitly have them enumerated. But the fact that this needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis is a feature of the legal system, not a bug.
- ianstormtaylor 10y ago
  Great level-headed response! It sounds like there could be an interesting side project for someone—a mini-site that explains each of the things the FBI is allowed to request via each type of request. Or even sponsored by the EFF.
- schoen 10y ago
  Your reply might be inadvertently equivocating on meanings of "request", although I can see an interpretation where you're right. Bear in mind that in many government data requests, the government is really demanding or instructing someone to provide the data, in a manner calculated to make the recipient think that complying is not optional and that refusing to comply would be punished. In other contexts, the courts have at least created suppression remedies when law enforcement agents order people to do things that aren't really legally required. And if you as a private party make an improper legal demand of someone, there could be a legal remedy against you just because of that (although maybe that falls under "[t]he law is then there to step in when there is a dispute"). I think there are also cases where people have maintained civil rights challenges against law enforcement officers who gave improper orders (for example, improperly ordering someone to stop doing something -- like photography!). I would think the legal system could pay attention in a broader range of situations to the difference between law enforcement requesting people consent to something and making people believe that they have no choice.
rayiner 10y ago
> You'd think the FBI wouldn't be able to just demand all kinds of stuff they have no legal right to. The police are entitled to ask for cooperation from people to help with investigations. If there is a crime in my neighborhood, should police be banned from asking me about what I saw just because they can't compel me to do so? And if you set the boundary for what police "may ask for" == to what police may "compel you to provide" don't you think that'll lead to undesirable growth in the latter?
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  IMO they should be allowed to ask for whatever they want, but they must also clarify if it is a lawful order or a request. Then it is up to the requestee to decide whether or not to comply. That is the whole point of living in a democracy and not a police state, correct? Also that is the actual law. Tricking people into doing more than required by law is fraud in my opinion.
- imh 10y ago
  How about a nice compromise where if the person asks whether they have to comply to a request, the government has to respond truthfully? As far as I know, there are no such requirements.
- simonh 10y ago
  What they are doing is the equivalent of demanding that people help with the investigation and threatening them with legal consequences if they don't. The fact is that even if a police officer doesn't have the right to arrest you for refusing to comply, they can absolutely threaten to do so and as a matter of fact if they choose to cuff and detain you that is what will happen regardless of your legal rights regarding any information you might have.
syngrog66 10y ago
It is this that is a huge part of how I react negatively to the recent issue where Facebook has suddenly decided to push heavily on me to install a Facebook Messenger Android app on my phone. You know: the functionality that already worked, that was already a cleanly solved problem in their mobile web app. But yet with a native Android app the store says they "need" to access my camera, my microphone, my GPS, all my contacts, all my photos, videos, my file system, my phone, my wifi interface, etc etc. Because... you know. Just trust us. In order for me to type in a short ASCII text message and hit ENTER and have that delivered to another person. A problem solved with much less code, and much less permissions, both in SMS, email, Usenet, etc, for the prior 30+ years. I glance over to Shirer's Rise & Fall on my bookshelf, for a second or two, before falling asleep tonight. "Trust us." - 1932 Germany/Europe is calling

vonklaus 10y ago

> The FBI’s decision to ask companies for everything and let them figure out what they’re required to turn over has had the effect of potentially putting smaller companies with fewer resources at a disadvantage, say national security attorneys. Without expensive legal representation and a familiarity with the law, companies might turn over more content than is necessary. Tech companies should jst turn over more than they're required. If they demand info on 5 users, send 10K gzipped blend of fake & real users and random images from imgur.

bllguo 10y ago
It's fun to speculate on things like this but when in the shoes of a small company faced with that request, without the clout of places like Apple and Google, I would not want to piss off the FBI.
- nxzero 10y ago
  Who's the FBI?
progressive_dad 10y ago
It works for FOIA
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  The prevailing strategy if FOIA requests now seems to be sprinkle some 'personal' information in with the rest and then you get to pick and choose what to release. So it's kind of the reverse of this.
  - bpchaps 10y ago
    Eh, column A and column B. I'm convinced that the only reason this happens is because of bad wording in FOIA requests, combined with a lack of pushback after rejections or missing/redacted information. A great way to get around that prevailing strategy is to simply chain requests - particularly since "unduly burdensome" is such a popular rejection. For example, I've been after the Chicago mayor's communication records and a recent request for communication records of three companies was rejected for being "unduly burdensome". My response to that is to request their DNS resolution logs and the domains/times/from of sent email. I honestly don't actually care that much about the DNS logs - the information is (mostly) just for finding significantly narrower windows for when communication is likely to have happened. Having an exact time for an email will get rid of their claims of burden. It still makes me chuckle that their obstinance only makes me request more, and each time it results in more information than I was originally seeking. If done right, FOIA is a lot more useful than you might think.

rsync 10y ago

The rsync.net warrant canary is 10 years old this year. https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

srtjstjsj 10y ago
You must have very boring customers.
rms_returns 10y ago
Just curious, why is a latest newpaper headline part of a warrant canary?
- null0pointer 10y ago
  The idea with a canary is that some government request can stop you from disclosing that request ("hey everyone we got subpoena'd") but they can't stop you from NOT updating a page. Putting a newspaper headline on the page basically provides a timestamp so anyone checking can go "hey, their canary hasn't been updated in 6 months... maybe something happened". At least that's my understanding of it.
  - ViViDboarder 10y ago
    Would a date not suffice?
    - null0pointer 10y ago
      You can't put the headline in there before it's been published, whereas you can put any date you like.

kyledrake 10y ago

One not-perfect trick: Stop retaining sensitive information. There is nothing in law that forces you to do retain things like IP addresses. https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention/us https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention/us Then they can harass you for data all the time with illegal shit "court" orders and you can give them garbage and they can do nothing about it. This is the best method I've seen for dealing with this problem on a budget. Unfortunately the tradeoff is losing a lot of not-especially-effective tools for dealing with spammers and the like.

strathmeyer 10y ago
You may want to learn about how Lavabit was shutdown.
- function_seven 10y ago
  Lavabit's shutdown revealed the flaw in its premise. That encryption-at-rest was good enough for email security (while using a single TLS key for all in-flight data). Turns out it's not. Only end-to-end encryption—with keys only held by the end-users—can provide that. As despicable as FBI's actions in that case may be, they did the public a service by showing Lavabit's security proposition to be less than what users may have assumed. EDIT: Nothing I wrote above detracts from your point, though. Re-enforces it, in fact. Lavabit held little or no data, which caused the FBI to escalate to the nuclear give-us-your-master-key option.
abraae 10y ago
As far as IP address goes, you could store a cryptographic hash of the IP, rather than the IP itself. That would prevent you from, say, identifying entire subnets used by spammers, but would be better than nothing. You'd just need to do the hashing with some kind of tamperproof keystore that exploded when the FBI fiddled with it.
- woodman 10y ago
  This wouldn't work without some really bizarre implementation that would make it less of a hash and more of a cipher. The range of potential values is too small and highly structured, generating a rainbow table would be braindead simple. > ...tamperproof keystore that exploded... So not one way hashes then?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nxzero 10y ago

It would be curious to know if given the choice of supporting mass surveillance or not being able to use services and products from brands like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Wikipedia, etc. - what consumers would choose. If they'd opt to use those brands, seems like the answer to change maybe very simple.

brokenmachine 10y ago
I feel like the public has already implicitly chosen convenience over privacy and freedom. IMO it is up to us techies to come up with a private and open system that offers the same conveniences without the privacy problems. The perfect system to me would support: - distributed (p2p) to avoid isolated silos and censorship - Tor-style privacy - encryption - multi-user database support to allow dynamic sites (ie users have access to store their own posts/data on a site), not just static pages - distributed torrent-style downloading and streaming of large files - some kind of bitcoin payment system for people mirroring sites? Zeronet combined with Tor is very interesting to me, although currently it doesn't support large file chunking or payment-for-storage. IPFS is good but doesn't have the privacy or multi-user database support.
- Qantourisc 10y ago
  Freenet comes close, no database or torrent iirc though. Or dynamic sites(to my knowledge).
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    It also seemed very complicated to put your own sites up on Freenet. Seems like it's pretty easy for an individual to put something up on IPFS or Zeronet.

jfoutz 10y ago

I wonder if companies could just invoice the FBI for document processing or administrative fees. Just follow the FOIA fee structure. Or, charge a whole lot. You can't make the NSL public, but it's not like you're complying with a warrant or something that would be immune from fees. Of course the government will refuse to pay, so you sue. Presumably you could subpoena the emails around the NSL without disclosing the NSL. "We need to get this information from $tech_company", $tech_company provided the information. pay me.

arca_vorago 10y ago

The FBI et al issue NSL's without a court order and on their own prerogative correct? In that case the FBI can get a warrant like the constitution they swore to uphold demands of them. I'm tired of people bending over backwards for unconstitutional poppycock like warrant-less surveillance. It's a fundamental part of the supreme law of the land, the constitution!

walid 10y ago

“Had the FBI put a reasonable position on the table … five years ago they probably would’ve got that through,” Gidari argues. “They’re their own worst enemy on this stuff.”

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

beedogs 10y ago

At this point, I honestly fail to see why the FBI is allowed to continue existing. They seem antithetical to a democratic society.

ianpurton 10y ago

Just playing devils advocate but... Aren't the FBI the good guys going about catching criminals and terrorists? So aren't we morally obliged to help rather than stamp our feet and say no and then publish a blog post about how we are fighting back against the tyranny of law enforcement. FFS.

brianpan 10y ago
Is the President a good guy that we are obliged to follow? I think you have it backwards. The FBI derives it's power from the people it serves. It is in all our interests to have healthy functioning governments that serve their communities well. (Is there any other role of a government?) That happens through discussion and debate, not through doing whatever they tell us to do.
thrkw123456789 10y ago
The (incorrect) concept of the world consisting of good and bad guys whilst dangerous and leading to flawed reasoning about society (of which this post is an excellent example) is fascinating. I'd be really interested in how it became so prevalent in US society.
simonh 10y ago
Do you think that government agencies are beyond reproach and should not be held accountable for their actions? Unfortunately the FBI has a long history of activities clearly contrary to the public good.