9 ms·

Trying to Keep the Internet Safe from Warrantless NSA Surveillance

150 points by maxt 10y ago

jMyles 10y ago
Very nice. Nothing new here, but this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with internet architecture and want to get up to speed with this particular facet of (seemingly illegal) surveillance. However, I want to quickly point out one omission in the discussion of the risks of allowing this kind of activity to continue: If the NSA is effectively spying on everybody who communicates with a server outside the US, it is trivial for them (or another government agency) to fabricate traffic (presumably child pornography) in order to target someone. The ACLU (and others similarly positioned to criticize this conduct) always rightly point to the risks to journalists and human rights activists of having their communications intercepted and accurately portrayed, but what about the ease of lying about it in order to target dissidents? This seems like an obvious vector and deserves more attention and discussion.
- devoply 10y ago
  If it were legal you could call it unconstitutional. The point is do not want. But really Google is so much worse than the NSA. We can't do anything about Google though. He's like an uninvited guest to every party. And now we have Microsoft to contend with as well.
  - late2part 10y ago
    We implicity permit Google to have our info. We have not given informed consent to allow our government to take this data. Therefore it is an unreasonable search and seizure of our property.
    - newsat13 10y ago
      This is incorrect. Most people don't realize this. Do you consent your car to store all your location information in the cloud? What if TV started storing all things you watch in the cloud? Tomorrow, if all the car/tv manufacturers started doing this, what choice do you have? No, the option is not "do not use cars/tv". And tbh, I don't even think 80% of the population is cognizant about what is being collected and what it's used for. This is the reality and they have "accepted" it as-is. This is the situation we find ourselves with email (all email providers mark any other email as spam).
      - Fnoord 10y ago
        > Tomorrow, if all the car/tv manufacturers started doing this, what choice do you have? No, the option is not "do not use cars/tv" Supply & demand. If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met. Vote with your wallet. Also, do not forget the second hand market for cars. This one's huge. There's still TVs and cars available which are dumb. There's still laptops available without Intel ME. > This is the situation we find ourselves with email (all email providers mark any other email as spam). What are you on about?
        hartz 10y ago
        If you run your own mail server, it's hard to get email deliverability to the inboxes of people who use the Big 3 (Gmail, yahoo mail, Outlook.com). This makes using these privacy-invasive email services a much easier decision
        sliken 10y ago
        Problems seem more to do with the age of the domain, rather than the size.
        Karunamon 10y ago
        > If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met. Such demand will never rise to substantial levels. The moment your solution to a problem requires the general public to (change their behavior/become educated about something), your solution is unworkable. If the general public regularly changed their habits out of principle, Windows would have been displaced by Linux in the 90s and the banana and diamond industries would be dead or dying. It doesn't work that way, and it's unrealistic to assume it ever can.
        Fnoord 10y ago
        > If the general public regularly changed their habits out of principle, Windows would have been displaced by Linux in the 90s and the banana and diamond industries would be dead or dying. My argument has never been that the general public at a whole changes something out of principle. Some of us may, most will not. Sadly you're right on that account. My argument was that if there is a demand for a product this will (eventually) be met by supply. I don't know anything about the banana industry. I do know that Windows is from the former monopolist Microsoft. I was there when the Halloween documents got released into the wild. The diamond industry is a former monopoly as well (De Beers). The diamond industry furthermore has the advantage of tradition. However according to [1] "Synthetic diamonds sold as jewelry typically sell for 15-20% less than natural equivalents, but the relative price is expected decline further as production economics improve." A-ha we got incentive right there: a price of 15-20% of the natural counterpart which is going to drop further over time! What makes you believe this competitor is irrelevant, unable to compete with natural diamonds? I see the exact opposite. So we have two incentives now: the principal, ideologic one (sadly usually doesn't fly; we agree there) and a money one. Diamonds lose their value the moment they're bought. There's no second hand market for them. It is a stupid investment. If you can save 80-85% on a stupid investment that seems like a pretty good incentive to me. > It doesn't work that way, and it's unrealistic to assume it ever can. If we're talking about monopolies, no, but those monopolies stay monopolies due to lack of government intervention and because the wheels of justice grind slowly. Microsoft eventually got what they deserved by courts, and they failed to compete with the successors of the PC which ran the 'children' of Linux and macOS (Android and iOS). Microsoft even had to change their business model, giving away Windows 10 and focusing on advertising instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#Gemstones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#Gemstones
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    > We can't do anything about Google though. Yes, we can! Don't use Google, or use certain settings in the applications which enhance your privacy. The default settings are not always the best settings for the user. Don't use Google Search. Use a search engine which respects your privacy such as the scraper DuckDuckGo (DDG). Don't use Gmail. Use an e-mail provider which doesn't scan through your e-mail. Where you got IMAP access. Use a device where you can use GPG. Or use alternative methods of communication. Don't use Google Maps. Use a maps application which respects your privacy such as OpenStreetMap or (arguably) Apple Maps. Don't use Google Fit. [...] And so on, so forth. Ask yourself the following: do I really need this? The answer is often: "not really." You have the option to use neither. If the choice is Android or iOS you pay more for iOS devices but your privacy generally suffers less. [Ignoring the option of dumbphones] there's a third option: don't take your phone with you. It is a choice to take your Android or iOS device with you. Among others, Bruce Schneier wrote about this in his book Data And Goliath.
    - smokeyj 10y ago
      But you can't avoid google analytics..
      - Fnoord 10y ago
        Why not? There's loads of options. Some examples include uBlock, NoScript, /etc/hosts
      - chimeracoder 10y ago
        > But you can't avoid google analytics.. That's the easiest to avoid. Ghostery, or a simple edit to your /etc/hosts file. The problem is that tracking is much more pervasive, and there are many more ways you can be tracked that are much harder to block than Google Analytics.
        smokeyj 10y ago
        What about for iOS? Sure there's more pervasive methods, but I doubt any are as ubiquitous as GA. My ghostery plugin shows GA for nearly every website I visit.
  - ergot 10y ago
    > But really Google is so much worse than the NSA Google is one of the many tentacles of the NSA. Worth reading 'How the CIA made Google': https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... Also noteworthy: 'DARPA director Regina Dugan takes job as Google senior executive': http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/13/business/la-fi-tn-from-darpa-to-google-regina-dugan-20120313 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/13/business/la-fi-tn-fr...
  - Esau 10y ago
    Commercial surveillance is a problem, no doubt, but the problem isn't just Google - any held commercial data is susceptible to government snooping. Which is why people just blindly throwing their data into The Cloud annoys me.
- tptacek 10y ago
  Why does the USG need global surveillance capability to fabricate damning traffic?
  - jMyles 10y ago
    Hey buddy. You never responded to me in the other thread. :-) Strictly speaking, it's not a requirement. But it gives incredible cover. It makes everyone think, "well, it's possible - they know everything that goes on." In other words, absent this sort of mass vacuuming, the individual targeting of a dissident might seem much more suspicious.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      Conversely, even the myth that the NSA reads all traffic also lends credibility to that theory. They don't need to read all traffic, they just need HN commenters to say they do.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Don't normal people already sort of assume that? What's in doubt isn't the potential for the USG to learn these things, but the credibility of their unverified claims that they actually have learned them. I seriously don't see the connection between global surveillance and the USG's ability to lie convincingly: they can already lie convincingly. Later BTW: I felt like I responded to what you asked in other comments on the thread, and by the time I saw your comment, many other people had already responded. Nothing personal!
  - nullc 10y ago
    Why is it that you so predictably respond denying or apologizing for the government's unlawful surveillance (or, now that it has been proven, harassing people who are up in arms about it) in almost every related thread on Hacker News? To answer the question: A lie with a grain of truth is inherently much more powerful, since research will seem to confirm it. Massive surveillance allows for the construction of the most convincing fabricated evidence with the minimum possibility of being shown to be a fabrication. It also, if needed, provides a plausible vector for the discovery of private information which is under the exclusive control of the forger and set outside of the domain of public inquiry or evaluation and, by practice, more or less excluded from the rule of evidence.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  > this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with Unfortunately, the people I know who need to read this the most consider "aclu" is a dirty word.
  - ch4s3 10y ago
    Sadly many of the people protected by the ACLU have been convinced by marketing and propaganda that the ACLu wants to destroy America.
awqrre 10y ago
Meanwhile: Obama Opens NSA’s Vast Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community, Just in Time for Trump [1] 1. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-trove-of-warrantless-data-to-entire-intelligence-community-just-in-time-for-trump/ https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-tr...
- newsat13 10y ago
  Yeah, I hate it when this starts out with Trump bashing. Obama is much more guilty. I am not an american, so I don't exactly understand what the term 'liberal' means. Spying on your own people without warrant? More discussion here - https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5o1ovy/with_only_days_until_donald_trump_takes_office/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5o1ovy/with_only...
  - leesalminen 10y ago
    Heh, that's funny. I am American and don't understand the meaning of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in our modern culture.
    - AJ007 10y ago
      American politics is good cop - bad cop, which one is good or bad depends on political affiliations. Both have the exact same goals with minimal deviation besides what words are being read from the teleprompter. Political hardliners cancel each other out and solidify the power of the base.
    - pharrlax 10y ago
      Ideology is basically meaningless. American politics is entirely tribalism. The Democrats spent 8 years decrying the myriad ways the executive branch violated the Constitution under George W. Then Obama takes power and basically continues or expands nearly all of them, and with only a small handful of exceptions, the Democrats stop caring and forget entirely. The Republicans spend 8 years decrying overspending and the national debt under Obama, even organizing an enormous 'Tea Party' movement predicated around resistance to it. Then, as Trump is taking power, they rally around a budget that will increase the national debt by 50%. Ideology is an extremely loose set of guidelines that are only really adhered to in a coherent way by a tiny handful of true believers (folks like Bernie Sanders or Justin Amash). By and large, politics is purely about power -- once you win, all that matters is erasing any past victories claimed by the other party and then doing whatever will please your donors so you can win the next time.
tritosomal 10y ago
In most cases, being liberal is a polite code word for being a pussy. But really, anything empathetic, humanist. Anything playing devil's advocate in favor of reason. Anything anti-paranoiac, anti-xenophobic. Anything inclusive or pluralist. Anything that means playing fair, without being zealously competitive. Anything that engages the idea that we don't need to fight, or that there's no us versus them. Anything that cares about the environment. Anything that cares about animals. Anything that hints at worrying about nice clothes and clean hands. Anything that considers the possibility and degree of high quality coffee preparations.
- baloneyman 10y ago
  I agree with this in large swathes, but I feel like bible beaters are all about nice clothes and clean hands and they're conservative as all hell
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404667.
  - tritosomal 10y ago
    Color me surprised.
RichardHeart 10y ago
The copies the NSA keeps of your intellectual property are definitely not piracy though.
jjawssd 10y ago
Obama is ultimately responsible for trying to ram an international Internet surveillance mechanism into law (https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp) and giving the NSA a free pass to conduct mass surveillance against American citizens without a warrant. (New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA—which collects information under that authority with little oversight, transparency, or concern for privacy—share the raw streams of communications it intercepts directly with agencies including the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report today by the New York Times. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3283349-Raw-12333-surveillance-sharing-guidelines.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3283349-Raw-12333-su...)
intralizee 10y ago
I'm curious to what HN crowd thinks about a question related to all this. People are now under the assumption that US agencies are collecting all calls, emails, anything electronic for all citizens as it's technically possible and confirmation is slowly being revealed. If a crime was committed to a citizen, how would said citizen legally make a request for information the NSA or any agency has that would be useful as evidence. Shouldn't all citizens be able to use what is being collected in court as the government is for the people? How would a person in court go about requesting anything if the possibility exists.
- digler999 10y ago
  I know some people have already tried that and obviously failed. they just pull the "security" card and say any information they have cannot be disclosed in court because its a threat to national security. then they'd say those matters can only be conducted in a secret court where everyone has "security clearance", and oops - sorry plaintiff - you don't, so you're excluded from your own trial. This was part of what happened to Ladar Levison, owner of Lavabit which was served with an NSL. He couldn't easily shop for a lawyer because he could only contact lawyers that were authorized to handle top secret material. And he had to appear at one specific court venue in Virginia even though he was from Texas.
bogomipz 10y ago
>"To use a non-digital analogy: It’s as if the NSA sent agents to the U.S. Postal Service’s major processing centers to conduct continuous searches of everyone’s international mail." It's worth noting that U.S. Post Office also records meta data of all snail mail: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-confirms-photographing-all-us-mail.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-confirms... The last paragraph in the above link being completely laughable if course.
gist 10y ago
> and even invited Russia to hack the emails of his political opponent For the 1000th time. He didn't (and it's amazing how often this gets repeated) 'invite' them. He said they should release the documents if they already had them. Note the story line and then the exact quote here: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-putin-no-relationship-226282 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-putin-no-relatio... "I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing". Is not "hack Hillary Clinton". It's "if you've hacked Hillary Clinton release the emails". Key difference.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nl 10y ago
  I think a reasonable person could interprete that quote both ways. I'd note that the politico headline you linked says "Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton's email", and it is only a campaign spokesperson who said the opposite.
- ch4s3 10y ago
  >For the 1000th time. He didn't (and it's amazing how often this gets repeated) 'invite' them. He said they should release the documents if they already had them. The direct quote is as follows: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” It's hardly a stretch to read this as an invitation, despite the later claims of his handlers.
  - gist 10y ago
    > It's hardly a stretch to read this as an invitation It's an interesting Rorschach test. What would be fascinating is to do an experiment where someone didn't have an emotional attachment to the issue and see how this is interpreted by different parties. For that matter do the same with this issue merely see what people who fell on either side (or in the middle) thought.
sandworm101 10y ago
Warrantless? Thats really splitting hairs. Warrants arent a problem for national governments. The goal must remain protection against all surveillance ... full stop. There is no room for backdoors, even for those with warrants.
- drinkjuice 10y ago
  push, meet shove. https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/tools-for-treason/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/tools-for-treason/
Bombthecat 10y ago
I feel like it will just get worse and worse. No turn back possible anymore. Maybe in fifty or hundred years we can talk about it again. For now. It will just get worse.
- drinkjuice 10y ago
  If it will "just get worse" then there will be no "again". Frankly, elsewhere people get jailed for speaking their mind, and you know what some of them do? Speak their mind. We face pretty much no repercussions other than it not being so fun to discuss it, some people pouting because it holds up the mirror to their cowardice, so we.. don't? Nah. This is the only way worms can get power, by giants lying down and falling asleep. So maybe just don't.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
Is there anyway for us outside the US to stop the US government from spying on our comms, when we message people inside the US?
gagmaker 10y ago
I'd less worry about NSA then character like googles Eric Schmidt. This one will sell you in a blink of an eye for his own political hallucinations.
- Esau 10y ago
  Yep - both him and Zuckerberg are awful people is you are about privacy.
schwag09 10y ago
If you support this you should consider donating to Wikimedia or the ALCU: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give https://action.aclu.org/secure/donate-to-aclu https://action.aclu.org/secure/donate-to-aclu

150 points by maxt 10y ago

Very nice. Nothing new here, but this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with internet architecture and want to get up to speed with this particular facet of (seemingly illegal) surveillance. However, I want to quickly point out one omission in the discussion of the risks of allowing this kind of activity to continue: If the NSA is effectively spying on everybody who communicates with a server outside the US, it is trivial for them (or another government agency) to fabricate traffic (presumably child pornography) in order to target someone. The ACLU (and others similarly positioned to criticize this conduct) always rightly point to the risks to journalists and human rights activists of having their communications intercepted and accurately portrayed, but what about the ease of lying about it in order to target dissidents? This seems like an obvious vector and deserves more attention and discussion.

devoply 10y ago
If it were legal you could call it unconstitutional. The point is do not want. But really Google is so much worse than the NSA. We can't do anything about Google though. He's like an uninvited guest to every party. And now we have Microsoft to contend with as well.
- late2part 10y ago
  We implicity permit Google to have our info. We have not given informed consent to allow our government to take this data. Therefore it is an unreasonable search and seizure of our property.
  - newsat13 10y ago
    This is incorrect. Most people don't realize this. Do you consent your car to store all your location information in the cloud? What if TV started storing all things you watch in the cloud? Tomorrow, if all the car/tv manufacturers started doing this, what choice do you have? No, the option is not "do not use cars/tv". And tbh, I don't even think 80% of the population is cognizant about what is being collected and what it's used for. This is the reality and they have "accepted" it as-is. This is the situation we find ourselves with email (all email providers mark any other email as spam).
    - Fnoord 10y ago
      > Tomorrow, if all the car/tv manufacturers started doing this, what choice do you have? No, the option is not "do not use cars/tv" Supply & demand. If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met. Vote with your wallet. Also, do not forget the second hand market for cars. This one's huge. There's still TVs and cars available which are dumb. There's still laptops available without Intel ME. > This is the situation we find ourselves with email (all email providers mark any other email as spam). What are you on about?
      - hartz 10y ago
        If you run your own mail server, it's hard to get email deliverability to the inboxes of people who use the Big 3 (Gmail, yahoo mail, Outlook.com). This makes using these privacy-invasive email services a much easier decision
        sliken 10y ago
        Problems seem more to do with the age of the domain, rather than the size.
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        > If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met. Such demand will never rise to substantial levels. The moment your solution to a problem requires the general public to (change their behavior/become educated about something), your solution is unworkable. If the general public regularly changed their habits out of principle, Windows would have been displaced by Linux in the 90s and the banana and diamond industries would be dead or dying. It doesn't work that way, and it's unrealistic to assume it ever can.
        Fnoord 10y ago
        > If the general public regularly changed their habits out of principle, Windows would have been displaced by Linux in the 90s and the banana and diamond industries would be dead or dying. My argument has never been that the general public at a whole changes something out of principle. Some of us may, most will not. Sadly you're right on that account. My argument was that if there is a demand for a product this will (eventually) be met by supply. I don't know anything about the banana industry. I do know that Windows is from the former monopolist Microsoft. I was there when the Halloween documents got released into the wild. The diamond industry is a former monopoly as well (De Beers). The diamond industry furthermore has the advantage of tradition. However according to [1] "Synthetic diamonds sold as jewelry typically sell for 15-20% less than natural equivalents, but the relative price is expected decline further as production economics improve." A-ha we got incentive right there: a price of 15-20% of the natural counterpart which is going to drop further over time! What makes you believe this competitor is irrelevant, unable to compete with natural diamonds? I see the exact opposite. So we have two incentives now: the principal, ideologic one (sadly usually doesn't fly; we agree there) and a money one. Diamonds lose their value the moment they're bought. There's no second hand market for them. It is a stupid investment. If you can save 80-85% on a stupid investment that seems like a pretty good incentive to me. > It doesn't work that way, and it's unrealistic to assume it ever can. If we're talking about monopolies, no, but those monopolies stay monopolies due to lack of government intervention and because the wheels of justice grind slowly. Microsoft eventually got what they deserved by courts, and they failed to compete with the successors of the PC which ran the 'children' of Linux and macOS (Android and iOS). Microsoft even had to change their business model, giving away Windows 10 and focusing on advertising instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#Gemstones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#Gemstones
- Fnoord 10y ago
  > We can't do anything about Google though. Yes, we can! Don't use Google, or use certain settings in the applications which enhance your privacy. The default settings are not always the best settings for the user. Don't use Google Search. Use a search engine which respects your privacy such as the scraper DuckDuckGo (DDG). Don't use Gmail. Use an e-mail provider which doesn't scan through your e-mail. Where you got IMAP access. Use a device where you can use GPG. Or use alternative methods of communication. Don't use Google Maps. Use a maps application which respects your privacy such as OpenStreetMap or (arguably) Apple Maps. Don't use Google Fit. [...] And so on, so forth. Ask yourself the following: do I really need this? The answer is often: "not really." You have the option to use neither. If the choice is Android or iOS you pay more for iOS devices but your privacy generally suffers less. [Ignoring the option of dumbphones] there's a third option: don't take your phone with you. It is a choice to take your Android or iOS device with you. Among others, Bruce Schneier wrote about this in his book Data And Goliath.
  - smokeyj 10y ago
    But you can't avoid google analytics..
    - Fnoord 10y ago
      Why not? There's loads of options. Some examples include uBlock, NoScript, /etc/hosts
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      > But you can't avoid google analytics.. That's the easiest to avoid. Ghostery, or a simple edit to your /etc/hosts file. The problem is that tracking is much more pervasive, and there are many more ways you can be tracked that are much harder to block than Google Analytics.
      - smokeyj 10y ago
        What about for iOS? Sure there's more pervasive methods, but I doubt any are as ubiquitous as GA. My ghostery plugin shows GA for nearly every website I visit.
- ergot 10y ago
  > But really Google is so much worse than the NSA Google is one of the many tentacles of the NSA. Worth reading 'How the CIA made Google': https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... Also noteworthy: 'DARPA director Regina Dugan takes job as Google senior executive': http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/13/business/la-fi-tn-from-darpa-to-google-regina-dugan-20120313 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/13/business/la-fi-tn-fr...
- Esau 10y ago
  Commercial surveillance is a problem, no doubt, but the problem isn't just Google - any held commercial data is susceptible to government snooping. Which is why people just blindly throwing their data into The Cloud annoys me.
tptacek 10y ago
Why does the USG need global surveillance capability to fabricate damning traffic?
- jMyles 10y ago
  Hey buddy. You never responded to me in the other thread. :-) Strictly speaking, it's not a requirement. But it gives incredible cover. It makes everyone think, "well, it's possible - they know everything that goes on." In other words, absent this sort of mass vacuuming, the individual targeting of a dissident might seem much more suspicious.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Conversely, even the myth that the NSA reads all traffic also lends credibility to that theory. They don't need to read all traffic, they just need HN commenters to say they do.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Don't normal people already sort of assume that? What's in doubt isn't the potential for the USG to learn these things, but the credibility of their unverified claims that they actually have learned them. I seriously don't see the connection between global surveillance and the USG's ability to lie convincingly: they can already lie convincingly. Later BTW: I felt like I responded to what you asked in other comments on the thread, and by the time I saw your comment, many other people had already responded. Nothing personal!
- nullc 10y ago
  Why is it that you so predictably respond denying or apologizing for the government's unlawful surveillance (or, now that it has been proven, harassing people who are up in arms about it) in almost every related thread on Hacker News? To answer the question: A lie with a grain of truth is inherently much more powerful, since research will seem to confirm it. Massive surveillance allows for the construction of the most convincing fabricated evidence with the minimum possibility of being shown to be a fabrication. It also, if needed, provides a plausible vector for the discovery of private information which is under the exclusive control of the forger and set outside of the domain of public inquiry or evaluation and, by practice, more or less excluded from the rule of evidence.
mixmastamyk 10y ago
> this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with Unfortunately, the people I know who need to read this the most consider "aclu" is a dirty word.
- ch4s3 10y ago
  Sadly many of the people protected by the ACLU have been convinced by marketing and propaganda that the ACLu wants to destroy America.

awqrre 10y ago

Meanwhile: Obama Opens NSA’s Vast Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community, Just in Time for Trump [1] 1. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-trove-of-warrantless-data-to-entire-intelligence-community-just-in-time-for-trump/ https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-tr...

newsat13 10y ago
Yeah, I hate it when this starts out with Trump bashing. Obama is much more guilty. I am not an american, so I don't exactly understand what the term 'liberal' means. Spying on your own people without warrant? More discussion here - https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5o1ovy/with_only_days_until_donald_trump_takes_office/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5o1ovy/with_only...
- leesalminen 10y ago
  Heh, that's funny. I am American and don't understand the meaning of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in our modern culture.
  - AJ007 10y ago
    American politics is good cop - bad cop, which one is good or bad depends on political affiliations. Both have the exact same goals with minimal deviation besides what words are being read from the teleprompter. Political hardliners cancel each other out and solidify the power of the base.
  - pharrlax 10y ago
    Ideology is basically meaningless. American politics is entirely tribalism. The Democrats spent 8 years decrying the myriad ways the executive branch violated the Constitution under George W. Then Obama takes power and basically continues or expands nearly all of them, and with only a small handful of exceptions, the Democrats stop caring and forget entirely. The Republicans spend 8 years decrying overspending and the national debt under Obama, even organizing an enormous 'Tea Party' movement predicated around resistance to it. Then, as Trump is taking power, they rally around a budget that will increase the national debt by 50%. Ideology is an extremely loose set of guidelines that are only really adhered to in a coherent way by a tiny handful of true believers (folks like Bernie Sanders or Justin Amash). By and large, politics is purely about power -- once you win, all that matters is erasing any past victories claimed by the other party and then doing whatever will please your donors so you can win the next time.

tritosomal 10y ago

In most cases, being liberal is a polite code word for being a pussy. But really, anything empathetic, humanist. Anything playing devil's advocate in favor of reason. Anything anti-paranoiac, anti-xenophobic. Anything inclusive or pluralist. Anything that means playing fair, without being zealously competitive. Anything that engages the idea that we don't need to fight, or that there's no us versus them. Anything that cares about the environment. Anything that cares about animals. Anything that hints at worrying about nice clothes and clean hands. Anything that considers the possibility and degree of high quality coffee preparations.

baloneyman 10y ago
I agree with this in large swathes, but I feel like bible beaters are all about nice clothes and clean hands and they're conservative as all hell
sctb 10y ago
We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404667.
- tritosomal 10y ago
  Color me surprised.

RichardHeart 10y ago

The copies the NSA keeps of your intellectual property are definitely not piracy though.

jjawssd 10y ago

Obama is ultimately responsible for trying to ram an international Internet surveillance mechanism into law (https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp) and giving the NSA a free pass to conduct mass surveillance against American citizens without a warrant. (New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA—which collects information under that authority with little oversight, transparency, or concern for privacy—share the raw streams of communications it intercepts directly with agencies including the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report today by the New York Times. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3283349-Raw-12333-surveillance-sharing-guidelines.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3283349-Raw-12333-su...)

intralizee 10y ago

I'm curious to what HN crowd thinks about a question related to all this. People are now under the assumption that US agencies are collecting all calls, emails, anything electronic for all citizens as it's technically possible and confirmation is slowly being revealed. If a crime was committed to a citizen, how would said citizen legally make a request for information the NSA or any agency has that would be useful as evidence. Shouldn't all citizens be able to use what is being collected in court as the government is for the people? How would a person in court go about requesting anything if the possibility exists.

digler999 10y ago
I know some people have already tried that and obviously failed. they just pull the "security" card and say any information they have cannot be disclosed in court because its a threat to national security. then they'd say those matters can only be conducted in a secret court where everyone has "security clearance", and oops - sorry plaintiff - you don't, so you're excluded from your own trial. This was part of what happened to Ladar Levison, owner of Lavabit which was served with an NSL. He couldn't easily shop for a lawyer because he could only contact lawyers that were authorized to handle top secret material. And he had to appear at one specific court venue in Virginia even though he was from Texas.

bogomipz 10y ago

>"To use a non-digital analogy: It’s as if the NSA sent agents to the U.S. Postal Service’s major processing centers to conduct continuous searches of everyone’s international mail." It's worth noting that U.S. Post Office also records meta data of all snail mail: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-confirms-photographing-all-us-mail.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-confirms... The last paragraph in the above link being completely laughable if course.

gist 10y ago

> and even invited Russia to hack the emails of his political opponent For the 1000th time. He didn't (and it's amazing how often this gets repeated) 'invite' them. He said they should release the documents if they already had them. Note the story line and then the exact quote here: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-putin-no-relationship-226282 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-putin-no-relatio... "I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing". Is not "hack Hillary Clinton". It's "if you've hacked Hillary Clinton release the emails". Key difference.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nl 10y ago
I think a reasonable person could interprete that quote both ways. I'd note that the politico headline you linked says "Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton's email", and it is only a campaign spokesperson who said the opposite.
ch4s3 10y ago
>For the 1000th time. He didn't (and it's amazing how often this gets repeated) 'invite' them. He said they should release the documents if they already had them. The direct quote is as follows: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” It's hardly a stretch to read this as an invitation, despite the later claims of his handlers.
- gist 10y ago
  > It's hardly a stretch to read this as an invitation It's an interesting Rorschach test. What would be fascinating is to do an experiment where someone didn't have an emotional attachment to the issue and see how this is interpreted by different parties. For that matter do the same with this issue merely see what people who fell on either side (or in the middle) thought.

sandworm101 10y ago

Warrantless? Thats really splitting hairs. Warrants arent a problem for national governments. The goal must remain protection against all surveillance ... full stop. There is no room for backdoors, even for those with warrants.

drinkjuice 10y ago
push, meet shove. https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/tools-for-treason/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/tools-for-treason/

Bombthecat 10y ago

I feel like it will just get worse and worse. No turn back possible anymore. Maybe in fifty or hundred years we can talk about it again. For now. It will just get worse.

drinkjuice 10y ago
If it will "just get worse" then there will be no "again". Frankly, elsewhere people get jailed for speaking their mind, and you know what some of them do? Speak their mind. We face pretty much no repercussions other than it not being so fun to discuss it, some people pouting because it holds up the mirror to their cowardice, so we.. don't? Nah. This is the only way worms can get power, by giants lying down and falling asleep. So maybe just don't.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

Is there anyway for us outside the US to stop the US government from spying on our comms, when we message people inside the US?

gagmaker 10y ago

I'd less worry about NSA then character like googles Eric Schmidt. This one will sell you in a blink of an eye for his own political hallucinations.

Esau 10y ago
Yep - both him and Zuckerberg are awful people is you are about privacy.

schwag09 10y ago

If you support this you should consider donating to Wikimedia or the ALCU: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give https://action.aclu.org/secure/donate-to-aclu https://action.aclu.org/secure/donate-to-aclu