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House Votes to Renew Surveillance Law, Rejecting New Privacy Limits
- Andersos 9y agoPrivacy in the US is dead
- plandis 9y agoWell, it’s not that bleak. You just need to have the knowledge to control your own privacy rather than relying on the government to have your back. Really the bad part is that most people don’t know about or how to use technology to protect their privacy :-/
- ProAm 9y ago> rather than relying on the government to have your back What's the purpose of having a government again?
- dmm 9y agoSocial Security + Medicare + Medicaid is 50% of the federal budget. Defense is another 17%. So the purpose of the government is mostly income redistribution and defense.
- cjbenedikt 9y agoWhere do your nbrs come from? https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_fed_spending_pie_chart https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_fed_spending_pie_cha...
- 24gttghh 9y agoThose numbers confirm the stats, and actually prove GP's point better (that the gov't is mostly medicare/aid, social security, and defense; half being the former, and ~22% being spent on defense), and are similar to numbers from the CBO [0] [0] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/budgetinfographic.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...
- dmm 9y agoI was using the numbers for 2015. The years after that aren't significantly different. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/US_Federal_Budget_Comparison_2016_vs._2015.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/US_Feder...
- 1001101 9y agoIf you've looked at the Shadow Brokers releases, Vault 7 etc., you will be reminded that, even as a privacy conscious technologist, you're still going up against PhDs with budgets of 10s of billions / yr.
- seanp2k2 9y ago...who work on this stuff as a day job, and likely also as passion projects. IOW, unless you dedicate your entire life to not being spied upon, you'll very likely "lose".
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y agoPrivacy in the world is dead (more precisely, dying), for all intents and purposes. The technological cat that enabled its demise can't be put back into the bag. Currently the problem is that certain classes of people have more access to "private" information than others, but once that goes away society will adapt to the new normal and look back with confusion at why we were so concerned about not being able to hide things.
- lurquer 9y agoAgreed. But, we're missing the point quibbling about search histories and emails... That's nothing compared to what's coming. The data already exists to track your every move. It's just a matter of consolidating and organizing it. Right now, there is money to be made selling customer data for marketing and the like. This keeps the repositories of our data from sharing with one another. But, soon, the economics will flip. And, there will be money to be made from selling privacy. For instance, assume all credit card, phone, cable companies, etc. pool their data. For a monthly subscription, this conglomerate will keep your info (or parts of it) hidden. The default will be everything is knowable about everyone, except for those who pay a fee to erase info from their records. Far more money to be made selling privacy than selling info. 4th amendment and all the rest is moot. Our info is held by private international companies who, eventually, will begin charging you to keep things hidden from others.
- xixi77 9y agoIt might be even worse. I actually doubt they'll allow you to get your info deleted, even for a fee, unless forced by law: it would only be worth it for them (as in, producing revenue that is a significant fraction of that they would be getting from selling the data) if enough people bother, but in that case, deleting their information would make the data a lot less attractive for the potential buyers...
- ataturk 9y agoAgreed, but we have to stand on principle, especially for all those people in countries like China that are using technology in a far more repressive fashion. This is a fight humanity can't lose.
- xir78 9y agoTurmp should be happy about this, it will be useful in cracking down on citizens and opponents who criticize him.
- knz 9y ago> Turmp should be happy about this To be fair, Trump is hardly the the first President to seek renewal of such laws. > useful in cracking down on citizens and opponents who criticize him. There were multiple reports about "Dark Side" yesterday - https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/dark-side-federal-unit-feeds-possibly-illegal-tips-to-local-cops-report-says/ https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/dark-side-federal-unit-... What could possibly go wrong.....
- xir78 9y agoHe opposed it according to the article.
- anon11082016 9y agoYeah that won't stop people frothing at the mouth. Any day now, annny day Trump is going to start locking citizens up for criticizing him. Any day.
- knz 9y agohttps://www.npr.org/2018/01/11/577331402/ahead-of-hill-vote-trump-attacks-spy-bill-his-administration-supports https://www.npr.org/2018/01/11/577331402/ahead-of-hill-vote-... "For the record, Trump's administration supports full reauthorization. In fact, the White House issued a statement on Wednesday evening — hours before Trump's tweet — restating its call for members of Congress to vote for its continued use."
- wtf_is_up 9y agoThe precedence has been set for using FISA against your political opponents. I agree, this will be great for him.
- brndnmtthws 9y agoThankfully the rules of math still apply and it's never been easier to use encryption just about everywhere. The question for me is: at what point will people begin to reject this farce of a ruling elite that exists today?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- epmaybe 9y agoI had a discussion with my mother regarding surveillance and privacy and how they relate to safety. I feel like she understands that surveillance when used in a nefarious manner can be detrimental to individual freedoms, but is pro surveillance regardless. This is because she believes that the benefits of keeping others safe outweighs the potential for misuse. How can I help her understand why people fight for privacy?
- PopsiclePete 9y agoYou can't. Most people will choose safety over freedom every single time.
- dgllghr 9y agoI completely understand where you're coming from, and I share some of that cynicism. But there are many contrary examples. Abolitionists fought in the US Civil War to end slavery. Russian journalists and politicians are killed left and right but continue to challenge Putin's dictatorship. The Kurds, though they have never had their own state, continue to resist both Turkey and ISIS. Protesters were attacked and killed for protesting the neo-nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA just last year. I think it's as Thomas Jefferson said: "...all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Perhaps in this case, the suffering is not great and the vision of privacy is not strongly supported. But I disagree that people will choose safety over freedom every time.
- javajosh 9y agoAmerican slaves weren't safe, so there wasn't a trade-off there.
- StanislavPetrov 9y agoWhich is why you have to help explain to her that the police state has absolutely nothing to do with keeping you safe.
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- AnimalMuppet 9y agoOK, it passed the House. Now the fight moves to the Senate. Anybody have any insight on whether it will fly through there, or whether there is a chance of derailing it?
- kej 9y agoI could maybe see Sen Wyden trying to stop it, he's been pretty good on things like this lately, but I bet there are enough pro-surveillance Democrats (Feinstein, etc.) to overcome any potential filibuster.
- znpy 9y agoUSA, the land of the monitored.
- coldcode 9y agoThe President actually tweeted two incompatible positions this morning. Guess they picked the one they wanted.
- sanjeetsuhag 9y agoPaul Ryan, in his press conference this morning[1], said that the President "has concerns about the Domestic FISA law". [1] - https://youtu.be/xUyKCpRl68E?t=3448 https://youtu.be/xUyKCpRl68E?t=3448
- tootie 9y agoHis opposition to this bill is based on nonsense, but it would be wonderfully ironic if he used it as the basis for veto.
- jonny_eh 9y agoHe'd never veto anything, he'd have to read the bill to veto it.
- cavanasm 9y agoYou seem to have been downvoted, possibly for how quippy your comment is, but there's some indication that this reasoning isn't far off. Earlier this week Trump made clear during his televised immigration policy meeting that he would sign anything Congress actually sent him, which seems like a very odd position to take when you consider that immigration was Trump's signature campaign issue.
- cryptonector 9y agoIt's easy to say "I'll sign anything you send me" if you're certain they will be unable to send anything. It is risky, sure, because the unexpected can happen. The next day he also gave a summary of the meeting that was very different from what attendees thought. The meeting was a made-for-TV moment, so you should take it in with lots of salt.
- mtgx 9y agoFFS New York Times, can you not make EVERY GOD DAMN ARTICLE about Trump and distract everyone from the main issue here? More than half of this article is about Trump's tweets. How about naming and shaming all the Republicans and Democrats that voted to extend the surveillance law instead?
- blackrose 9y ago> Mr. Trump, who is known to watch Fox News while he is tweeting, posted his tweet shortly after a Fox News legal analyst appealed directly to the president during a Thursday morning segment about the coming House vote. The analyst, Andrew Napolitano, turned to television cameras and said, “Mr. President, this is not the way to go.” He added that Mr. Trump’s “woes” began with surveillance. lol. But seriously we need someone in the oval office who feels strongly about protecting the privacy of Americans (and everyone else!). Trump is just another one in the line to rubber-stamp this. Not holding my breath though...
- nimbius 9y agoThis has been a can kicked for many a mile. First bush, then obama, and now trump. The undocumented and largely ignored effect of FISA is that it is quietly driving cryptography to unprecedented levels of adoption. OpenPGP is part of Yubikey now, granting the average user HSM level security for their encryption for less than $50. Google has increased their cipherstrength and offers several multifactor solutions as well as foreign agent attack warnings for journalists. GPG offers curve25519 in light of just the implication of poisoned NIST primes. Signal sidesteps bugged SMS in favour of a hardened PFS channel of OTR deniable communication in video, voice and text. Letsencrypt is working to blanket the world in affordable, quick, and easy crypto for any site desired. Finally, tor's many exploits have been patched, and the protocols weaknesses have given way to more secure tools like i2p. The government is largely focusing on iPhone at this point, and why not. Apple is an easy target to beat on for the woes of late stage capitalism and unchecked foreign policy, however any modern consumer tech company worth their salt has seen the writing for quite some time. Encrypt, and make sure you're out of the loop entirely.
- ballenf 9y agoI take no solace in typical cryptography as it does nothing to hide most metadata. Who I talk to, when, how often (and the same for websites visited) is way more sensitive in the collective than the contents of any single one of those interactions. Signal type apps hide both and are valuable, but without widespread adoption is meaningless to most people. I'm not against any of the progress you cite, but so long as people can be targeted based on metadata they are at risk. Once targeted, it becomes child's play to bypass the encryption that most people employ, whether through social engineering or side channel attacks (beyond Spectre-type) or governmental requests/threats to cloud providers.
- cryptonector 9y agoCrypto does nothing to prevent rubber hose attacks. And as you note, it is very difficult to prevent traffic analysis, that being the only thing the government really needs to find what it's looking for anyways.
- tzs 9y ago> The vote on Thursday was a victory for the Trump administration and the intelligence community, which opposed imposing major new curbs on the program, and for Republican leadership, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who had blocked the House from an opportunity to consider a less-sweeping compromise package developed by the House Judiciary Committee. They gambled that faced with an all-or-essentially-nothing choice, a majority of lawmakers would choose the status quo — and won. Normally if you do not like what a House member does there is not much you can do unless you are in that member's district. In that case you can vote for someone other than them. In the case of Ryan, though, you can do something even if you live in another district. The majority party decides on who will be Speaker. If Ryan's partly loses its majority Ryan goes back to being just an ordinary member of the House, one of over 400. You can indirectly vote against Ryan's speakership by voting against the candidate from his party in your district.
- kbd 9y agoExcept Pelosi and many Democrats voted for this as well...
- Retric 9y agoCompare the ratio of support from their members, and the parties are not equivalent. Even if there is plenty of support from across the isle to pass these measures. So, if you want to shift parties you need to get into the primary process. One step deeper, there is a lot of popular support in the US for these measures. Nobody wants to face "Did not vote to keep you safe" attack add when that's going to resonate with people.
- tzs 9y agoSo? As was mentioned in the excerpt from the article I quoted Ryan would not allow the House to consider a compromise from the House Judiciary Committee. How many of those Democrats would have gone for that compromise bill if that had been on the table? We need both privacy and surveillance. The harm from too little privacy tends to manifest on a longer time frame than the harm from too little surveillance, so when considering a good balance between the two is off the table it is understandable one might go for the option that looks like it will be the safest short term. Pelosi is indeed quite aligned with Republicans on surveillance issues. If she had been speaker she probably would have supported the current bill. But would she have blocked consideration of the compromise, like Ryan did? That seems much less likely, because despite Pelosi and a few other Democrats being quite pro-surveillance the fact is that the party as a whole is quite a bit less pro-surveillance than are the Republicans as a whole. She would have had a harder time than Ryan keeping the compromise from being considered because she would be going against the majority of her own party, unlike Ryan.
- bgentry 9y ago55 House Democrats, including Pelosi, voted against the USA Rights Act amendment that would have substantially limited the surveillance against US citizens. 65 House Democrats ultimately voted in favor of this bill and giving the Trump admin more unchecked surveillance powers. https://twitter.com/gzornick/status/951501089047764992 https://twitter.com/gzornick/status/951501089047764992 http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2018/roll016.xml http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2018/roll016.xml
- rocmcd 9y agoDoes anyone know if there is a place where representatives put their reasoning behind votes?
- Something1234 9y agoIf there isn't one yet, there needs to be one. Our government needs to be made more transparent, and we deserve to know their train of thought for these incredible and large decisions.
- maxerickson 9y agoIf you somehow convince them to require it of themselves you'll just get page after page of disingenuous paffle.
- TallGuyShort 9y agoAnd it'll be done by some intern. Same as when you write or call them now.
- bmelton 9y agoNot my representative, bu Justin Amash, an R from Michigan's 3rd District, posts the rationale for why he voted how he voted on most bills on Facebook. To my knowledge, he's the only one that does it with any degree of regularity.
- rektide 9y agoAs Wyden[1] points out, Congress has nearly no information on what impact the FISA program has. How many Americans are targeted already? The military refuses to answer Congress. How many emails & other collections are swept up? The military refuses to answer to Congress. This bill explicitly allows it's use directly against Americans and declares which circumstances the FBI & other agencies need to use warrants and where these agencies will now be permitted warrantless access to FISA collections. "Abouts" collection has a direct means to being permitted again. Ever use the word Benghazi in an email? Ok, all your communication might be wiretapped from now on. If the FBI ever wants to investigate you for something non terrorism related, something totally unrelated to Benghazi? No problem. Maybe- in some cases- they MIGHT need a warrant. Just Security had a great writeup[2]. This bill is a travesty, especially given that Congress has again and again asked for some information to inform them about how FISA is being used already, and the military has stonewalled and stonewalled and stonewalled. That congress would radically expand these powers, let them now directly target Americans, and would allow the FBI & others access to this program, after being continually rebuffed, AND would make this program unable to be challenged in court- it's the pinnacle of madness. It's complete dereliction of duty by congress, and one of the saddest moments of cowardice in the US Governments history that we'd stoop so low. [1] https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/dont-pass-surveillance-legislation-dark#.WlX-vO2BQqo.twitter https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/dont-pass-surv... [2] https://www.justsecurity.org/50801/house-intelligence-committees-section-702-bill-wolf-sheeps-clothing/ https://www.justsecurity.org/50801/house-intelligence-commit...
- dingaling 9y ago> The military refuses to answer Congress. Pedantically the NSA, FBI and CIA are not 'military' The DIA, NRO and NIMA are.
- keldaris 9y agoThat's not quite right, the NSA is a DoD agency and the highest ranking civilian in it is the Deputy Director. The Director of the NSA is a military officer also in charge of USCYBERCOM. The FBI and the CIA are indeed civilian agencies (though the CIA has some caveats there).
- JohnStudio 9y agoCuriosity is getting the best of me, and I figured HN is a good place to scratch the itch. Has anyone done a study or solicited information from the government that shows the impact of legislation such as FISA or better yet the Patriot ACT's post provision sunset (what's left of the act) parts? Namely - hard numbers that shows in a numerical fashion the fact based evidence to keep overt invasions of privacy in check in the name of security. Being from New York, I always try to question politicians here - more specifically Gov. Cuomo on the quantifiable evidence that supports the SAFE ACT's passage in our state - on such things, to have a better impact on things that affect me regionally vs. worrying about broad stroke Federal things that rarely do.
- filoeleven 9y agoThis is bad news. > “The Intelligence Committee’s bill disregards the Constitution and common sense by granting the government the authority to search Americans’ communications without first obtaining a warrant,” Schuman told The Intercept. “Not only does this turn the purpose of the foreign surveillance law on its head, transforming it into a domestic surveillance tool, but it places activists, minorities, and everyone else at the mercy of President Trump and Attorney General Sessions, who have made clear their disregard for legal constraints and democratic norms.” https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/nsa-surveillance-fisa-section-702-reauthorization-fbi/ https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/nsa-surveillance-fisa-se...
- nullifidian 9y agoCan someone clear it up for me. How likely is it that my google searches are being swept up and stored indefinitely, because I'm foreigner. I've disabled google search history, though I doubt it will help. Similar question - do they have a profile for every foreigner they can identify?
- seanp2k2 9y agoSee https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect : Normally, one would think that a communication that has been intercepted and stored in a government database as “collected.” But the government’s definition of what it means to “collect” intelligence information is quite different from its plain meaning. Under Department of Defense regulations, information is considered to be “collected” only after it has been “received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component,” and “data acquired by electronic means is ‘collected’ only when it has been processed into intelligible form.” In other words, the NSA can intercept and store communications in its data base and have an algorithm search them for key words and analyze the meta data without ever considering the communications “collected.” TL;DR they're being swept up and stored indefinitely for everyone, all the time, right now.
- efoto 9y agoGoogle search uses HTTPS and, unless you personally is a target and/or your devices are hacked, the content of your searches is not visible to anyone except Google. Your citizenship doesn't matter.
- nullifidian 9y agoThey've tapped into google's internal networks in the past. I suspect they've already regained the access. Another matter is whether google really deletes accounts when asked, or really doesn't store histories when asked. Because if the data is stored by Google, when the time comes and the person becomes "interesting" for the US establishment, they can rubber-stamp FISA court warrant and get this data.
- corpMaverick 9y agoLet's say a state actor decides to cyber attack the US or allies. We want every person, gobernment or economic entity to be secure. A state actor can do more widespread damage than what we gain by catching some terrorists. Precisely for national security, we need good security in every entity.
- willstrafach 9y agoFISA/702 is also used to trace/analyze cyber attacks, it is not just for counter-terrorism. Example - A report (leaked to The Intercept) regarding Russian spearphishing: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3766950/NSA-Report-on-Russia-Spearphishing.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3766950/NSA-Repor...
- clackanon 9y agoThis shouldn't be any surprise to anyone. Congress gives lip service to representing their constituents. In reality, the only people (and interests) they represent are THEMSELVES.
- throwacide 9y agosomeone needs to do independent audits in the form of a zero knowledge proof to say “ok I understand why the wizards and warlocks are at battle”. Used to be that we would say to ourselves, “we should consider It likely Obama flipped once in office because he saw confidential stuff that would make you sick”, which is a more cosmo view