5 ms·

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to ma

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

mtgx 7y ago
Yes, the point of the article is that there are very few if any checks and balances. If you support anything but paying lip service to checks and balances then you would support restricting US government's surveillance powers and requiring a warrant in many more instances than it is required today (almost never when it comes to the NSA, and now the FBI and other agencies can warrantless look at your data before going to court, too, thanks to the latest FISA extension).
alexfromapex 7y ago
It can be done, the intelligence agencies just need to find new ways to identify terrorists or prevent terrorists from causing harm.
- 54thr 7y ago
  What if the terrorists were intelligence agencies? How would we stop them?
Razengan 7y ago
Really? It doesn't even occur to you to address the issues that create "terrorists?"
- mpiedrav 7y ago
  Reasons behind the kind of terrorism for which mass surveillance is enforced (e.g., Muslim fundamentalists against American interests) have deep historical roots, too messy to be addressed. Britain and France had geopolitical and business interests in the Middle East since the 18-19th century. America since the 20th, when oil suddenly had all the spotlight. Fundamentalists are convinced that "the West" is the Devil on Earth. No political force can pacify fundamentalists nor avoid future generations.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    You're conveniently ignoring the fact that the US has historically ruined entire countries for multiple generations just to benefit itself. Maybe if we'd stop carpet bombing other countries we'd have fewer people that hate us. Most of the problems in the Middle East, at least with regards to them hating the US, are because the US did something to directly make them hate the US. Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan - at least in their current iterations - are all problems the US created. This is barely even beginning to describe the list of atrocities the US has committed against other countries. The US has terrorists because the US creates terrorists, sometimes from us terrorizing other countries that are too insignificant for the world to take notice. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, look into the history of US drone strikes just for a very recent example of the US leveraging its military superiority to decimate other countries. What's interesting is it gets worse regardless of the president.
    - mpiedrav 7y ago
      I'm not ignoring those facts about the destructive role of America in the Middle East. What I'm alluding to is that fundamentalists hating the West have way more "historical ammo" for their arguments than just pointing at the US. It's just that the current biggest offender is America (which makes it the main target for terrorism). Before that, it was Britain. On a grand historical scale, the Powers That May at any given point in time become the main offender against those having something of value. Next time it'll probably be China (beginning with the "Security Theater" [1] in Xinjiang). [1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/11/beyond_security_thea.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/11/beyond_secu...
  - justincredible 7y ago
    We could at least address domestic terrorism.
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  Some people think terrorists will always exist (despite them very clearly growing in numbers) when it's actually governments and the US in particular that radicalise most of them by bombing their countries.
- refurb 7y ago
  There will always be people willing to use violence to effect change, no matter how hard you try and fix the issues they raise.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    > to effect change What change? Why don't you let them effect those changes?
    - refurb 7y ago
      Because some of those changes violate human rights?
      - Razengan 7y ago
        Mass surveillance and warrantless invasion of everyone's privacy does not violate human rights?
npo9 7y ago
> Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. The article: Surveillance fails to catch terrorist. Your argument: Without surveillance we cannot catch terrorist. My question: How are we catching them now? How did we catch bad actors and saboteurs before surveillance?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  There's a base rate fallacy here: take a look at total deaths from terrorism in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#U.S._totals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States... After September 11, the typical number of deaths from terrorism in a given year was...0, give or take a few, with a disconcerting uptick since 2013. Great, our efforts to curb terrorism are working! From 1975-2001, the typical number of deaths from terrorism in a given year was...2. Wait, the massive surveillance state has saved 2 lives a year? What? We saved more lives by posting a guard at the Caltrain tracks in Palo Alto to keep people from killing themselves. By the numbers, terrorism just wasn't a problem, because rational people don't blow themselves up to make a point. Mentally ill people do, and a significant number of mass shootings are not counted in the terrorism statistics but actually kill far more people. But by making terrorism into a big bogeyman that's going to kill you, it feeds into the interests of the media, of the state, and of the military-industrial complex, and so there are a lot of powerful forces shaping the discourse around terrorism that aren't necessarily reflective of reality.
  - npo9 7y ago
    “We’re not catching them because they aren’t there” seems like a valid hypothesis, but I’m not sure I fully buy into it.
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
The structure of your statement has problems not related to the topic at all. When you take something away that never (or rarely) happens, how do you establish causality? Suppose I told you that taking bazookas away from people that live in the city prevents bear attacks? You might say that there aren't bear attacks in the city anyway, which would be true, but you couldn't prove it one way or another. Who knows, maybe there would have been one bear attack if people ran around with bazookas shooting up the nearby forest. Now add in the complexity that terrorism is more like a rate than a yes/no question. What if I told you that taking away bazookas in the city reduced the crime rate? Well, the crime rate in many cities has decreased, but how are those two related? Once again, we're left with a statement that might sound good to some and bad to others -- and no way to reasonably discuss it. The only thing we can say with certainty is that no matter what we do, terrorism will continue exist. We can never eliminate it no matter how hard we try. So unless we want each new terrorist act to wreak havoc with massive changes on our societies, we're really talking about trade-offs here. How much stuff do you want to give away for a 50% reduction in terrorism? And once you come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that reduced it? It's one thing when a pubic discussion has reasonable people talking about the various sides. It's another thing entirely when we start injecting these semantic landmines into our conversations. I'm not saying you're wrong or right; I'm saying there is no way to know.
- conception 7y ago
  I agree with your general thesis. The "And once you come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that reduced it?" seems "simple" enough in that it would result in a number of arrests involving the methodology of surveillance in question. You couldn't say they wouldn't have been caught otherwise but you could at least say "X has produced Y for these cases." no?
  - mhb 7y ago
    No. Because 1) X itself may enable Y which might not otherwise have occurred and 2) since resources are finite doing X to yield Y means that you couldn't do Z instead which you might value more than whatever utility you got from Y.
zzzcpan 7y ago
You can't catch "terrorists" with surveillance and even generally bad actors, except for some naive desperate people doing stupid things. What you can do with surveillance is catch dissidents, create some chilling effect on dissent and overall use it as a tool to suppress dissent. It's basically a power supporting tool, nothing more.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Thriptic 7y ago
Assuming that surveillance works (and I'm not really sure it works well) then the alternative is terrorism and crime. I agree we need some level of surveillance, but the question is at what point do the risks of the surveillance (suppression of democracy / dissent, self-censorship, loss of privacy / liberty, concentration of rich data for misuse by bad actors, etc) outweigh the risks of terrorism and crime? Just because we can bring terrorism and crime to zero with max surveillance, doesn't mean that it's in the best interest of society to enable such a system. Personally, I'm willing to accept a level of risk from terrorism and crime if it means that I get to live my life the way I want to without being constantly monitored by government. Regarding checks and balances, it's extremely hard to have robust authorization when the group calibrating and performing the authorizations is the same group or adjacent to the group who wants to look at the data. To do it well you need true, apolitical, independence between gatekeepers and users, and users can never be in possession of the actual data because access control can be easily bypassed if this is the case. We have never had that in this country, countermeasures against misuse always seem to be non-transparent and policy based rather than technical (ie secret courts and warrants that no one can actually audit), and data is repeatedly misused over and over with no consequences (eg parallel reconstruction, people spying on partners, people spying on celebs, etc).
Koremat6666 7y ago
All of this eventually boils down to skin in the game. What price does government and its minions pay for the surveillance ? If it is too low then those powers will be abused, if it is too high then they will be less willing to use it.
papito 7y ago
NSA is combing through voice phone data, and that's totally useless. As depicted in Jack Ryan (communication via an online game), the bad actors will find rather elegant ways to bypass at. I can embed standard EXIF metadata into an image and send it to someone's facebook wall. You think NSA is looking at that? It's not that hard.
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Since it has GPS coordinates, is in a standardized format, and generated by default on most phones, they probably are.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  Doesn’t Facebook strip EXIF data?
kerkeslager 7y ago
For the most part, surveillance is irrelevant to catching terrorists or other bad actors. The track record of catching terrorists using surveillance is pitiful. The reason is simple: terrorists and bad actors assume they're being surveiled, and take countermeasures, and those countermeasures are far more effective than the surveillance. Anyone with moderate technical knowledge can use GPG and Tor. It's not rocket surgery. The people caught by surveillance are for the most part uneducated young men of color who are driven into low-level drug dealing by poverty, and anyone who thinks that putting these people in jail is an effective measure against drug addiction is willfully ignoring the evidence.
StreamBright 7y ago
Some does not mean you need to do what the US government is doing now. There are alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LufSe8-50-s& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LufSe8-50-s&

mtgx 7y ago

Yes, the point of the article is that there are very few if any checks and balances. If you support anything but paying lip service to checks and balances then you would support restricting US government's surveillance powers and requiring a warrant in many more instances than it is required today (almost never when it comes to the NSA, and now the FBI and other agencies can warrantless look at your data before going to court, too, thanks to the latest FISA extension).

alexfromapex 7y ago

It can be done, the intelligence agencies just need to find new ways to identify terrorists or prevent terrorists from causing harm.

54thr 7y ago
What if the terrorists were intelligence agencies? How would we stop them?

Razengan 7y ago

Really? It doesn't even occur to you to address the issues that create "terrorists?"

mpiedrav 7y ago
Reasons behind the kind of terrorism for which mass surveillance is enforced (e.g., Muslim fundamentalists against American interests) have deep historical roots, too messy to be addressed. Britain and France had geopolitical and business interests in the Middle East since the 18-19th century. America since the 20th, when oil suddenly had all the spotlight. Fundamentalists are convinced that "the West" is the Devil on Earth. No political force can pacify fundamentalists nor avoid future generations.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  You're conveniently ignoring the fact that the US has historically ruined entire countries for multiple generations just to benefit itself. Maybe if we'd stop carpet bombing other countries we'd have fewer people that hate us. Most of the problems in the Middle East, at least with regards to them hating the US, are because the US did something to directly make them hate the US. Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan - at least in their current iterations - are all problems the US created. This is barely even beginning to describe the list of atrocities the US has committed against other countries. The US has terrorists because the US creates terrorists, sometimes from us terrorizing other countries that are too insignificant for the world to take notice. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, look into the history of US drone strikes just for a very recent example of the US leveraging its military superiority to decimate other countries. What's interesting is it gets worse regardless of the president.
  - mpiedrav 7y ago
    I'm not ignoring those facts about the destructive role of America in the Middle East. What I'm alluding to is that fundamentalists hating the West have way more "historical ammo" for their arguments than just pointing at the US. It's just that the current biggest offender is America (which makes it the main target for terrorism). Before that, it was Britain. On a grand historical scale, the Powers That May at any given point in time become the main offender against those having something of value. Next time it'll probably be China (beginning with the "Security Theater" [1] in Xinjiang). [1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/11/beyond_security_thea.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/11/beyond_secu...
- justincredible 7y ago
  We could at least address domestic terrorism.
WilliamEdward 7y ago
Some people think terrorists will always exist (despite them very clearly growing in numbers) when it's actually governments and the US in particular that radicalise most of them by bombing their countries.
refurb 7y ago
There will always be people willing to use violence to effect change, no matter how hard you try and fix the issues they raise.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > to effect change What change? Why don't you let them effect those changes?
  - refurb 7y ago
    Because some of those changes violate human rights?
    - Razengan 7y ago
      Mass surveillance and warrantless invasion of everyone's privacy does not violate human rights?

npo9 7y ago

> Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. The article: Surveillance fails to catch terrorist. Your argument: Without surveillance we cannot catch terrorist. My question: How are we catching them now? How did we catch bad actors and saboteurs before surveillance?

nostrademons 7y ago
There's a base rate fallacy here: take a look at total deaths from terrorism in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#U.S._totals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States... After September 11, the typical number of deaths from terrorism in a given year was...0, give or take a few, with a disconcerting uptick since 2013. Great, our efforts to curb terrorism are working! From 1975-2001, the typical number of deaths from terrorism in a given year was...2. Wait, the massive surveillance state has saved 2 lives a year? What? We saved more lives by posting a guard at the Caltrain tracks in Palo Alto to keep people from killing themselves. By the numbers, terrorism just wasn't a problem, because rational people don't blow themselves up to make a point. Mentally ill people do, and a significant number of mass shootings are not counted in the terrorism statistics but actually kill far more people. But by making terrorism into a big bogeyman that's going to kill you, it feeds into the interests of the media, of the state, and of the military-industrial complex, and so there are a lot of powerful forces shaping the discourse around terrorism that aren't necessarily reflective of reality.
- npo9 7y ago
  “We’re not catching them because they aren’t there” seems like a valid hypothesis, but I’m not sure I fully buy into it.

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

The structure of your statement has problems not related to the topic at all. When you take something away that never (or rarely) happens, how do you establish causality? Suppose I told you that taking bazookas away from people that live in the city prevents bear attacks? You might say that there aren't bear attacks in the city anyway, which would be true, but you couldn't prove it one way or another. Who knows, maybe there would have been one bear attack if people ran around with bazookas shooting up the nearby forest. Now add in the complexity that terrorism is more like a rate than a yes/no question. What if I told you that taking away bazookas in the city reduced the crime rate? Well, the crime rate in many cities has decreased, but how are those two related? Once again, we're left with a statement that might sound good to some and bad to others -- and no way to reasonably discuss it. The only thing we can say with certainty is that no matter what we do, terrorism will continue exist. We can never eliminate it no matter how hard we try. So unless we want each new terrorist act to wreak havoc with massive changes on our societies, we're really talking about trade-offs here. How much stuff do you want to give away for a 50% reduction in terrorism? And once you come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that reduced it? It's one thing when a pubic discussion has reasonable people talking about the various sides. It's another thing entirely when we start injecting these semantic landmines into our conversations. I'm not saying you're wrong or right; I'm saying there is no way to know.

conception 7y ago
I agree with your general thesis. The "And once you come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that reduced it?" seems "simple" enough in that it would result in a number of arrests involving the methodology of surveillance in question. You couldn't say they wouldn't have been caught otherwise but you could at least say "X has produced Y for these cases." no?
- mhb 7y ago
  No. Because 1) X itself may enable Y which might not otherwise have occurred and 2) since resources are finite doing X to yield Y means that you couldn't do Z instead which you might value more than whatever utility you got from Y.

zzzcpan 7y ago

You can't catch "terrorists" with surveillance and even generally bad actors, except for some naive desperate people doing stupid things. What you can do with surveillance is catch dissidents, create some chilling effect on dissent and overall use it as a tool to suppress dissent. It's basically a power supporting tool, nothing more.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Thriptic 7y ago

Assuming that surveillance works (and I'm not really sure it works well) then the alternative is terrorism and crime. I agree we need some level of surveillance, but the question is at what point do the risks of the surveillance (suppression of democracy / dissent, self-censorship, loss of privacy / liberty, concentration of rich data for misuse by bad actors, etc) outweigh the risks of terrorism and crime? Just because we can bring terrorism and crime to zero with max surveillance, doesn't mean that it's in the best interest of society to enable such a system. Personally, I'm willing to accept a level of risk from terrorism and crime if it means that I get to live my life the way I want to without being constantly monitored by government. Regarding checks and balances, it's extremely hard to have robust authorization when the group calibrating and performing the authorizations is the same group or adjacent to the group who wants to look at the data. To do it well you need true, apolitical, independence between gatekeepers and users, and users can never be in possession of the actual data because access control can be easily bypassed if this is the case. We have never had that in this country, countermeasures against misuse always seem to be non-transparent and policy based rather than technical (ie secret courts and warrants that no one can actually audit), and data is repeatedly misused over and over with no consequences (eg parallel reconstruction, people spying on partners, people spying on celebs, etc).

Koremat6666 7y ago

All of this eventually boils down to skin in the game. What price does government and its minions pay for the surveillance ? If it is too low then those powers will be abused, if it is too high then they will be less willing to use it.

papito 7y ago

NSA is combing through voice phone data, and that's totally useless. As depicted in Jack Ryan (communication via an online game), the bad actors will find rather elegant ways to bypass at. I can embed standard EXIF metadata into an image and send it to someone's facebook wall. You think NSA is looking at that? It's not that hard.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Since it has GPS coordinates, is in a standardized format, and generated by default on most phones, they probably are.
colejohnson66 7y ago
Doesn’t Facebook strip EXIF data?

kerkeslager 7y ago

For the most part, surveillance is irrelevant to catching terrorists or other bad actors. The track record of catching terrorists using surveillance is pitiful. The reason is simple: terrorists and bad actors assume they're being surveiled, and take countermeasures, and those countermeasures are far more effective than the surveillance. Anyone with moderate technical knowledge can use GPG and Tor. It's not rocket surgery. The people caught by surveillance are for the most part uneducated young men of color who are driven into low-level drug dealing by poverty, and anyone who thinks that putting these people in jail is an effective measure against drug addiction is willfully ignoring the evidence.

StreamBright 7y ago

Some does not mean you need to do what the US government is doing now. There are alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LufSe8-50-s& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LufSe8-50-s&