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I think people have the FBIs motivations misunderstood. And I don't mean in some evil conspiracy theory sort of way, but in one that is pretty consistent with

I think people have the FBIs motivations misunderstood. And I don't mean in some evil conspiracy theory sort of way, but in one that is pretty consistent with their mission. Their main mission nowadays is to stop terrorism, etc... I I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations. The article theorizes that people with data to hide will use encryption, or otherwise would be so stupid, that one can find them easily in any case. In the real world a lot of these cases are broken on a "lucky" break or two. Someone improperly or not using their encryption software once, for example. I think it seems foolish to accuse them of being dumb, evil, or incompetent. Given the stakes they deal with, and the amount of data they have to sift through, I think its very reasonable that they try to reduce the amount of work they need to do to find credible leads. And I'm sure they try to institute methods to minimize abuse, but I'm sure they are also aware that some abuse will happen. While some of this feels like it may cross the line, I think it's a line that a rationale organization, with their mission, should push against.

nathan_long 13y ago
Yes. Most of us here are privacy advocates, and I think society needs our voice. However, we're only one side of the coin. Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible. There are many kinds of dystopias. Big Brother is one. Rule by competing gangs is another. We're shooting for some compromise where both individuals and society's rights are balanced. It's hard.
- betterunix 13y ago
  "Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible." So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses? What does communication privacy have to do with that? There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access. We still managed to prosecute criminals then. Yes, sometimes criminals got away with their crimes, but that is what striking a balance is all about. The FBI is not trying to strike a balance with this proposal, they are trying to shift the balance in their favor.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access. Federal authorities always had wiretapping powers pursuant to a warrant. If you mean before that, it was also a time when limited communications forced more visible means of coordination. Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications, even pursuant to a warrant.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      "Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications" I am not sure I see the difference. On the one hand, you have two people who likely have a legitimate reason to meet at a restaurant speaking quietly to each other. On the other, you have two people with a legitimate reason to have an Internet connection using it to communicate. There is a matter of distance I suppose, but so what? Postal mail has always allowed people to communicate at a distance, and it has always allowed anonymous senders. Why not require all restaurants to record their customers' conversations, just in case the FBI needs to investigate it later on (with a requirement for a warrant, of course)? The same reasoning applies to this FBI push for expanded wiretapping power.
      - kenjackson 13y ago
        The FBI can already do this in restaurants. They can ask the owner to tap a table (or set of tables). How many owners do you think would deny this request? This is essentially what the FBI is requesting. The post office does allow anonymous senders, but not receivers. Mail can be intercepted, although evidence of tampering maybe harder to conceal.
      - rayiner 13y ago
        The difference is that if you plot a crime in a restaurant, there are potentially dozens of sources of evidence linking you to the meeting: patrons and servers might see you, security cameras might record you, people might see you drive there, a credit card bill might link you to a meeting there, etc. If the same crime is planned in a chat room, the only thing police may have to go on is logs hosted by the intermediate service provider. Technology makes the real-time communication more anonymous and less traceable than was practical in the past. Even postal mail, besides not being real-time, isn't as anonymous as electronic communications without the possibility of obtaining logs via a warrant. The focus of privacy activists is in my opinion misplaced. People want an internet that's never monitored, never recorded, never wire-tappable. That's never going to happen, nor is it apparent that it's desirable. What we want is something that preserves the scope of investigative powers that have historically existed with the telephone system. That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.
- TelmoMenezes 13y ago
  Rule by competing gangs is not a dystopia, it's the natural state that we were born into as animals and that we'be been living under for most of our history. We live largely under rule by competing gangs to the present day and are used to that. We prefer that to Big Brother. That's why the Berlin wall was built to keep people _inside_ the GDR and not the other way around.
  - derleth 13y ago
    > Rule by competing gangs is not a dystopia, it's the natural state that we were born into as animals and that we'be been living under for most of our history. Which doesn't mean it's not a dystopia. > We live largely under rule by competing gangs No, not for any useful definition of the word 'gang'.
- polarix 13y ago
  Abduction should be solved by physical surveillance.
- dm2 13y ago
  I don't think many rational people would be against this type of surveillance. It's all about transparency and ensuring that those who use this great power are doing so for the right reasons. Every time a wiretap is executed, there should be some sort of public notice. It should be automatic and only suppressed if the investigation is ongoing and only with a judges approval. Would that make everyone happy? Obviously there are tons of edge-cases, but those would have to be ironed out as they are revealed, just like anything else. We have major issues to overcome with keeping those in power honest and free of corruption, but like you said, it's hard.
mrtksn 13y ago
There was an article about the IRS targeting legal organizations that are not exactly beloved ones by the government. Sure, FBI are not evil or anything but even one abuse is too much. Government agencies are build to act according to the status quo. What if the government is not perfect and there are people trying to change something but the government in power is opposing it. Ending the slavery, ending the Vietnam war, gay rights or any movement with an opposition in Washington could have been destroyed with the power that FBI is seeking. The recent decriminalization of drugs in some states could have been prevented if FBI had this power of intercepting all communications. People must have means to challenge the government with non-violent actions. Just because FBI may catch some terrorists is not good enough reason to give them all the means to preserve the status quo. I am not even talking about individual abuses that may occur, compared to society engineering, they are not that important anyway.
wyck 13y ago
Being reasonable to try and reduce harm/work in this regard is not congruent with reality. What makes the FBI so different than the NSA? The latter already throwing billions down the hole in useless tech and encroaching on your freedom at the same time. The article also does not mention something obvious, the FBI does not have earth-wide jurisdiction, moving to a "chat" or operating system hosted and built in another country is already available in many forms. So they will encroach upon your freedom and throw your culture into the garbage to catch a bunch of dummies.
bazillion 13y ago
Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. The FBI is the most backwards agency technologically -- the leadership is mostly composed of people who actively oppose innovation. At any other government agency, you can host user created applications that consolidate workflows and make peoples' lives much easier. Some even have teams that are dedicated to creating these one-off solutions that don't fit into a general commercial/OSS workflow program. The FBI, however, doesn't allow programming of any sort outside of the scope of their contracts, which mean that a regular analyst is storing data in an excel spreadsheet and trying to pass it around as a database. I say actively oppose innovation, because I've seen people told to get in line and shut up when speaking out about how to make processes better. This attitude mostly comes from a culture of "special agents" who are their own cool kid club. Imagine a bunch of movie-stereotypical dumb jocks. Now imagine them in front of a computer. FBI. The most egregious of technological sins I witnessed was when we told the FBI that if they appended a row id to the scattered data they were sending us, that it would literally save on the order of 10 million dollars a year in people not having to manually input things, but being able to parse the data out. Their engineers came back and told us that it was not technologically possible. I said that not knowing their systems, what languages they were using to program the database, or even the database structure itself, give me one hour in the code and I will make it happen. Let's just say that didn't go over well.
reeses 13y ago
The thing I try to keep in mind is that 'the government' is the emergent behavior of millions of self-interested people of varying abilities, from people who just want a job for life to people who want to rule the world. There's a framework in place, and they all live within it. Some work to change the framework, but as with ant colonies, it's not as if all of the ants are designing and architecting the colony. Uncle Milton is a blind watchmaker. That doesn't mean bad things won't happen, just that you have people "trying to do their jobs" who aren't thinking about fundamental liberties. Get a few million of these ants together and they end up in all aspects of your life, much like real ants. In most cases, the best you can hope for is benign mediocrity. When counted as individuals, it's the infinitesimal minority that reach to greatness or descend to horror.
mikeash 13y ago
What do you call it when you do a good job of achieving a poor goal? "Evil" might not be too far off, although the FBI doesn't have too much of a choice in this matter. The resources spent on combating terrorism are vastly disproportionate to the threat presented. The FBI may see this as the best way to combat terrorism, but it's an unworthy goal, and it's bad for them to potentially cause so much damage in pursuit of it. Maybe another alternative should be presented: "solving the wrong problem."
belorn 13y ago
> I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations. I don't doubt that FBI believe that total surveillance and complete control over every move that their citizen do is useful to data mine. However, the article question such logic because of the social impact that total surveillance has on society, criminals and innocents. And this article is not alone on that aspect. The Swedish secret police had similar objections when the military suggested introducing such surveillance in Sweden. Their primary objection was that ubiquitous surveillance pushed criminals and innocents alike to darknets and encryption, which would then make their job harder (through, after they got a slice of the surveillance pie, they have now become very silent on the subject). I guess the police would have similar objection, however they are also getting a slice soon. In the mean time, we can actually see in real-time the effects on society, like hot-lines being called less, people avoiding calling priest/lawyer and so on. Germany has some direct statistics since they introduced the surveillance several years before Sweden. I guess we will have to wait for hot-lines being added to tor hidden services before people feel comfortable again with talking with a stranger about suspected child abuses or domestic abuse. Criminals will as suggested move to more encrypted routes. Botnet distributors can get an increased slice in facilitating secure communication, and the military, secret police, and to a degree, the regular police can catch those too slow to follow the technology change. Is this a dumb, evil, or just incompetent change to society?
joe_the_user 13y ago
So your choice is dumb, then? Meaning they understand only "their mission" and nothing else. I mean, sure, an organization with Mission X can go about that mission in variety of ways. It's like the sci-fi movies about a God-like-AI "solving" society's problems. Stop crime in New York City? Easy, just encase every resident in three inches of plastic? Makes sense "from their point of view". And the fact is that the deaths and mayhem from terrorism haven't exceed deaths and mayhem from many other sources. Thus preempting everything to fight terrorism is not actually logical for us as a society and has not, so far, been particularly positive in its effects.
- kvb 13y ago
  Are defense attorneys dumb for taking on the cases of guilty defendants? Having a specific mission is often helpful, and doesn't preclude having other systems to provide an appropriate balance.
- swalkergibson 13y ago
  Here is an interesting article discussing the relative probabilities of losing your life due to terrorism versus other ways. http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terrorism-should http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terroris...

nathan_long 13y ago

Yes. Most of us here are privacy advocates, and I think society needs our voice. However, we're only one side of the coin. Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible. There are many kinds of dystopias. Big Brother is one. Rule by competing gangs is another. We're shooting for some compromise where both individuals and society's rights are balanced. It's hard.

betterunix 13y ago
"Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible." So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses? What does communication privacy have to do with that? There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access. We still managed to prosecute criminals then. Yes, sometimes criminals got away with their crimes, but that is what striking a balance is all about. The FBI is not trying to strike a balance with this proposal, they are trying to shift the balance in their favor.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access. Federal authorities always had wiretapping powers pursuant to a warrant. If you mean before that, it was also a time when limited communications forced more visible means of coordination. Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications, even pursuant to a warrant.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    "Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications" I am not sure I see the difference. On the one hand, you have two people who likely have a legitimate reason to meet at a restaurant speaking quietly to each other. On the other, you have two people with a legitimate reason to have an Internet connection using it to communicate. There is a matter of distance I suppose, but so what? Postal mail has always allowed people to communicate at a distance, and it has always allowed anonymous senders. Why not require all restaurants to record their customers' conversations, just in case the FBI needs to investigate it later on (with a requirement for a warrant, of course)? The same reasoning applies to this FBI push for expanded wiretapping power.
    - kenjackson 13y ago
      The FBI can already do this in restaurants. They can ask the owner to tap a table (or set of tables). How many owners do you think would deny this request? This is essentially what the FBI is requesting. The post office does allow anonymous senders, but not receivers. Mail can be intercepted, although evidence of tampering maybe harder to conceal.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      The difference is that if you plot a crime in a restaurant, there are potentially dozens of sources of evidence linking you to the meeting: patrons and servers might see you, security cameras might record you, people might see you drive there, a credit card bill might link you to a meeting there, etc. If the same crime is planned in a chat room, the only thing police may have to go on is logs hosted by the intermediate service provider. Technology makes the real-time communication more anonymous and less traceable than was practical in the past. Even postal mail, besides not being real-time, isn't as anonymous as electronic communications without the possibility of obtaining logs via a warrant. The focus of privacy activists is in my opinion misplaced. People want an internet that's never monitored, never recorded, never wire-tappable. That's never going to happen, nor is it apparent that it's desirable. What we want is something that preserves the scope of investigative powers that have historically existed with the telephone system. That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.
TelmoMenezes 13y ago
Rule by competing gangs is not a dystopia, it's the natural state that we were born into as animals and that we'be been living under for most of our history. We live largely under rule by competing gangs to the present day and are used to that. We prefer that to Big Brother. That's why the Berlin wall was built to keep people _inside_ the GDR and not the other way around.
- derleth 13y ago
  > Rule by competing gangs is not a dystopia, it's the natural state that we were born into as animals and that we'be been living under for most of our history. Which doesn't mean it's not a dystopia. > We live largely under rule by competing gangs No, not for any useful definition of the word 'gang'.
polarix 13y ago
Abduction should be solved by physical surveillance.
dm2 13y ago
I don't think many rational people would be against this type of surveillance. It's all about transparency and ensuring that those who use this great power are doing so for the right reasons. Every time a wiretap is executed, there should be some sort of public notice. It should be automatic and only suppressed if the investigation is ongoing and only with a judges approval. Would that make everyone happy? Obviously there are tons of edge-cases, but those would have to be ironed out as they are revealed, just like anything else. We have major issues to overcome with keeping those in power honest and free of corruption, but like you said, it's hard.

mrtksn 13y ago

There was an article about the IRS targeting legal organizations that are not exactly beloved ones by the government. Sure, FBI are not evil or anything but even one abuse is too much. Government agencies are build to act according to the status quo. What if the government is not perfect and there are people trying to change something but the government in power is opposing it. Ending the slavery, ending the Vietnam war, gay rights or any movement with an opposition in Washington could have been destroyed with the power that FBI is seeking. The recent decriminalization of drugs in some states could have been prevented if FBI had this power of intercepting all communications. People must have means to challenge the government with non-violent actions. Just because FBI may catch some terrorists is not good enough reason to give them all the means to preserve the status quo. I am not even talking about individual abuses that may occur, compared to society engineering, they are not that important anyway.

wyck 13y ago

Being reasonable to try and reduce harm/work in this regard is not congruent with reality. What makes the FBI so different than the NSA? The latter already throwing billions down the hole in useless tech and encroaching on your freedom at the same time. The article also does not mention something obvious, the FBI does not have earth-wide jurisdiction, moving to a "chat" or operating system hosted and built in another country is already available in many forms. So they will encroach upon your freedom and throw your culture into the garbage to catch a bunch of dummies.

bazillion 13y ago

Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. The FBI is the most backwards agency technologically -- the leadership is mostly composed of people who actively oppose innovation. At any other government agency, you can host user created applications that consolidate workflows and make peoples' lives much easier. Some even have teams that are dedicated to creating these one-off solutions that don't fit into a general commercial/OSS workflow program. The FBI, however, doesn't allow programming of any sort outside of the scope of their contracts, which mean that a regular analyst is storing data in an excel spreadsheet and trying to pass it around as a database. I say actively oppose innovation, because I've seen people told to get in line and shut up when speaking out about how to make processes better. This attitude mostly comes from a culture of "special agents" who are their own cool kid club. Imagine a bunch of movie-stereotypical dumb jocks. Now imagine them in front of a computer. FBI. The most egregious of technological sins I witnessed was when we told the FBI that if they appended a row id to the scattered data they were sending us, that it would literally save on the order of 10 million dollars a year in people not having to manually input things, but being able to parse the data out. Their engineers came back and told us that it was not technologically possible. I said that not knowing their systems, what languages they were using to program the database, or even the database structure itself, give me one hour in the code and I will make it happen. Let's just say that didn't go over well.

reeses 13y ago

The thing I try to keep in mind is that 'the government' is the emergent behavior of millions of self-interested people of varying abilities, from people who just want a job for life to people who want to rule the world. There's a framework in place, and they all live within it. Some work to change the framework, but as with ant colonies, it's not as if all of the ants are designing and architecting the colony. Uncle Milton is a blind watchmaker. That doesn't mean bad things won't happen, just that you have people "trying to do their jobs" who aren't thinking about fundamental liberties. Get a few million of these ants together and they end up in all aspects of your life, much like real ants. In most cases, the best you can hope for is benign mediocrity. When counted as individuals, it's the infinitesimal minority that reach to greatness or descend to horror.

mikeash 13y ago

What do you call it when you do a good job of achieving a poor goal? "Evil" might not be too far off, although the FBI doesn't have too much of a choice in this matter. The resources spent on combating terrorism are vastly disproportionate to the threat presented. The FBI may see this as the best way to combat terrorism, but it's an unworthy goal, and it's bad for them to potentially cause so much damage in pursuit of it. Maybe another alternative should be presented: "solving the wrong problem."

belorn 13y ago

> I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations. I don't doubt that FBI believe that total surveillance and complete control over every move that their citizen do is useful to data mine. However, the article question such logic because of the social impact that total surveillance has on society, criminals and innocents. And this article is not alone on that aspect. The Swedish secret police had similar objections when the military suggested introducing such surveillance in Sweden. Their primary objection was that ubiquitous surveillance pushed criminals and innocents alike to darknets and encryption, which would then make their job harder (through, after they got a slice of the surveillance pie, they have now become very silent on the subject). I guess the police would have similar objection, however they are also getting a slice soon. In the mean time, we can actually see in real-time the effects on society, like hot-lines being called less, people avoiding calling priest/lawyer and so on. Germany has some direct statistics since they introduced the surveillance several years before Sweden. I guess we will have to wait for hot-lines being added to tor hidden services before people feel comfortable again with talking with a stranger about suspected child abuses or domestic abuse. Criminals will as suggested move to more encrypted routes. Botnet distributors can get an increased slice in facilitating secure communication, and the military, secret police, and to a degree, the regular police can catch those too slow to follow the technology change. Is this a dumb, evil, or just incompetent change to society?

joe_the_user 13y ago

So your choice is dumb, then? Meaning they understand only "their mission" and nothing else. I mean, sure, an organization with Mission X can go about that mission in variety of ways. It's like the sci-fi movies about a God-like-AI "solving" society's problems. Stop crime in New York City? Easy, just encase every resident in three inches of plastic? Makes sense "from their point of view". And the fact is that the deaths and mayhem from terrorism haven't exceed deaths and mayhem from many other sources. Thus preempting everything to fight terrorism is not actually logical for us as a society and has not, so far, been particularly positive in its effects.

kvb 13y ago
Are defense attorneys dumb for taking on the cases of guilty defendants? Having a specific mission is often helpful, and doesn't preclude having other systems to provide an appropriate balance.
swalkergibson 13y ago
Here is an interesting article discussing the relative probabilities of losing your life due to terrorism versus other ways. http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terrorism-should http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terroris...