9 ms·

Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-terror Tactic

48 points by snippyhollow 13y ago

cinquemb 13y ago
…among a national sample of 1,004 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States
- Zikes 13y ago
  It's funny, I've mentioned this for surveys in the past and I keep getting told I don't understand statistics.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    If the survey was properly randomized, then it's actually probably true that you don't understand statistics...
    - cinquemb 13y ago
      Depends on the types of people who are likely to give up their phone number for national political polling reasons, and in that subset, I'd think that is hardly random.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        They don't go out and canvass for phone numbers first. If they don't include cell phone numbers it's possible to bias more towards older persons, but that wouldn't invalidate the survey either.
        cinquemb 13y ago
        The survey itself? Probably not. The conclusion most people are likely to draw from it and apply it overarchingly, that is what I question.
    - Zikes 13y ago
      It's true, I've never taken a statistics course. But, if the experts tell me a 0.0003% sample size is fine so long as it's the RIGHT 0.0003%, then I guess I'll have to concede the point.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        The Central Limit Theorem and the Law of Large Numbers are wonderful things.
- Kiro 13y ago
  A fully adequate population imo and I don't think it's far off at all.
tstactplsignore 13y ago
The even crazier story is this: In 2006, 61% of Democrats thought it was unacceptable, and in 2013, 34% of Democrats think it is unacceptable. I vote as Democrat as the next guy, but that's some crazy double-think going on there.
- u2328 13y ago
  Cult of personalities, I think. Fascinating, if not terrifying, human trait. People root for their political party like they root for their home team; issues be damned.
- benmmurphy 13y ago
  Privacy might not be a big issue for many people and so they use the issue to signal support for politicians that are similar on issues that are important to them. EDIT: Or with even less mental effort they saw a question about privacy and didn't have an answer at hand so just substituted it with the question: do you like the President? It's not double think if they never had an opinion on privacy :)
wavefunction 13y ago
Keep in mind many Americans have never traveled outside the country, they are fed a constant diet of bullshit by our media alternating between frantic fear-mongering and gushing American paternalism, and simply don't stop to think about what is actually going on. I would call them complete morons but that is unkind. Incurious and ignorant and perhaps far too trusting is perhaps more polite.
- GHFigs 13y ago
  What's the polite word for elitist?
  - jmadsen 13y ago
    "Realist speaking from experience"
    - GHFigs 13y ago
      "Poor people are stupid" isn't an experience, it's a prejudice.
      - NikaJessenia 13y ago
        I'm with you on that. But, for once, this guy wasn't insulting poor people. He was insulting average people. The average person has free time but finds it very very hard to use it for something socially beneficial. This is partially their fault but certainly not wholly their fault.
        wavefunction 13y ago
        Are you saying I have a habit of insulting poor people? I've been a poor person. Shit, I'm poor now, with no real assets. I do love reading your assumptions though. Tell me more about me.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Maybe if the poster had said we are fed a diet of bullshit; we don't stop to think enough; we are ignorant. Instead, it is always they, they, they. Never the poster- no, the poster is much smarter than they, much too smart to fall for any of that.
marknutter 13y ago
That's because a majority of Americans don't believe they have anything to hide, or that the stuff they do want to hide is probably so mundane to the average government official that they assume they wouldn't care. I'm guessing the way the survey question is posed has a lot to do with the outcome. Take out the word "terrorism" and I'm sure support would drop. Add the phrase "personal information" and I'm sure it would drop even further. Or perhaps ask "Would you be comfortable with the government tracking your activity on Facebook, Gmail, and Skype?" I'm guessing support for that would be close to 0%.
- tptacek 13y ago
  I get the sense that this doesn't surprise you. My question is: why would it surprise anyone? It's not just that most Americans don't believe they have anything to hide from NSA. It's that they don't have anything to hide from NSA. I'm not invoking the fallacious "nothing to hide" argument; I have stuff I need to keep hidden. But most people really don't, and especially not from NSA.
  - craigyk 13y ago
    Yeah. You'll get me too pull out my pitchfork if there is ever evidence this is being used for anything other than national security, I haven't seen that. IMO, the first shady use of this would most likely be the war on drugs, if we see that happen than I'll start getting worried.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Hey: my pitchfork is already within arm's reach. My "problem" over the last couple days is shoddy reporting and rush to judgement, especially with things like "OMG Palantir is even named after the all-seeing eye in Lord of the Rings, they must be in on it". It's not OK if NSA is hoovering all communications in the US and sifting for national security issues, and that does appear to be what happened with Verizon/ATT/Sprint (though it does not appear to be true of Google and Facebook).
      - 13y ago
captionobvious 13y ago
Anyone with strong views about privacy would never answer an opinion poll so how can this be considered accurate?
- stray 13y ago
  It's not meant to be accurate. It's meant to calm the masses.
baddox 13y ago
And I have no problem with them opting in to have their lives and data tracked. The real problem is that everyone is tracked, including those in the minority who do not want their lives and data tracked. But such is democracy.
- tptacek 13y ago
  I don't understand the logic behind this comment. Surveillance against criminals doesn't work if the criminals have to opt-in to the surveillance.
  - ics 13y ago
    It's reasonable if you believe that it can also work as an alibi. It would be like state level fraud protection for those who do opt in, and obviously a mark of suspicion towards those who don't.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    In theory, that's why we have the notion of "probable cause" and warrants, etc. But what we have instead, is a "rubber stamp" mechanism from a secret court which - essentially - is completely free from an accountability to the American people. Given that, I don't really care so much what the NSA tries to do... I now realize that the real answer is promotion, advocacy and education around technological tools to evade their snooping (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they can't break strong crypto). My goal going forward is to dive into helping promote the use of, and education regarding, Tor, I2P, PGP, and their ilk. Part of that is going to mean educating myself to a considerable degree as well, as I've admittedly been too cavalier about this stuff in the past.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      All federal courts are (basically) free from public accountability. That is literally one of the objectives of the design of the Judicial Branch; complain to the founding fathers.
      - 13y ago
ganeumann 13y ago
I think that people like us (that is, people who think in a systems fashion about the electronic communications networks and the data flowing over them) are more likely to view this with alarm than the normals. I think that's because we actually know how much power having things like metadata gives you. The question is, how do we explain this to non-engineers in a way that they will listen to so that they will be as alarmed as we know they should be?
zobzu 13y ago
until ppl get problems, they have no idea what the nsa does with the data. if they have no idea and get no problem, "why would it bother them?" that yeah. its like if i had the right to sentence anybody on earth to death, but i wasn't doing it too often, and when i do it, nobody has any idea it happened. So people would think its ok.
entangld 13y ago
I'd like to see more surveys or reviews of this survey's methods. It isn't difficult for the phrasing of the questions to skew results in one direction or another (e.g. Gallup). I'm sure it's possible for people to be a bit apathetic and support widespread data snooping, but I'm wary of the inevitable attacks and possible drummed up support for current policies.
rdl 13y ago
I think we need to make a choice as a society where the line is drawn. We chose to allow privilege for religious, medical, and legal conversations. Sure, in individual cases, it would be better to get the data from someone's confession, but overall, it's better for society (or people decided) to allow those conversations to encourage religious confession. Maybe there needs to be special protection for certain classes of cloud service, computing service, or communication. Certainly allowing people to use an "exocortex" without fear of seizure would make people smarter. It might make some crimes harder to punish. Luckily, technology gets a vote, too. I think a clear/easy line is that anything which is "personal thought" or approximates thought should be immune to search, ideally though technical means. Notes (for yourself), a journal, etc. Maybe "quantified self" measurements. etc. The line is probably in a different place than in the telephone era, or even the disconnected Internet era. I'd prefer it be defined through legislation (and maybe through constitutional amendment) vs. through legal decisions. The problem with legal decisions is they tend to involve criminal cases, and "a person was keeping a personal diary of his child rapes" is an exceptionally hard thing to argue privacy for, even if that's only 0.001% of the use case enabled by making personal notes private.
- socillion 13y ago
  IANAL but aren't warrants designed to override privacy when there is existing probable cause? IMO one problem is sweeping collection and indefinite storage for the purposes of trawling for crimes. The other is that the FISA court could be a token "APPROVED" rubber stamp for all we know, taking a "guilty until proven innocent" stance on anyone outside the US. The bit that really bothers me is the total lack of transparency and accountability.
  - rdl 13y ago
    The collect-first and degree of oversight in FISA are issues, but generally you can't get a warrant to access protected communications (lawyer, doctor, priest) unless that professional is actually a co-conspirator, not just a professional service provider. There are exceptions (e.g. child abuse, imminent harm, etc.) to the privilege, though. And I think weaker spousal privilege (not being compelled to testify, but if wiretapped, that's fine). IANAL.
staunch 13y ago
I think I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA. Maybe other things like that, with some checks in place (mostly to prevent this data getting out of their hands). But I want to know about these trade-offs, and I don't care if that makes them less effective. There's no way NSA should be looking at private email, phone, VOIP, social networking communication en masse.
- brymaster 13y ago
  > I think I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA Why? Someone looking to do harm doesn't use phones (maybe Burners) or other communication methods where they know they'd be easily tracked.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Why do you think people looking to do harm don't use phones? Why do you assume the use of burners makes telephonic surveillance pointless? Are you attributing to adversaries the best possible set of circumstances and smallest possible set of constraints?
    - brymaster 13y ago
      I think the argument I wanted to make was that the people NSA claim to be after aren't using your typical contractual phone plans, since OP was suggesting they should simply track call logs. Sure they used pre-paid phones as well as pay phones, hotmail and were still using coded and hidden messages. Today they'd be using that steganography over cryptography. Few sources: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-4985597.html http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-4985597.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/al_qaeda_secret.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/al_qaeda_secre...
      - tptacek 13y ago
        The fact that these people might use disposable phones is actually one of the reasons USG supporters give in favor of hoovering all the telephony "metadata".
alan_cx 13y ago
That is the power of fear for you. Terror in it's self.
- brymaster 13y ago
  BBC did a good documentary on this very subject: "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/ Seems fear, ignorance and apathy is still working out just fine unfortunately.

48 points by snippyhollow 13y ago

cinquemb 13y ago

…among a national sample of 1,004 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States

Zikes 13y ago
It's funny, I've mentioned this for surveys in the past and I keep getting told I don't understand statistics.
- mpyne 13y ago
  If the survey was properly randomized, then it's actually probably true that you don't understand statistics...
  - cinquemb 13y ago
    Depends on the types of people who are likely to give up their phone number for national political polling reasons, and in that subset, I'd think that is hardly random.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      They don't go out and canvass for phone numbers first. If they don't include cell phone numbers it's possible to bias more towards older persons, but that wouldn't invalidate the survey either.
      - cinquemb 13y ago
        The survey itself? Probably not. The conclusion most people are likely to draw from it and apply it overarchingly, that is what I question.
  - Zikes 13y ago
    It's true, I've never taken a statistics course. But, if the experts tell me a 0.0003% sample size is fine so long as it's the RIGHT 0.0003%, then I guess I'll have to concede the point.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      The Central Limit Theorem and the Law of Large Numbers are wonderful things.
Kiro 13y ago
A fully adequate population imo and I don't think it's far off at all.

tstactplsignore 13y ago

The even crazier story is this: In 2006, 61% of Democrats thought it was unacceptable, and in 2013, 34% of Democrats think it is unacceptable. I vote as Democrat as the next guy, but that's some crazy double-think going on there.

u2328 13y ago
Cult of personalities, I think. Fascinating, if not terrifying, human trait. People root for their political party like they root for their home team; issues be damned.
benmmurphy 13y ago
Privacy might not be a big issue for many people and so they use the issue to signal support for politicians that are similar on issues that are important to them. EDIT: Or with even less mental effort they saw a question about privacy and didn't have an answer at hand so just substituted it with the question: do you like the President? It's not double think if they never had an opinion on privacy :)

wavefunction 13y ago

Keep in mind many Americans have never traveled outside the country, they are fed a constant diet of bullshit by our media alternating between frantic fear-mongering and gushing American paternalism, and simply don't stop to think about what is actually going on. I would call them complete morons but that is unkind. Incurious and ignorant and perhaps far too trusting is perhaps more polite.

GHFigs 13y ago
What's the polite word for elitist?
- jmadsen 13y ago
  "Realist speaking from experience"
  - GHFigs 13y ago
    "Poor people are stupid" isn't an experience, it's a prejudice.
    - NikaJessenia 13y ago
      I'm with you on that. But, for once, this guy wasn't insulting poor people. He was insulting average people. The average person has free time but finds it very very hard to use it for something socially beneficial. This is partially their fault but certainly not wholly their fault.
      - wavefunction 13y ago
        Are you saying I have a habit of insulting poor people? I've been a poor person. Shit, I'm poor now, with no real assets. I do love reading your assumptions though. Tell me more about me.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Maybe if the poster had said we are fed a diet of bullshit; we don't stop to think enough; we are ignorant. Instead, it is always they, they, they. Never the poster- no, the poster is much smarter than they, much too smart to fall for any of that.

marknutter 13y ago

That's because a majority of Americans don't believe they have anything to hide, or that the stuff they do want to hide is probably so mundane to the average government official that they assume they wouldn't care. I'm guessing the way the survey question is posed has a lot to do with the outcome. Take out the word "terrorism" and I'm sure support would drop. Add the phrase "personal information" and I'm sure it would drop even further. Or perhaps ask "Would you be comfortable with the government tracking your activity on Facebook, Gmail, and Skype?" I'm guessing support for that would be close to 0%.

tptacek 13y ago
I get the sense that this doesn't surprise you. My question is: why would it surprise anyone? It's not just that most Americans don't believe they have anything to hide from NSA. It's that they don't have anything to hide from NSA. I'm not invoking the fallacious "nothing to hide" argument; I have stuff I need to keep hidden. But most people really don't, and especially not from NSA.
- craigyk 13y ago
  Yeah. You'll get me too pull out my pitchfork if there is ever evidence this is being used for anything other than national security, I haven't seen that. IMO, the first shady use of this would most likely be the war on drugs, if we see that happen than I'll start getting worried.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Hey: my pitchfork is already within arm's reach. My "problem" over the last couple days is shoddy reporting and rush to judgement, especially with things like "OMG Palantir is even named after the all-seeing eye in Lord of the Rings, they must be in on it". It's not OK if NSA is hoovering all communications in the US and sifting for national security issues, and that does appear to be what happened with Verizon/ATT/Sprint (though it does not appear to be true of Google and Facebook).
    - 13y ago

captionobvious 13y ago

Anyone with strong views about privacy would never answer an opinion poll so how can this be considered accurate?

stray 13y ago
It's not meant to be accurate. It's meant to calm the masses.

baddox 13y ago

And I have no problem with them opting in to have their lives and data tracked. The real problem is that everyone is tracked, including those in the minority who do not want their lives and data tracked. But such is democracy.

tptacek 13y ago
I don't understand the logic behind this comment. Surveillance against criminals doesn't work if the criminals have to opt-in to the surveillance.
- ics 13y ago
  It's reasonable if you believe that it can also work as an alibi. It would be like state level fraud protection for those who do opt in, and obviously a mark of suspicion towards those who don't.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  In theory, that's why we have the notion of "probable cause" and warrants, etc. But what we have instead, is a "rubber stamp" mechanism from a secret court which - essentially - is completely free from an accountability to the American people. Given that, I don't really care so much what the NSA tries to do... I now realize that the real answer is promotion, advocacy and education around technological tools to evade their snooping (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they can't break strong crypto). My goal going forward is to dive into helping promote the use of, and education regarding, Tor, I2P, PGP, and their ilk. Part of that is going to mean educating myself to a considerable degree as well, as I've admittedly been too cavalier about this stuff in the past.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    All federal courts are (basically) free from public accountability. That is literally one of the objectives of the design of the Judicial Branch; complain to the founding fathers.
    - 13y ago

ganeumann 13y ago

I think that people like us (that is, people who think in a systems fashion about the electronic communications networks and the data flowing over them) are more likely to view this with alarm than the normals. I think that's because we actually know how much power having things like metadata gives you. The question is, how do we explain this to non-engineers in a way that they will listen to so that they will be as alarmed as we know they should be?

zobzu 13y ago

until ppl get problems, they have no idea what the nsa does with the data. if they have no idea and get no problem, "why would it bother them?" that yeah. its like if i had the right to sentence anybody on earth to death, but i wasn't doing it too often, and when i do it, nobody has any idea it happened. So people would think its ok.

entangld 13y ago

I'd like to see more surveys or reviews of this survey's methods. It isn't difficult for the phrasing of the questions to skew results in one direction or another (e.g. Gallup). I'm sure it's possible for people to be a bit apathetic and support widespread data snooping, but I'm wary of the inevitable attacks and possible drummed up support for current policies.

rdl 13y ago

I think we need to make a choice as a society where the line is drawn. We chose to allow privilege for religious, medical, and legal conversations. Sure, in individual cases, it would be better to get the data from someone's confession, but overall, it's better for society (or people decided) to allow those conversations to encourage religious confession. Maybe there needs to be special protection for certain classes of cloud service, computing service, or communication. Certainly allowing people to use an "exocortex" without fear of seizure would make people smarter. It might make some crimes harder to punish. Luckily, technology gets a vote, too. I think a clear/easy line is that anything which is "personal thought" or approximates thought should be immune to search, ideally though technical means. Notes (for yourself), a journal, etc. Maybe "quantified self" measurements. etc. The line is probably in a different place than in the telephone era, or even the disconnected Internet era. I'd prefer it be defined through legislation (and maybe through constitutional amendment) vs. through legal decisions. The problem with legal decisions is they tend to involve criminal cases, and "a person was keeping a personal diary of his child rapes" is an exceptionally hard thing to argue privacy for, even if that's only 0.001% of the use case enabled by making personal notes private.

socillion 13y ago
IANAL but aren't warrants designed to override privacy when there is existing probable cause? IMO one problem is sweeping collection and indefinite storage for the purposes of trawling for crimes. The other is that the FISA court could be a token "APPROVED" rubber stamp for all we know, taking a "guilty until proven innocent" stance on anyone outside the US. The bit that really bothers me is the total lack of transparency and accountability.
- rdl 13y ago
  The collect-first and degree of oversight in FISA are issues, but generally you can't get a warrant to access protected communications (lawyer, doctor, priest) unless that professional is actually a co-conspirator, not just a professional service provider. There are exceptions (e.g. child abuse, imminent harm, etc.) to the privilege, though. And I think weaker spousal privilege (not being compelled to testify, but if wiretapped, that's fine). IANAL.

staunch 13y ago

I think I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA. Maybe other things like that, with some checks in place (mostly to prevent this data getting out of their hands). But I want to know about these trade-offs, and I don't care if that makes them less effective. There's no way NSA should be looking at private email, phone, VOIP, social networking communication en masse.

brymaster 13y ago
> I think I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA Why? Someone looking to do harm doesn't use phones (maybe Burners) or other communication methods where they know they'd be easily tracked.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Why do you think people looking to do harm don't use phones? Why do you assume the use of burners makes telephonic surveillance pointless? Are you attributing to adversaries the best possible set of circumstances and smallest possible set of constraints?
  - brymaster 13y ago
    I think the argument I wanted to make was that the people NSA claim to be after aren't using your typical contractual phone plans, since OP was suggesting they should simply track call logs. Sure they used pre-paid phones as well as pay phones, hotmail and were still using coded and hidden messages. Today they'd be using that steganography over cryptography. Few sources: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-4985597.html http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-4985597.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/al_qaeda_secret.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/al_qaeda_secre...
    - tptacek 13y ago
      The fact that these people might use disposable phones is actually one of the reasons USG supporters give in favor of hoovering all the telephony "metadata".

alan_cx 13y ago

That is the power of fear for you. Terror in it's self.

brymaster 13y ago
BBC did a good documentary on this very subject: "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/ Seems fear, ignorance and apathy is still working out just fine unfortunately.