16 ms·

Before Prosecuting, Investigate the Government

567 points by Libertatea 13y ago

hanifvirani 13y ago
When this issue came out, I was really hoping that the people will rise and big changes will finally happen. But now I realize that it was just wishful thinking. For any real big positive changes to occur, there first needs to be a change at the root level, and by that I mean the way people think. The government doing this is a big problem, sure. But the majority of people don't even care, and that I think is a much bigger problem.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- misiti3780 13y ago
  a majority of people know more about what is happening on the jersey shore than they know about prism - that is the real problem - its cool to be ignorant and apathetic these days
  - misiti3780 13y ago
    maybe it's not "cool", but it certainly is not "uncool"
- oftenwrong 13y ago
  Even worse, a lot of Americans seem to see Snowden as a traitor.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    Irrelevant. The question is whether these programs are legal.
- l33tbro 13y ago
  I wish the "nothing to hide" people would just actually stop and think outside their myopic b.s. Look, from what I've been seeing in the last few days (mostly from talking to friends), the "nothing to hide" people are usually white, middle-upper class, and citizens of the USA. But let's try this: get out of your privileged world for a moment and pretend, just for a second, that you are a Middle-Eastern American. This is where shit gets pretty real. Why? Because the reality is that with every email, telephone conversation, and internet search you ever commit to - you will pretty much always be censoring yourself in the back of your mind if the government may misinterpret what you are doing. One search term, one "trigger word" on a phone call, and you could be finding yourself having to defend yourself against some very serious allegations. This is why PRISM is a completely INSANE breach of freedoms. Given that so much of human communication is now conveyed electronically, this is such a huge loss of freedom for those who are being racially and religiously profiled. FYI, I'm a white dude. But if I had to seriously self-censor every every email, phone call, and text I wrote for fear of persecution - the US would feel to me like Syria with MTV.
  - bmelton 13y ago
    "When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking", Ai Weiwei
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  People will only rise up and get upset when they're denied their status quos. Let's talk about it economically. To effect real change, there would have to be a huge shift in the number of upset and angry people. So one or two of a few things would have to happen: 1) right now, most people are working from paycheck to paycheck. They have no buffer, no savings, no freedom from their day job. In fact, they are sacrificing more and more basics just to have the privilege of a job. How do you expect them to find the time to rally? 2) Probably near half the people in the US believe they have nothing to hide and thus shouldn't care about these issues. Something very significant would have to happen to many of them to get them to take action on it. Just by the nature of intelligence, this is likely outside the realm of reality. 3) what's left after throwing all your time and energy at your work and dealing with torturous bureaucracies? Whatever it is that makes life worth living. Your family, entertainment, food; whatever it is, a person just wants to enjoy these things for the little time they have on this planet. When trying to wrangle an entrenched insititution like the US government seems like it would take an entire lifetime to make happen, people evaluate their lives and make that calculus. Most find its just not worth it. I don't really know what the answer is except to say that for anything to happen, probably at least two of those three things have to affect most people in a negative way.
pfortuny 13y ago
Well, at least this sets some balance against Brooks and (have just read it, what a shame...), Friedman! [1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/opinion/friedman-blowing-a-whistle.html?hp http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/opinion/friedman-blowing-a...
- venomsnake 13y ago
  I was thinking of submitting the Friedman article too. Sadly what Friedman fails to acknowledge is that a whole generation is entering puberty now for which 9/11 never happened. But Friedman has always been naive of full of crap depending on the interpretation. Both Brooks and Friedman have one great problem though - they fail to show some real and tangible harm brought to the US or their allies by this leak. It is also interesting that the Editorial can be used as rebuttal to those articles. Schneier is sober and sensible as usual. But sadly among the connected people the opinions are strongly against the leak.
- icebraining 13y ago
  It's amazing how he refers to the Boston Marathon bombing, when that happened despite having NSA monitoring and despite the FBI having warnings from Russia and from informants of the Joint Terrorism Task Force about one of the brothers. "We can't find the needle. I know, let's stack more hay on top, that'll help!"
junto 13y ago
In my honest opinion, I truly believe that this ship has sailed. It is too late to turn back now. Too much money and too much value has been had from these systems for these black projects to be switched off. They will not budge and those systems will never be switched off. I would bet my last dollar on that premise. Our only choice is to accept this and live in the knowledge that we are always being watched, or go as dark as the modern world currently permits without hindering day to day life. At a minimum, we now know that we are being watched and listened to on a massive scale. Previously we only suspected the worst. Sadly, the worst was not anywhere near how bad it actually is.
- olalonde 13y ago
  In my opinion, the situation is much worse now because government can now openly use those tools without having to bear the cost of revealing their capabilities. Before PRISM came to light, they wouldn't have dared to use it for an IRS investigation because they would have ran the risk of revealing their spying activities. Now that everyone knows, they don't run this risk anymore.
- christoph 13y ago
  I'm not really sure why you've been down-voted for this? I agree - I can't imagine a scenario whereby these large scale systems are switched off. Even if we are told they have been switched off or the data destroyed, how would we (as everyday folk) ever verify this?
- monsterix 13y ago
  No it hasn't. And they'll have to budge, or go out. Too much money has been put (It's the tax-payers money) and value gained (doesn't it sound like finding terrorists this way is as bad as finding the next superstar for Hollywood?) is near-negligible in contrast to the value eroded: trust that's been destroyed - particularly in Internet companies - both inside and outside of US. Think again. > Our only choice is to accept this and live in the knowledge that we are always being watched, or go as dark as the modern world currently permits without hindering day to day life. You sound low here, but if the above were true then it'd mean that people are willing to live under a dictator too. That's simply untrue.
btipling 13y ago
Anyone have a pulse of Congress to know if "PRISM" has become politically toxic enough to warrant change? I'm guessing that if PRISM has SOPA level public distain that real change can happen. If the majority of Americans are shrugging at this, any announced changes may be superficial.
- contingencies 13y ago
  Change! There's a masterful political campaign centerpiece if I ever saw one. Obama's recent comments re: PRISM: "I'm not against change". How vacuous.
  - crimsonzagar 13y ago
    Feels like Obama Bin Laden ... hope they don't kill me for the perfection :-)
joshuak 13y ago
As Bruce Schneier points out in his book Beyond Fear humans are very bad at assessing risk accurately. Ask yourself how scared are you of terrorist attacks vs. heart disease. Notice how the government is putting much more money into the terrorist attack threat then the heart disease threat? Here are some of the reasons why people are so bad and assessing risk: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/five_neglects_i.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/five_neglects_... (note finding the actual risk of death by heart disease vs terrorist attack is left to the reader...you might be surprised)
- icebraining 13y ago
  By the way, he was Econtalk this monday: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/schneier_on_pow.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/schneier_on_pow.htm... My favorite part: "We don't say that pigs kill more people than terrorists every year."
- defuzz 13y ago
  At a certain degree quantification and comparing numbers is just stupid, and Bruce is still right we suck at this, and so is he.
- larryCh 13y ago
  Given this known bias politicians then have stronger incentives to try to prevent terrorist attacks (as opposed to heart attacks). It may also be the case that our perception is that politicians can have a more direct impact on terrorist attacks than on heart attacks.
Shivetya 13y ago
What annoys me is that just watching the various government agencies, IRS, NSA, FBI, and others, is that there is a pattern of not telling the public the truth, they lie to Congress as well. How is it that our own government agencies can lie to Congress with near impunity? It is like disrespect has become second nature to government. They do not respect us nor do they respect other agencies within the same. Too big to fail, too big to jail, applies to government now.
- mtgx 13y ago
  I think you should be even more outraged about the fact that Congress doesn't really seem to care that they lied to them. Because if that continues, then we have a pretty big problem here. Where are all the impeachments and swift punishments from Congress? By not punishing them, it just makes it ok for the next guy to do it.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I'm not sure the process should be too swift. Otherwise agreed, though.
    - youngerdryas 13y ago
      We should do it now before the story is discredited.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Where are all the impeachments and swift punishments from Congress? By not punishing them, it just makes it ok for the next guy to do it. The influential people in Congress, by and large, want to be the next guy, be appointed to a high position by the next guy, or have influence with the next guy while remaining in Congress, so this is perhaps unsurprising. Coupled with the fact that FPTP, single-member district elections (for the legislative branch, with even strong two-party incentives in the indirecte executive elections) tend to produce a weakly ideological and more strongly tribal party system, and a greater expectation than in a multiparty system for the average legislator that "we may not like it when their guy is in charge, but we need not to cripple the office for when we get back in charge", well, the results are what should be expected.
HannibalLecter 13y ago
How many men will fall before we find the source of the corruption is in fact the paradox of democracy itself. To have a democracy, you must first enable everyone to be in a fair system. To enable a fair system you have to have certain conditions. To have certain conditions, any conditions, you have to have authority. To have authority, you must not have democracy.
olalonde 13y ago
"In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." - Alexis de Tocqueville In a sense, Americans deserve what they got. They chose to re-elect the same party (Democratic/Republican party, is there a difference really?) over and over again when there is an alternative in the libertarian party which by the way, would most certainly not authorize or encourage what the NSA has been up to. Regardless of your political inclinations, I would strongly suggest you consider voting for them if only for the sake of shaking up the establishment.
- oleganza 13y ago
  Those who do not vote have the right to complain. And those who do, also have the right because everyone is brainwashed. Government is not some magical entity, it is a group of armed bandits who claim to represent the whole society for the "common good" at each individual's expense. It's just religious excuse. People do not deserve to be threatened to surrender property, secrets and liberties that they arrange freely between each other for some "common good" invented by priests and presidents. Saying "you deserve your government" is like saying "you deserve to be raped because you didn't try to avoid it hard enough". I don't care about losing money because of taxes. But if government kills people and I cannot withdraw financial support for it, then it bothers me. Then, its real mafia face is exposed. "Go vote for change, but still pay for our activity."
  - olalonde 13y ago
    > Saying "you deserve your government" is like saying "you deserve to be raped because you didn't try to avoid it hard enough". I meant Americans as a group, not the individuals. Also, while I mostly agree with you, I certainly hope you do not get into politics. This kind of discourse is fine amongst people who are already like minded but will assuredly fail to convince anyone who does not already share your ideas. I hope you realize that and tone it down a little according to your audience even if you are right.
    - oleganza 13y ago
      Americans as a group do not exist. It's a conceptual label. Individuals exist. And if your analysis of what's good for a "group" leads to suffering of individuals, you have some problem. My view of the "group" can be different from yours. To me all people are people, without nations and colors determining "rights" and morality. Who's right?
slacka 13y ago
If you want to show the media and government that we care, you can join your local protest on the 4th of July. Here's more info: http://www.reddit.com/r/rtforganizers http://www.reddit.com/r/rtforganizers
frankblizzard 13y ago
The same could be said for people in general... Don't just complain about the issue on the internet, but actually go out to the streets and demonstrate. It's a long way from the internet to the street...
joering2 13y ago
I believe the worst is still to come up to light: that Obama used his friendship with Schmitt and others that sit on the table during his dinner with CEOs of the biggest IT companies to get pinpointed data on all americans that were not sure how to vote in the second therm. That list was priceless and in the presidency race of 2012 would give Obama huge and unfair competitive edge against Romney. Criminal edge I should say.
yoster 13y ago
We are slowly losing freedoms that were once thought to be a given.
conroe64 13y ago
There probably won't be any prosecution because Snowden most likely defected to the Chinese government. It may have been his plan all along. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who would love to leave their families, and be considered a hero by the general public, and live their life comfortably in another country. Given all the secrets he probably has that he hasn't released, he would be a very valuable resource to China. This is something someone in his position would know how to do, safely, and with a great reward to himself, given that he's probably read the outcomes of hundreds of informants defecting to other countries. And given his CIA background, he knew enough about propaganda to know how to sell it to keep his family from being shamed by being related to a defector. The idea that a guy that's smart enough to make 6 figures after not graduating high school can't plan far enough ahead to explain why he went to China is ludicrous. He's simply not telling the truth about his motives.
- beeneto 13y ago
  > Snowden most likely defected to the Chinese government I keep reading this hypothesis Am I right in thinking that it still has no evidence to support it whatsoever, excluding the fact that he announced his identity while in a Hong Kong hotel?
- conroe64 13y ago
  Regarding the modding, I guess the group think is still in the doe eyed fanatical allegiance phase.. and hasn't reached the bitter disappointment and finger pointing stage yet.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  > There probably won't be any prosecution because Snowden most likely defected to the Chinese government. Or maybe he defected to Brazil? There's no proof one way or another, so let's just pick random countries and speculate.
trotsky 13y ago
In a state where even corporate malfesance is rarely pursued and even more rarely punished beyond fines that can be considered a cost of doing business, exactly which of our agencies, representatives or judicial systems are we expecting to perform such an investigation? At least from my memory, It's varey rare to see a go-get-em special prosecutor attached to anything that didn't have a partisan political origin. And neither of the parties are anti-surveillance - the last thing they want to do is ruin their next chance at bat with it.
robomartin 13y ago
One way I think about this is the parallel with unions. The fundamental concept of unions and collective bargaining are good and, if you will, wholesome. There are working environments where it would be difficult to have a voice without such a facility in place. However, it is my opinion that, unions have degenerated into virtual viruses that kill their hosts. Unions have optimized their side of the equation to such an extent that they are now absolutely deadly for both industry and government. The simplest example of this are the ridiculous benefit and pension packages they have obtained. These packages are mathematically impossible to sustain without hurting both their host and people outside the union. Imagine hiring an employee, paying them above industry average and then having to continue paying them 90% of that salary for life once they retire. How does that happen? Are these organizations evil? Are the people evil? Well, no, the people in the unions, the average union member is not evil at all. Tese are generally good folks just like anyone else in the country, union or not. Where is the evil? At some level it is in the union's management. Perhaps not explicitly. Again, most of the people running unions are probably just as nice as anyone else. The evil really resides in the system and its interaction with other systems. Union leadership and me bership seek to optimize the deals they make looking mostly only at their criteria: more money, more benefits, protections, etc. taken to an extreme this leads to evolving a "virus" genetically coded to kill the host. Part of this is facilitated by incompetent negotiators on the other side of the table, particularly in government. That was a long setup to draw a parallel between unions and government agencies entrusted with national security. The vast majority of the people who work for these agencies are good people. The failure is in the system of rules that they operate under and, perhaps, a failure to, just like unions, look way beyond self needs and consider a sphere beyond theirs and a timeline far into the future. In the end it is a failure in the leadership of these organizations. They all work for the executive branch, which means the buck stops with the President.
ilaksh 13y ago
I see the state as basically being a _really_ official Mafia. They are the government because they have a virtual monopoly on deadly force. If more people understood what the wars were actually about then they would have much more realistic expectations (none) in regards to the ethicality or legality of state actions.
- joonix 13y ago
  Given that the vast majority of American support this type of surveillance in the name of fighting "terrorism," democracy appears to be working. You should blame the electorate.
grappler 13y ago
I'm curious why I haven't seen any talk about porn. Wait, seriously. Come back for a second. Porn. We all know a significant fraction of internet traffic is porn. Most men probably watch it. Perhaps also a large fraction of women. How much you want to bet the NSA knows lots and lots about people's porn habits. Maybe they know exactly what percentage of men and women watch it, browse it, and/or read it. After all, if you want to threaten, embarrass or otherwise manipulate somebody, knowing their porn habits would probably be a good start.
JumpCrisscross 13y ago
We may have a decent time looking at NSA employees' trading histories for suspicious activity. They are a large, secretive organisation populated by smart people who have access to privileged information and who operate on the assumption of immunity. If you could channel public fury over Libor, TBTF, etc. at the NSA it would give the Obama administration even less of a platform to stand on.
- malandrew 13y ago
  This is interesting. I wonder if we could audit the entire holdings of any NSA agents, investigating any portfolios with unusual gains.
- mseebach 13y ago
  Insider trading investigations generally work by looking for unusual trading patterns, especially prior to large market movements. So any NSA employee who's had substantial gains from classified information in his possession would already have been investigated by the NSA. Security clearances, especially TS ones, come with very elaborate requirements that I'm certain would include a requirement to disclose that you're being investigated by the SEC. Even if it doesn't (or the employee decides not to disclose it), I'd be surprised if there wasn't some exchange of data between the SEC and the clearance authorities. Since trading in the public markets based on classified information constitutes a leak, you wouldn't keep your clearance for long.
- trotsky 13y ago
  disclosure of investments, assets and other sources of income is an annual requirement for everyone (or nearly) that works at these agencies. The forms are very thorough and clearly get examined carefully and checked against other sources - if you accidentally omit something it is very likely they will contact you about it. Except for some specialized jobs, this constitutes by far the most serious security review employees are regularly subject to. If anything it seems like those subject to the financial disclosures go out of their way to avoid anything that could even slightly be interpreted as a conflict of interest. While I'm sure there are cases, I think the controls in place to guard against that kind of abuse are probably some of the most effective in government. More effective than polygraph programs to screen those moonlighting for a hostile party, for example.
grappler 13y ago
Event: A bunch of schoolchildren are brutally murdered by a guy with a gun. Conversation in the media: Maybe citizens shouldn't have guns. At least not guns that can easily fire lots of rounds in a short period of time. Massive well-funded response: Don't even think about it. This is a violation of a constitutional right (2nd amendment) which is a vital protection against a tyrannical government. Result: Attempt to pass a bill in congress fails. Event: Guy with access to highly classified information concerning massive surveillance programs leaks some of this information to the press, which makes some of that information public. Conversation in the media: This sounds like George Orwell's “1984”. The government is monitoring everyone and lying to congress and to the people about it. The laws, interpretations and court rulings are all secret, preventing accountability. People should know what their government is doing. Pitiful response from lots of people with no clout: Stop tracking all our calls, movements and internet traffic. This is a violation of our constitutional rights (1st and 4th amendments) which are a vital protection against a tyrannical government. Counter-response from establishment people with lots of clout: This is necessary to protect you from terrorists. Result: TBD...
- sneak 13y ago
  I think you are oversimplifying a very complex system. Silly gun control (which is ineffective at addressing the threat to which it responds) isn't simply difficult to get passed because the NRA has a lot of money. Conversely, in the second example, the clout/well-funded comparison argument is similarly ineffective. It's not really that parallel, and there are a lot more factors involved.
egsec 13y ago
I don't know if anyone read the onsite comments, but I don't know if this is funny or true: "Simple question, why wasn’t Snowden’s girlfriend a Spook? Back in the 1990s, if any nerd/geek/brain had access to Top Secret data then one of 17 U.S. agencies would have paired such a person with a beautiful girlfriend with similar level of clearance with whom he could talk just so he wouldn’t run away or leak, and said girlfriend would go on to become wife and pop out a kid or two, preventing said nerd/geek/brain from ever leaking (even if he ran away) just to avoid starving his kid/s because their mommy would lose her security clearance. What happened to America after 9-11? Fear got rid of all the common sense? lol. Let me guess, the Carlyles went Boozing with Allen and Hamilton and they supplied the intelligence community with so many thousands of geeks and nerds that America’s 17 intelligence services ran out of beautiful women with whom to keep them in line. Ofcourse Snowden would leave his pole dancing, nature loving girlfriend of 8 years (with whom he couldn’t talk about anything and who couldn’t share the burden to his conscience because she had no security clearance) to blow the whistle and expose the alarming surveillance of innocent Americans who have no way to prove their innocence if their innocent words and second or third degree online associations mistakenly put them under suspicion and surveillance just because some computer algorithm got triggered. Just how many Americans are under suspicion right now? What are the numbers exactly? Thousands? Millions? lol."

567 points by Libertatea 13y ago

When this issue came out, I was really hoping that the people will rise and big changes will finally happen. But now I realize that it was just wishful thinking. For any real big positive changes to occur, there first needs to be a change at the root level, and by that I mean the way people think. The government doing this is a big problem, sure. But the majority of people don't even care, and that I think is a much bigger problem.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
misiti3780 13y ago
a majority of people know more about what is happening on the jersey shore than they know about prism - that is the real problem - its cool to be ignorant and apathetic these days
- misiti3780 13y ago
  maybe it's not "cool", but it certainly is not "uncool"
oftenwrong 13y ago
Even worse, a lot of Americans seem to see Snowden as a traitor.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Irrelevant. The question is whether these programs are legal.
l33tbro 13y ago
I wish the "nothing to hide" people would just actually stop and think outside their myopic b.s. Look, from what I've been seeing in the last few days (mostly from talking to friends), the "nothing to hide" people are usually white, middle-upper class, and citizens of the USA. But let's try this: get out of your privileged world for a moment and pretend, just for a second, that you are a Middle-Eastern American. This is where shit gets pretty real. Why? Because the reality is that with every email, telephone conversation, and internet search you ever commit to - you will pretty much always be censoring yourself in the back of your mind if the government may misinterpret what you are doing. One search term, one "trigger word" on a phone call, and you could be finding yourself having to defend yourself against some very serious allegations. This is why PRISM is a completely INSANE breach of freedoms. Given that so much of human communication is now conveyed electronically, this is such a huge loss of freedom for those who are being racially and religiously profiled. FYI, I'm a white dude. But if I had to seriously self-censor every every email, phone call, and text I wrote for fear of persecution - the US would feel to me like Syria with MTV.
- bmelton 13y ago
  "When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking", Ai Weiwei
dclowd9901 13y ago
People will only rise up and get upset when they're denied their status quos. Let's talk about it economically. To effect real change, there would have to be a huge shift in the number of upset and angry people. So one or two of a few things would have to happen: 1) right now, most people are working from paycheck to paycheck. They have no buffer, no savings, no freedom from their day job. In fact, they are sacrificing more and more basics just to have the privilege of a job. How do you expect them to find the time to rally? 2) Probably near half the people in the US believe they have nothing to hide and thus shouldn't care about these issues. Something very significant would have to happen to many of them to get them to take action on it. Just by the nature of intelligence, this is likely outside the realm of reality. 3) what's left after throwing all your time and energy at your work and dealing with torturous bureaucracies? Whatever it is that makes life worth living. Your family, entertainment, food; whatever it is, a person just wants to enjoy these things for the little time they have on this planet. When trying to wrangle an entrenched insititution like the US government seems like it would take an entire lifetime to make happen, people evaluate their lives and make that calculus. Most find its just not worth it. I don't really know what the answer is except to say that for anything to happen, probably at least two of those three things have to affect most people in a negative way.

pfortuny 13y ago

Well, at least this sets some balance against Brooks and (have just read it, what a shame...), Friedman! [1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/opinion/friedman-blowing-a-whistle.html?hp http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/opinion/friedman-blowing-a...

venomsnake 13y ago
I was thinking of submitting the Friedman article too. Sadly what Friedman fails to acknowledge is that a whole generation is entering puberty now for which 9/11 never happened. But Friedman has always been naive of full of crap depending on the interpretation. Both Brooks and Friedman have one great problem though - they fail to show some real and tangible harm brought to the US or their allies by this leak. It is also interesting that the Editorial can be used as rebuttal to those articles. Schneier is sober and sensible as usual. But sadly among the connected people the opinions are strongly against the leak.
icebraining 13y ago
It's amazing how he refers to the Boston Marathon bombing, when that happened despite having NSA monitoring and despite the FBI having warnings from Russia and from informants of the Joint Terrorism Task Force about one of the brothers. "We can't find the needle. I know, let's stack more hay on top, that'll help!"

junto 13y ago

In my honest opinion, I truly believe that this ship has sailed. It is too late to turn back now. Too much money and too much value has been had from these systems for these black projects to be switched off. They will not budge and those systems will never be switched off. I would bet my last dollar on that premise. Our only choice is to accept this and live in the knowledge that we are always being watched, or go as dark as the modern world currently permits without hindering day to day life. At a minimum, we now know that we are being watched and listened to on a massive scale. Previously we only suspected the worst. Sadly, the worst was not anywhere near how bad it actually is.

olalonde 13y ago
In my opinion, the situation is much worse now because government can now openly use those tools without having to bear the cost of revealing their capabilities. Before PRISM came to light, they wouldn't have dared to use it for an IRS investigation because they would have ran the risk of revealing their spying activities. Now that everyone knows, they don't run this risk anymore.
christoph 13y ago
I'm not really sure why you've been down-voted for this? I agree - I can't imagine a scenario whereby these large scale systems are switched off. Even if we are told they have been switched off or the data destroyed, how would we (as everyday folk) ever verify this?
monsterix 13y ago
No it hasn't. And they'll have to budge, or go out. Too much money has been put (It's the tax-payers money) and value gained (doesn't it sound like finding terrorists this way is as bad as finding the next superstar for Hollywood?) is near-negligible in contrast to the value eroded: trust that's been destroyed - particularly in Internet companies - both inside and outside of US. Think again. > Our only choice is to accept this and live in the knowledge that we are always being watched, or go as dark as the modern world currently permits without hindering day to day life. You sound low here, but if the above were true then it'd mean that people are willing to live under a dictator too. That's simply untrue.

btipling 13y ago

Anyone have a pulse of Congress to know if "PRISM" has become politically toxic enough to warrant change? I'm guessing that if PRISM has SOPA level public distain that real change can happen. If the majority of Americans are shrugging at this, any announced changes may be superficial.

contingencies 13y ago
Change! There's a masterful political campaign centerpiece if I ever saw one. Obama's recent comments re: PRISM: "I'm not against change". How vacuous.
- crimsonzagar 13y ago
  Feels like Obama Bin Laden ... hope they don't kill me for the perfection :-)

joshuak 13y ago

As Bruce Schneier points out in his book Beyond Fear humans are very bad at assessing risk accurately. Ask yourself how scared are you of terrorist attacks vs. heart disease. Notice how the government is putting much more money into the terrorist attack threat then the heart disease threat? Here are some of the reasons why people are so bad and assessing risk: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/five_neglects_i.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/five_neglects_... (note finding the actual risk of death by heart disease vs terrorist attack is left to the reader...you might be surprised)

icebraining 13y ago
By the way, he was Econtalk this monday: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/schneier_on_pow.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/schneier_on_pow.htm... My favorite part: "We don't say that pigs kill more people than terrorists every year."
defuzz 13y ago
At a certain degree quantification and comparing numbers is just stupid, and Bruce is still right we suck at this, and so is he.
larryCh 13y ago
Given this known bias politicians then have stronger incentives to try to prevent terrorist attacks (as opposed to heart attacks). It may also be the case that our perception is that politicians can have a more direct impact on terrorist attacks than on heart attacks.

Shivetya 13y ago

What annoys me is that just watching the various government agencies, IRS, NSA, FBI, and others, is that there is a pattern of not telling the public the truth, they lie to Congress as well. How is it that our own government agencies can lie to Congress with near impunity? It is like disrespect has become second nature to government. They do not respect us nor do they respect other agencies within the same. Too big to fail, too big to jail, applies to government now.

mtgx 13y ago
I think you should be even more outraged about the fact that Congress doesn't really seem to care that they lied to them. Because if that continues, then we have a pretty big problem here. Where are all the impeachments and swift punishments from Congress? By not punishing them, it just makes it ok for the next guy to do it.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  I'm not sure the process should be too swift. Otherwise agreed, though.
  - youngerdryas 13y ago
    We should do it now before the story is discredited.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Where are all the impeachments and swift punishments from Congress? By not punishing them, it just makes it ok for the next guy to do it. The influential people in Congress, by and large, want to be the next guy, be appointed to a high position by the next guy, or have influence with the next guy while remaining in Congress, so this is perhaps unsurprising. Coupled with the fact that FPTP, single-member district elections (for the legislative branch, with even strong two-party incentives in the indirecte executive elections) tend to produce a weakly ideological and more strongly tribal party system, and a greater expectation than in a multiparty system for the average legislator that "we may not like it when their guy is in charge, but we need not to cripple the office for when we get back in charge", well, the results are what should be expected.

HannibalLecter 13y ago

How many men will fall before we find the source of the corruption is in fact the paradox of democracy itself. To have a democracy, you must first enable everyone to be in a fair system. To enable a fair system you have to have certain conditions. To have certain conditions, any conditions, you have to have authority. To have authority, you must not have democracy.

olalonde 13y ago

"In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." - Alexis de Tocqueville In a sense, Americans deserve what they got. They chose to re-elect the same party (Democratic/Republican party, is there a difference really?) over and over again when there is an alternative in the libertarian party which by the way, would most certainly not authorize or encourage what the NSA has been up to. Regardless of your political inclinations, I would strongly suggest you consider voting for them if only for the sake of shaking up the establishment.

oleganza 13y ago
Those who do not vote have the right to complain. And those who do, also have the right because everyone is brainwashed. Government is not some magical entity, it is a group of armed bandits who claim to represent the whole society for the "common good" at each individual's expense. It's just religious excuse. People do not deserve to be threatened to surrender property, secrets and liberties that they arrange freely between each other for some "common good" invented by priests and presidents. Saying "you deserve your government" is like saying "you deserve to be raped because you didn't try to avoid it hard enough". I don't care about losing money because of taxes. But if government kills people and I cannot withdraw financial support for it, then it bothers me. Then, its real mafia face is exposed. "Go vote for change, but still pay for our activity."
- olalonde 13y ago
  > Saying "you deserve your government" is like saying "you deserve to be raped because you didn't try to avoid it hard enough". I meant Americans as a group, not the individuals. Also, while I mostly agree with you, I certainly hope you do not get into politics. This kind of discourse is fine amongst people who are already like minded but will assuredly fail to convince anyone who does not already share your ideas. I hope you realize that and tone it down a little according to your audience even if you are right.
  - oleganza 13y ago
    Americans as a group do not exist. It's a conceptual label. Individuals exist. And if your analysis of what's good for a "group" leads to suffering of individuals, you have some problem. My view of the "group" can be different from yours. To me all people are people, without nations and colors determining "rights" and morality. Who's right?

slacka 13y ago

If you want to show the media and government that we care, you can join your local protest on the 4th of July. Here's more info: http://www.reddit.com/r/rtforganizers http://www.reddit.com/r/rtforganizers

frankblizzard 13y ago

The same could be said for people in general... Don't just complain about the issue on the internet, but actually go out to the streets and demonstrate. It's a long way from the internet to the street...

joering2 13y ago

I believe the worst is still to come up to light: that Obama used his friendship with Schmitt and others that sit on the table during his dinner with CEOs of the biggest IT companies to get pinpointed data on all americans that were not sure how to vote in the second therm. That list was priceless and in the presidency race of 2012 would give Obama huge and unfair competitive edge against Romney. Criminal edge I should say.

yoster 13y ago

We are slowly losing freedoms that were once thought to be a given.

conroe64 13y ago

There probably won't be any prosecution because Snowden most likely defected to the Chinese government. It may have been his plan all along. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who would love to leave their families, and be considered a hero by the general public, and live their life comfortably in another country. Given all the secrets he probably has that he hasn't released, he would be a very valuable resource to China. This is something someone in his position would know how to do, safely, and with a great reward to himself, given that he's probably read the outcomes of hundreds of informants defecting to other countries. And given his CIA background, he knew enough about propaganda to know how to sell it to keep his family from being shamed by being related to a defector. The idea that a guy that's smart enough to make 6 figures after not graduating high school can't plan far enough ahead to explain why he went to China is ludicrous. He's simply not telling the truth about his motives.

beeneto 13y ago
> Snowden most likely defected to the Chinese government I keep reading this hypothesis Am I right in thinking that it still has no evidence to support it whatsoever, excluding the fact that he announced his identity while in a Hong Kong hotel?
conroe64 13y ago
Regarding the modding, I guess the group think is still in the doe eyed fanatical allegiance phase.. and hasn't reached the bitter disappointment and finger pointing stage yet.
darkarmani 13y ago
> There probably won't be any prosecution because Snowden most likely defected to the Chinese government. Or maybe he defected to Brazil? There's no proof one way or another, so let's just pick random countries and speculate.

trotsky 13y ago

In a state where even corporate malfesance is rarely pursued and even more rarely punished beyond fines that can be considered a cost of doing business, exactly which of our agencies, representatives or judicial systems are we expecting to perform such an investigation? At least from my memory, It's varey rare to see a go-get-em special prosecutor attached to anything that didn't have a partisan political origin. And neither of the parties are anti-surveillance - the last thing they want to do is ruin their next chance at bat with it.

robomartin 13y ago

One way I think about this is the parallel with unions. The fundamental concept of unions and collective bargaining are good and, if you will, wholesome. There are working environments where it would be difficult to have a voice without such a facility in place. However, it is my opinion that, unions have degenerated into virtual viruses that kill their hosts. Unions have optimized their side of the equation to such an extent that they are now absolutely deadly for both industry and government. The simplest example of this are the ridiculous benefit and pension packages they have obtained. These packages are mathematically impossible to sustain without hurting both their host and people outside the union. Imagine hiring an employee, paying them above industry average and then having to continue paying them 90% of that salary for life once they retire. How does that happen? Are these organizations evil? Are the people evil? Well, no, the people in the unions, the average union member is not evil at all. Tese are generally good folks just like anyone else in the country, union or not. Where is the evil? At some level it is in the union's management. Perhaps not explicitly. Again, most of the people running unions are probably just as nice as anyone else. The evil really resides in the system and its interaction with other systems. Union leadership and me bership seek to optimize the deals they make looking mostly only at their criteria: more money, more benefits, protections, etc. taken to an extreme this leads to evolving a "virus" genetically coded to kill the host. Part of this is facilitated by incompetent negotiators on the other side of the table, particularly in government. That was a long setup to draw a parallel between unions and government agencies entrusted with national security. The vast majority of the people who work for these agencies are good people. The failure is in the system of rules that they operate under and, perhaps, a failure to, just like unions, look way beyond self needs and consider a sphere beyond theirs and a timeline far into the future. In the end it is a failure in the leadership of these organizations. They all work for the executive branch, which means the buck stops with the President.

ilaksh 13y ago

I see the state as basically being a _really_ official Mafia. They are the government because they have a virtual monopoly on deadly force. If more people understood what the wars were actually about then they would have much more realistic expectations (none) in regards to the ethicality or legality of state actions.

joonix 13y ago
Given that the vast majority of American support this type of surveillance in the name of fighting "terrorism," democracy appears to be working. You should blame the electorate.

grappler 13y ago

I'm curious why I haven't seen any talk about porn. Wait, seriously. Come back for a second. Porn. We all know a significant fraction of internet traffic is porn. Most men probably watch it. Perhaps also a large fraction of women. How much you want to bet the NSA knows lots and lots about people's porn habits. Maybe they know exactly what percentage of men and women watch it, browse it, and/or read it. After all, if you want to threaten, embarrass or otherwise manipulate somebody, knowing their porn habits would probably be a good start.

JumpCrisscross 13y ago

We may have a decent time looking at NSA employees' trading histories for suspicious activity. They are a large, secretive organisation populated by smart people who have access to privileged information and who operate on the assumption of immunity. If you could channel public fury over Libor, TBTF, etc. at the NSA it would give the Obama administration even less of a platform to stand on.

malandrew 13y ago
This is interesting. I wonder if we could audit the entire holdings of any NSA agents, investigating any portfolios with unusual gains.
mseebach 13y ago
Insider trading investigations generally work by looking for unusual trading patterns, especially prior to large market movements. So any NSA employee who's had substantial gains from classified information in his possession would already have been investigated by the NSA. Security clearances, especially TS ones, come with very elaborate requirements that I'm certain would include a requirement to disclose that you're being investigated by the SEC. Even if it doesn't (or the employee decides not to disclose it), I'd be surprised if there wasn't some exchange of data between the SEC and the clearance authorities. Since trading in the public markets based on classified information constitutes a leak, you wouldn't keep your clearance for long.
trotsky 13y ago
disclosure of investments, assets and other sources of income is an annual requirement for everyone (or nearly) that works at these agencies. The forms are very thorough and clearly get examined carefully and checked against other sources - if you accidentally omit something it is very likely they will contact you about it. Except for some specialized jobs, this constitutes by far the most serious security review employees are regularly subject to. If anything it seems like those subject to the financial disclosures go out of their way to avoid anything that could even slightly be interpreted as a conflict of interest. While I'm sure there are cases, I think the controls in place to guard against that kind of abuse are probably some of the most effective in government. More effective than polygraph programs to screen those moonlighting for a hostile party, for example.

grappler 13y ago

Event: A bunch of schoolchildren are brutally murdered by a guy with a gun. Conversation in the media: Maybe citizens shouldn't have guns. At least not guns that can easily fire lots of rounds in a short period of time. Massive well-funded response: Don't even think about it. This is a violation of a constitutional right (2nd amendment) which is a vital protection against a tyrannical government. Result: Attempt to pass a bill in congress fails. Event: Guy with access to highly classified information concerning massive surveillance programs leaks some of this information to the press, which makes some of that information public. Conversation in the media: This sounds like George Orwell's “1984”. The government is monitoring everyone and lying to congress and to the people about it. The laws, interpretations and court rulings are all secret, preventing accountability. People should know what their government is doing. Pitiful response from lots of people with no clout: Stop tracking all our calls, movements and internet traffic. This is a violation of our constitutional rights (1st and 4th amendments) which are a vital protection against a tyrannical government. Counter-response from establishment people with lots of clout: This is necessary to protect you from terrorists. Result: TBD...

sneak 13y ago
I think you are oversimplifying a very complex system. Silly gun control (which is ineffective at addressing the threat to which it responds) isn't simply difficult to get passed because the NRA has a lot of money. Conversely, in the second example, the clout/well-funded comparison argument is similarly ineffective. It's not really that parallel, and there are a lot more factors involved.

egsec 13y ago

I don't know if anyone read the onsite comments, but I don't know if this is funny or true: "Simple question, why wasn’t Snowden’s girlfriend a Spook? Back in the 1990s, if any nerd/geek/brain had access to Top Secret data then one of 17 U.S. agencies would have paired such a person with a beautiful girlfriend with similar level of clearance with whom he could talk just so he wouldn’t run away or leak, and said girlfriend would go on to become wife and pop out a kid or two, preventing said nerd/geek/brain from ever leaking (even if he ran away) just to avoid starving his kid/s because their mommy would lose her security clearance. What happened to America after 9-11? Fear got rid of all the common sense? lol. Let me guess, the Carlyles went Boozing with Allen and Hamilton and they supplied the intelligence community with so many thousands of geeks and nerds that America’s 17 intelligence services ran out of beautiful women with whom to keep them in line. Ofcourse Snowden would leave his pole dancing, nature loving girlfriend of 8 years (with whom he couldn’t talk about anything and who couldn’t share the burden to his conscience because she had no security clearance) to blow the whistle and expose the alarming surveillance of innocent Americans who have no way to prove their innocence if their innocent words and second or third degree online associations mistakenly put them under suspicion and surveillance just because some computer algorithm got triggered. Just how many Americans are under suspicion right now? What are the numbers exactly? Thousands? Millions? lol."