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57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents

272 points by 1337biz 13y ago

knowaveragejoe 13y ago
Couldn't techniques typically used for finding moles be used to test this? Astroturf a politically antagonistic group with carefully crafted information and see what happens. Similar to inserting random strings into documents with each distributed copy in order to later find who leaked their copy. Either the NSA(or whomever) would have to be incredibly careful in using the information to some end, or they would abstain from using it at all. I'm not sure the benefits would outweigh the risks here.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  Don't assume that the NSA's primary goal is to collect factual information.
skaevola 13y ago
Given the recent IRS scandal, I'm surprised the number isn't higher.
w_t_payne 13y ago
There is of course, the ultimate litmus test: Would you trust Nixon with this data?
- 1337biz 13y ago
  I love that. This should be a pundit's tag-line. You can kill pretty much any pro-government spying argument with this.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  There is of course, the ultimate litmus test: Would you trust Nixon with this data? Also: "Would you trust J. Edgar Hoover[1] with this data?" [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
wicknicks 13y ago
Fun science fact: Fear causes people to think irrationally. I find it hard to believe that so many people have jumped out of their wits over this NSA news. After all, there are so many more harder and pressing problems in the world. Global Warming, Child Slavery, Drugs, overpriced health care, mortgage and education loans? But on HN, the most intellectual community I am part of (imo) is so worried about automated programs parsing through their mails and tweets, its surprising. Dude, wake up! Your content is NOT so cool. Its like everybody else's -- emails from mom telling you missed on events, defaulting on payments, failures in relationships, failure in school. Everybody goes through those things, and have records to show it. When I see an article with the title that makes me believe that a bunch of scared folks are now going to set decision making processes for the future, it makes me worried. Very worried. Such community moods have been known to make the worst choices (always conservative than progressive) for the future generations. Today, people complain about the war US took to Iraq, and what a bad decision that was. Five years from now, it will be privacy policies that were set in, after "57% FEARED NSA will misuse their personal info." Is privacy important -- yes, it is. But should we blow things out of proportion? No. That's never going to lead to a better world.
- Uhhrrr 13y ago
  You might be too young to remember why laws like FISA exist. The government really has abused its wiretapping capabilities for political ends in the past. So the fear is not irrational at all. You seem to care about a lot of political issues. Do you think the government is always going to be on your side?
  - wicknicks 13y ago
    Yes, I tend to be optimistic about what big corporations and governments can do. After all, they are the people with the resources to change the world if they wanted to. Call me naive. I remember the Bush Wiretapping Laws (seems like a successor to FISA). After saying that, I am not "for" any organization (political or business) to misuse personal information. Personal info is personal, and it should stay that way. But the fear some people are portraying seems irrational and overblown, and this will lead the tech community to self-impose some harsh "laws", which will not play out well.
general_failure 13y ago
(I am not an american) OK, so obama approves all this today. Don't you guys think he has the common sense to think that he will be a target tomorrow himself when he is no longer president? His wife and kids and their families? Such things are definitely to worry about in dictatorial countries but nothing to be 'paranoid' about in democracies. While I don't condone the government for monitoring data, I will have to 'respect' their decision if they think it's the way to go about providing security. After all, they were elected by the people and people have to trust them for their brains. The whole prism thing is completely blown up because media has nothing else to talk about right now. It's just waiting for another news to happen and everyone will move on.
- akiselev 13y ago
  This would never happen. As far as I know, the US has never had a violent change of power except for the Civil War and former Presidents and their spouses are protected for life by the secret service. When the guy you want to target is very well known and knows the country's deepest darkest secrets, there's nothing you can do. Everyone else, however, well... we won't be so lucky. Edit: And no, it is they who must trust us. We must never trust them and we must always be vigilant, always looking over their shoulder, ready to squash their wretched political careers at the slightest infraction against democracy.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > Don't you guys think he has the common sense to think that he will be a target tomorrow himself when he is no longer president? His wife and kids and their families? That depends on whether or not we think that he and his family will be beholden to the same rules as everyone else. Many of us would argue that that is a faulty assumption.
  - general_failure 13y ago
    But a smart person is bound to think that this will happen to him tomorrow _regardless_ of the state today. If you were the president, wouldn't you think you are prone to surveillance despite being president today? I definitely would. I know that when my time is up anything can happen to me. Future presidents can repeal all sorts of powers the same way I as president did.
curt 13y ago
People seem to forget that democracy and freedom are relatively new to the world. The Soviet Union collapsed 20 years ago, many European countries have been free for less than 40 years. Don't take freedom for granted, it's not the steady state system, tyranny is. I'm sorry to say but a lot of countries will degrade back to authoritarianism within the next 10-20 years due to economy and political problems. They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin
- tokenizer 13y ago
  I guess our best hope is that at least one country can retain it.
  - selter01 13y ago
    I fail to see how that is our best hope.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  >People seem to forget that democracy and freedom are relatively new to the world. Democracy was practiced by Greeks 2 thousand years ago. The system of couple of hundred people from the top of society gathered in one room making the decisions for the rest of society hasn't changed since than. And Magna Carta which codified the idea of freedom as a limit on government power is 800 years old.
  - jivatmanx 13y ago
    Athens was a tiny city-state in a world where every other political. The Roman Republic did get fairly large and lasted a while, however. After the classical era and prior to WWII the only major democracies were Britain, the U.S. and intermittently, France.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Since we're quoting Franklin, this one is also relevant: (...) I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
youngerdryas 13y ago
51% of all turns are right hand turns.
Millennium 13y ago
You will, no doubt, find plenty of people who trust Obama to not do this. You'll find plenty of people who would have trusted Bush, and you'll even find a lot of people who don't trust either one of them. But there's a fourth corner to that square, and I don't think you'd find many people in it at all: people who would trust both Bush and Obama with data like this. That's the thing about governments: people have successors. People like Bush and Obama have been elected before, and given enough time, people like them will be elected again. Trusting one administration with a given power means trusting all future administrations, sight unseen, with that same power, and that is rarely a sane thing to do.
- wonderyak 13y ago
  The other problem -- despite the changing of the guard in the Executive branch -- other branches and workers stay the same.
  - SkyMarshal 13y ago
    Exactly. I find it confounding how people are still attributing this stuff to Presidents when it should be obvious by now it's not the elected officials running this show. They're being led along by an entrenched bureaucracy with its own goals and agenda, no term limits, and with the ability to shape the world view and hence decisions of our elected officials by what information they choose to provide or withhold. Stop talking about this in terms of Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat. The problem transcends any one elected individual or even political party.
    - bcoates 13y ago
      This simply isn't true. Obama ran on being Bush's third and fourth terms and that's what we got. The two of them have been a radical departure from previous administrations. Two presidencies does not make an immutable law of nature. Recent political events have demonstrated just how autonomous the President is, there is no reason to think there is some sort of hidden power at play here. If anything we need a stronger and more professional bureaucracy that's less eager to help the President break the law.
trekky1700 13y ago
A recent poll found 20% of Republicans think Obama's the antichrist...
josephlord 13y ago
Opponents of a particular party or those of the NSA/Security state? I wonder if the fears match the reality.
splitrocket 13y ago
I'd imagine that 100% of politicians are afraid the NSA will harass them if they opposed the NSA.
asolove 13y ago
I think this is a much more effective method of getting people to reject snooping. Saying "the government can track metadata about who you call" is not very scary. But make it more concrete and you get some scary statements: - The government can use phone call metadata to build a list of all people who likely own firearms and are gun enthusiasts and pro-gun rights. - The government can use phone call metadata to build a list of all women who likely have had abortions or use contraception. - The government can use phone call metadata to build lists of likely members of each religious group, and their respective social networks. Now there's something for everyone to oppose!
- ivanca 13y ago
  Yeah, the government use fear to spread ignorance, we should do the same to spread awareness against their systematic privacy violations.
  - bradyo 13y ago
    But seriously
- threeseed 13y ago
  Sorry but is this the kind of paranoid stupidity I should start to expect from HN now ? The "government" has been able to collect far more data via the tax and health care systems, TSA, census etc for decades. Imagine all the scary statements I could contrive from those. Or how about we amp up the crazy and talk about all the things the "government" could be doing with their drones and satellites.
  - halorhodopsin 13y ago
    well, it's not really paranoid stupidity. these resources were used against the Occupy movement. if you look at the 70's, COINTELPRO was created to squash domestic dissenting groups such as the Black Panthers, to great effect. our government is perfectly fine with suppressing dissent, and the fate of the Occupy movement shows this - a government would not use undercover police, agent provocateurs, destabilizing tactics, etc. if they tolerated dissent. in my city, the local police intentionally broke up homeless camps and moved them near or into the Occupy tent camp, straining the Occupy resources. Then, when the homeless people inevitably did drugs or were publicly intoxicated in the camp, the police came in and started arresting people left and right for drug possession, intoxication, etc. this did a fantastic job of breaking up our local protest.
Steko 13y ago
Hey look a push poll from Scott Rasmussen. Shouldn't he be working on President Romney's reelection? http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmusse... http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-po...
- d23 13y ago
  Yeah, I've stopped caring much about what the general populace thinks about issue X since they seem to mostly just respond with what they think they should say.
yoster 13y ago
Talk about a title that misleads completely with the word Fear added. The majority of people do not fear this....
coldtea 13y ago
>57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents "Feat that it Will"??????? It already does.
patrickmay 13y ago
> 57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents The other 43% know it will.
- shill 13y ago
  Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
ttrreeww 13y ago
Only 57%? We are doomed.
yyqux 13y ago
Alternative title: "American public paranoid, susceptible to leading survey questions".
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I don't trust Rassmussen even when his polls say what I want them to.

272 points by 1337biz 13y ago

Couldn't techniques typically used for finding moles be used to test this? Astroturf a politically antagonistic group with carefully crafted information and see what happens. Similar to inserting random strings into documents with each distributed copy in order to later find who leaked their copy. Either the NSA(or whomever) would have to be incredibly careful in using the information to some end, or they would abstain from using it at all. I'm not sure the benefits would outweigh the risks here.

jessaustin 13y ago
Don't assume that the NSA's primary goal is to collect factual information.

skaevola 13y ago

Given the recent IRS scandal, I'm surprised the number isn't higher.

w_t_payne 13y ago

There is of course, the ultimate litmus test: Would you trust Nixon with this data?

1337biz 13y ago
I love that. This should be a pundit's tag-line. You can kill pretty much any pro-government spying argument with this.
mindcrime 13y ago
There is of course, the ultimate litmus test: Would you trust Nixon with this data? Also: "Would you trust J. Edgar Hoover[1] with this data?" [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

wicknicks 13y ago

Fun science fact: Fear causes people to think irrationally. I find it hard to believe that so many people have jumped out of their wits over this NSA news. After all, there are so many more harder and pressing problems in the world. Global Warming, Child Slavery, Drugs, overpriced health care, mortgage and education loans? But on HN, the most intellectual community I am part of (imo) is so worried about automated programs parsing through their mails and tweets, its surprising. Dude, wake up! Your content is NOT so cool. Its like everybody else's -- emails from mom telling you missed on events, defaulting on payments, failures in relationships, failure in school. Everybody goes through those things, and have records to show it. When I see an article with the title that makes me believe that a bunch of scared folks are now going to set decision making processes for the future, it makes me worried. Very worried. Such community moods have been known to make the worst choices (always conservative than progressive) for the future generations. Today, people complain about the war US took to Iraq, and what a bad decision that was. Five years from now, it will be privacy policies that were set in, after "57% FEARED NSA will misuse their personal info." Is privacy important -- yes, it is. But should we blow things out of proportion? No. That's never going to lead to a better world.

Uhhrrr 13y ago
You might be too young to remember why laws like FISA exist. The government really has abused its wiretapping capabilities for political ends in the past. So the fear is not irrational at all. You seem to care about a lot of political issues. Do you think the government is always going to be on your side?
- wicknicks 13y ago
  Yes, I tend to be optimistic about what big corporations and governments can do. After all, they are the people with the resources to change the world if they wanted to. Call me naive. I remember the Bush Wiretapping Laws (seems like a successor to FISA). After saying that, I am not "for" any organization (political or business) to misuse personal information. Personal info is personal, and it should stay that way. But the fear some people are portraying seems irrational and overblown, and this will lead the tech community to self-impose some harsh "laws", which will not play out well.

general_failure 13y ago

(I am not an american) OK, so obama approves all this today. Don't you guys think he has the common sense to think that he will be a target tomorrow himself when he is no longer president? His wife and kids and their families? Such things are definitely to worry about in dictatorial countries but nothing to be 'paranoid' about in democracies. While I don't condone the government for monitoring data, I will have to 'respect' their decision if they think it's the way to go about providing security. After all, they were elected by the people and people have to trust them for their brains. The whole prism thing is completely blown up because media has nothing else to talk about right now. It's just waiting for another news to happen and everyone will move on.

akiselev 13y ago
This would never happen. As far as I know, the US has never had a violent change of power except for the Civil War and former Presidents and their spouses are protected for life by the secret service. When the guy you want to target is very well known and knows the country's deepest darkest secrets, there's nothing you can do. Everyone else, however, well... we won't be so lucky. Edit: And no, it is they who must trust us. We must never trust them and we must always be vigilant, always looking over their shoulder, ready to squash their wretched political careers at the slightest infraction against democracy.
chimeracoder 13y ago
> Don't you guys think he has the common sense to think that he will be a target tomorrow himself when he is no longer president? His wife and kids and their families? That depends on whether or not we think that he and his family will be beholden to the same rules as everyone else. Many of us would argue that that is a faulty assumption.
- general_failure 13y ago
  But a smart person is bound to think that this will happen to him tomorrow _regardless_ of the state today. If you were the president, wouldn't you think you are prone to surveillance despite being president today? I definitely would. I know that when my time is up anything can happen to me. Future presidents can repeal all sorts of powers the same way I as president did.

curt 13y ago

People seem to forget that democracy and freedom are relatively new to the world. The Soviet Union collapsed 20 years ago, many European countries have been free for less than 40 years. Don't take freedom for granted, it's not the steady state system, tyranny is. I'm sorry to say but a lot of countries will degrade back to authoritarianism within the next 10-20 years due to economy and political problems. They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin

tokenizer 13y ago
I guess our best hope is that at least one country can retain it.
- selter01 13y ago
  I fail to see how that is our best hope.
VladRussian2 13y ago
>People seem to forget that democracy and freedom are relatively new to the world. Democracy was practiced by Greeks 2 thousand years ago. The system of couple of hundred people from the top of society gathered in one room making the decisions for the rest of society hasn't changed since than. And Magna Carta which codified the idea of freedom as a limit on government power is 800 years old.
- jivatmanx 13y ago
  Athens was a tiny city-state in a world where every other political. The Roman Republic did get fairly large and lasted a while, however. After the classical era and prior to WWII the only major democracies were Britain, the U.S. and intermittently, France.
icebraining 13y ago
Since we're quoting Franklin, this one is also relevant: (...) I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.

youngerdryas 13y ago

51% of all turns are right hand turns.

Millennium 13y ago

You will, no doubt, find plenty of people who trust Obama to not do this. You'll find plenty of people who would have trusted Bush, and you'll even find a lot of people who don't trust either one of them. But there's a fourth corner to that square, and I don't think you'd find many people in it at all: people who would trust both Bush and Obama with data like this. That's the thing about governments: people have successors. People like Bush and Obama have been elected before, and given enough time, people like them will be elected again. Trusting one administration with a given power means trusting all future administrations, sight unseen, with that same power, and that is rarely a sane thing to do.

wonderyak 13y ago
The other problem -- despite the changing of the guard in the Executive branch -- other branches and workers stay the same.
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  Exactly. I find it confounding how people are still attributing this stuff to Presidents when it should be obvious by now it's not the elected officials running this show. They're being led along by an entrenched bureaucracy with its own goals and agenda, no term limits, and with the ability to shape the world view and hence decisions of our elected officials by what information they choose to provide or withhold. Stop talking about this in terms of Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat. The problem transcends any one elected individual or even political party.
  - bcoates 13y ago
    This simply isn't true. Obama ran on being Bush's third and fourth terms and that's what we got. The two of them have been a radical departure from previous administrations. Two presidencies does not make an immutable law of nature. Recent political events have demonstrated just how autonomous the President is, there is no reason to think there is some sort of hidden power at play here. If anything we need a stronger and more professional bureaucracy that's less eager to help the President break the law.

trekky1700 13y ago

A recent poll found 20% of Republicans think Obama's the antichrist...

josephlord 13y ago

Opponents of a particular party or those of the NSA/Security state? I wonder if the fears match the reality.

splitrocket 13y ago

I'd imagine that 100% of politicians are afraid the NSA will harass them if they opposed the NSA.

asolove 13y ago

I think this is a much more effective method of getting people to reject snooping. Saying "the government can track metadata about who you call" is not very scary. But make it more concrete and you get some scary statements: - The government can use phone call metadata to build a list of all people who likely own firearms and are gun enthusiasts and pro-gun rights. - The government can use phone call metadata to build a list of all women who likely have had abortions or use contraception. - The government can use phone call metadata to build lists of likely members of each religious group, and their respective social networks. Now there's something for everyone to oppose!

ivanca 13y ago
Yeah, the government use fear to spread ignorance, we should do the same to spread awareness against their systematic privacy violations.
- bradyo 13y ago
  But seriously
threeseed 13y ago
Sorry but is this the kind of paranoid stupidity I should start to expect from HN now ? The "government" has been able to collect far more data via the tax and health care systems, TSA, census etc for decades. Imagine all the scary statements I could contrive from those. Or how about we amp up the crazy and talk about all the things the "government" could be doing with their drones and satellites.
- halorhodopsin 13y ago
  well, it's not really paranoid stupidity. these resources were used against the Occupy movement. if you look at the 70's, COINTELPRO was created to squash domestic dissenting groups such as the Black Panthers, to great effect. our government is perfectly fine with suppressing dissent, and the fate of the Occupy movement shows this - a government would not use undercover police, agent provocateurs, destabilizing tactics, etc. if they tolerated dissent. in my city, the local police intentionally broke up homeless camps and moved them near or into the Occupy tent camp, straining the Occupy resources. Then, when the homeless people inevitably did drugs or were publicly intoxicated in the camp, the police came in and started arresting people left and right for drug possession, intoxication, etc. this did a fantastic job of breaking up our local protest.

Steko 13y ago

Hey look a push poll from Scott Rasmussen. Shouldn't he be working on President Romney's reelection? http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmusse... http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-po...

d23 13y ago
Yeah, I've stopped caring much about what the general populace thinks about issue X since they seem to mostly just respond with what they think they should say.

yoster 13y ago

Talk about a title that misleads completely with the word Fear added. The majority of people do not fear this....

coldtea 13y ago

>57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents "Feat that it Will"??????? It already does.

patrickmay 13y ago

> 57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents The other 43% know it will.

shill 13y ago
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

ttrreeww 13y ago

Only 57%? We are doomed.

yyqux 13y ago

Alternative title: "American public paranoid, susceptible to leading survey questions".

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

I don't trust Rassmussen even when his polls say what I want them to.