11 ms·
Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting
by DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years.
Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime?
Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a field day with such material.
Oh, and by the way, it's completely fucked.
Back in the day, the FBI recorded folks that they suspected were subversives and it caused a huge stink. People were rightly outraged. It was considered a blemish on the FBI. Now we do the same thing -- only with everybody. And still 45% or so of the population hasn't figured out what the problem is. Amazing.
- Lost_BiomedE 13y agoPart of the book 1984 was the complacence of the lower class. I am not targeting any class here but pointing out that a culture of complacency by division was a large warning in that book that is often overlooked.
- Homunculiheaded 13y agoIt's really unfortunate that most people read 1984 as teenagers (I did). I went back to it as an adult, somewhat expecting it to be a let down. What I found was quite the opposite, there's a lot more nuance in that book than would really be absorbed by high school students being forced to read it. "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
- kunai 13y agoDo not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.
- MartinCron 13y agoAnd think how much more astute you will be in 20 years.
- hawkharris 13y agoI agree that we should be careful not to stereotype based on age, but your comment made me think of this funny (yet poignant) bit by Louis C.K.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcWeFn-YYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcWeFn-YYM "Older people are smarter, and if you get into an argument with someone who's older, you should listen. It doesn't mean they're always right; but even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more experience."
- sliverstorm 13y agoHomunculiheaded was not criticizing or belittling teenagers. Notice you yourself acknowledge most teenagers today are "shallow"- consider that Homunculiheaded is not concerned with the exceptional individuals, but rather the larger group. To attempt to illustrate, a question: "At what age ought citizens read 1984, that more of them will see the deeper meanings?"
- temp9251 13y agoI'm 20 now, and I think I'm smart. When I was 15 I did as well, but now I think I was pretty stupid at the time. No doubt the pattern will continue at 25.
- D9u 13y agoI had no problem understanding the many nuances of 1984 the book, and that was over 35 years ago. I also had no problem seeing a problem with the central banking system and fractional reserve lending. Perhaps you disliked "being forced" to read classics, but many of us contemplated these writings thoughtfully.
- wavefunction 13y agoYou may find there are even more nuances now that you have those additional 35 years under your belt, who knows...
- einhverfr 13y agoIndeed all states derive their power from the consent of the governed, do they not? What would have happened if even a third of Iraq decided to ignore their government under Saddam? The government couldn't have responded. Governments work because we agree to do what they say. Now things like drones centralize some of the power in ways that could not be done before but only to a point and the complexity overhead counterbalances that. Complacency is how tyranny works everywhere and in all ages.
- careersuicide 13y ago>Complacency is how tyranny works everywhere and in all ages. I think your point specifically about Iraq is largely likely to be correct, but I have never been able to swallow this argument, which comes up just about every discussion of tyranny I see/hear. A fundamental component of true tyranny is violence or an immediate threat of violence (as opposed to the somewhat more abstract monopoly on force that democratic governments have). At the risk of sounding trite: it's easy to call people complacent in the face of a tyrannical government when it isn't your family that will be the target of that violence. Resisting a strong and deeply rooted tyrannical government is not for the feint of heart or those with precious things to lose. To say those that don't give up the tenuous stability they have to attempt to foil the will of the government are complacent is dangerously close to shifting the blame on the victims of abuse. I suppose it would be fair to say that in any tyrannical state that many are, in a way, resigned to their fate. For most people in that situation anything besides begrudging acceptance of the way things are is not far from suicide. In the case of the US I would wholeheartedly agree that apathy is a huge driving force behind our government taking power it should not. Implying that's how it works everywhere and every time seems very unfair.
- einhverfr 13y agoIt's not just that though. Tyranny usually works by doing three things: 1. Threatening violence against those who oppose them. 2. Propaganda purporting to show the exceptional nature of the dictator. North Korea for example portrayed Kim Jung Il as a genius mathematician, philosopher, writer, and much more. 3. Socially isolate resistance and ensure they cannot talk to eachother. This takes many forms, but in Iraq for example, a lot of effort was spent fomenting conflict between various small groups in Iraqi society. The goal is an environment where nobody can effectively oppose not just because they are afraid, but because the images of the grand dictator are so prevalent and everyone is so preoccupied that organized opposition is just not possible. The result is that as soon as folks stop being complacent because organization becomes feasible, the dictatorship falls.
- arethuza 13y agoThe complacence of the proles in 1984 was carefully engineered - they were fed mindless entertainments (songs, novels, porn) and ruthlessly culled of anyone who appeared to show political awareness.
- dbbolton 13y agoIf they were obtained without a warrant, wouldn't they be inadmissible as evidence, especially if they were being used in an inculpatory rather than exculpatory manner?
- aqme28 13y agoUnless I'm mistaken (IANAL), they can still be used as exculpatory evidence.
- paulsutter 13y agoThe government lawyers' opinion is that they can later get a warrant to access the data, long after it was recorded (see the whole discussion on "collect" meaning to take a book off the shelf and read it). They also seem to think it's ok to datamine the recordings as long as it's done anonymously.
- mpyne 13y agoAnd in fact I'm willing to bet that explains the divergence of opinion that the Senator noted in the linked story. He probably was told in his classified briefing that NSA could record and collect phone calls without a warrant. Mueller, on the other hand, would be talking about actually tapping into that data, which would need a warrant. I'm not sure I buy the argument that you can record a phone call without a warrant just because it's using VoIP or some equivalent instead of a physical wiretap, but it does sound similar to the other arguments that have been made to collect data for later analysis by warrant if necessary.
- ihsw 13y agoThere seems to be a lot of legal niggling regarding that, obtaining the data itself is perfectly well within all legal avenues -- including indexing it and organizing it into whatever manner -- however querying the resultant database is quite restricted (with apparently many levels of oversight).
- georgemcbay 13y agoHow quaint, assuming there would be a trial with evidence and everything. What makes all of this horrifying instead of merely troubling to me is the corresponding destruction of the idea of a writ of habeas corpus.
- drawkbox 13y agoIt really is appalling that this isn't more rejected. A couple decades ago impeachment, resignations, firings would happen. Everyone thinks about how this affects us now, how will it affect everyone decades from now? Pretty soon warrants won't be needed at all because Executive Orders override them and are 'legal'. We may as well just remove the 4th amendment since everyone is so scared and complacent.
- niels_olson 13y ago> the NSA might be sitting on audio recordings of all your phone calls for the past several years I believe you would be interested in Laura Poitras (Snowden advisor and documentary filmmaker) and William Binney (NSA code breaker who designed some of this software and then got a friendly FBI raid-at-gunpoint and who spoke at the same DEFCON as General Alexander). Specifically, Snowden watched Poitras's documentary about Binney, The Program, before seeking her assistance in learning how to live the surveilled life: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...
- cscurmudgeon 13y agoEnjoy our brave new world.
- pasbesoin 13y agoI recall some months ago a seemingly fairly technical and generally informed commenter -- here on HN, I believe -- laying out their back of the envelop calculation of what it might take to archive all the U.S. voice traffic. The resulting figures were currently readily achievable, and they became increasingly... "trivial" (my interpretation) with the already announced and in progress data center expansions. And here, in this article, we have a description of Brewster Khale coming up with what is truly a trivial dollar amount to accomplish this. It's increasingly apparent that there is probably no technical limitation to their accomplishing this. The only question remains, is any other limitation stopping them?
- niels_olson 13y agoThe real problem is that once a government program is started, good luck shutting it down. Look at the GITMO detainee program.
- hownottowrite 13y agoCorrect. If there's one thing that governments are good at, it's storage. Long term storage.
- vidarh 13y agoYou can record GSM encoded (9600bps) voice of all americans 24/7 for a year and still only fill up a couple of percent of the speculated storage capacity of the NSA's new Utah data centre. I don't know how long the average person spends on the phone each day, but clearly recording the phone calls will be just a small fraction of that again. So keeping a few years of recordings of all phone calls they can get their hands on would not be a storage problem.
- alephnil 13y agoA phone call can be compressed to 10 kbits/sec or less given a good speech codec and still be understandable, if not of very good quality. That means that if you are on the phone 20 minutes every day, it will be around a half a GB per year. If every American is on phone that much, it will be bit less than 143 petabytes a year, or about 36000 4GB hardisks. That is a bit, but the datacenter in Utah presumably have a capacity of a yottabyte, or nearly seven order of magnitude more than what is needed to record all phonecalls for a given year. They would have capacity to store all phone calls for nearly a million years if the yottabyte figure is right.
- babesh 13y agoThat 'might' seems much more like an 'is'. And they seem to be sharing that information with foreign governments as well. As an aside, why is Silicon Valley not much more worked up about this versus say immigration acts? This seems to be more important than the immigration bills they are pushing. Talking about misplaced values... Thinking of more ways to make money while Rome burns.
- 16s 13y agoMost American's don't care. They are too busy on Facebook or playing games on their iphone/android, taking pictures of themselves in the bathroom, etc. The Native Americans gave their land away for beads. Modern Americans give their constitutional rights away for electronic gadgets that they can play with.
- mpyne 13y agoNative Americans on the whole didn't give anything away. They had their land taken by force and by disaster.
- Lost_BiomedE 13y ago'The Native Americans gave their land away for beads.' This is one myth sold to us in school. The tribe that sold the land for beads did not own that land. It was the territory of another competing tribe. I will sell you russia for $20, right now.
- Udo 13y agoHaving just watched yesterday's RealTime (Bill Maher's show) as well as the mainstream news coverage of the week, I have finally come to the conclusion that no significant number of Americans has a problem with living in a surveillance state, not even the host and guests on a faux liberal talk show. Except when I'm on HN, everywhere I go there just are no people who see anything fundamentally wrong with the entire premise, so I think saying that only 45% don't care is a very low-ball estimate. From the look of things, it's more like 95%.
- ataggart 13y agoFew men want to be free; most just want fair masters.
- mratzloff 13y agoA great quote from Sallust, a statesman of the Roman republic. Specifically, he lived toward the end of the Roman republic. Another quote of his that seems applicable here: "Yet many human beings, resigned to sensuality and indolence, uninstructed and unimproved, have passed through life like travellers in a strange country."
- f1nch3r 13y agoBill Maher has a vested interest in seeing Obama not be made a fool.
- booruguru 13y agoWhat are you talking about? Maher criticizes Obama all of the time...and he gets lots of flak from liberals because of it.
- Amadou 13y agoI saw that same show and I was similarly disappointed with it. However, my impression was that all of the guests and Maher himself were under-informed. Possibly even misinformed because there were echoes of talking points "Snowden is neither a hero nor a traitor." "Hong Kong is, after-all, China," "Snowden is delusional," "Snowden is a publicity seeker" etc. Last week, when the story first broke, Maher was ambivalent about it and he justified his ambivalence by focusing on nuclear weapons - as in because nukes can kill so many people the risk is just too great so we need to do everything and anything to stop them. Obviously he didn't know enough about the situation to understand that dirty bombs are the only nukes that it is even plausible to consider being used by terrorists (rather than foreign governments) and that dirty bombs are all about the dirty and not so much the bomb - fallout over a couple of city blocks and not an explosion that could destroy a city hiroshima style. Still enough to kill hundreds, maybe thousands if an attacker gets everything just right, but not the existential threat that obliterating Manhattan would be. I'd like to see Greenwald on his show, Greenwald did a pretty good job of calling Maher on his BS regarding the arab spring the last time he was on there. Since he's right in the middle of this story I'm sure he'd do even better. The only "liberal" group I'm particularly disillusioned with is mediaite - everything I've seen from them on the topic has been despicably underhanded apologisms.