5 ms·

Edward Snowden, Ars, the NSA, and me: digging through the past

142 points by jadell 13y ago

ChuckMcM 13y ago
I remember seeing all my comp.sys.amiga posts return to life after DejaNews indexed them all. Shudder. I find it interesting to read peoples writings over the years to see where they have focussed and where they have moved on. Its like going through the boxes and boxes of snapshots which had been taken over the years. When my kids die, nearly their entire lives worth of bits of ephemera will probably be on some archive somewhere. Sure will make for an interesting addendum to some famous persons biography.
- samstave 13y ago
  There is a forum that I was active on daily since 2004, that was shut-off in 2008, though is still online in read-only-mode... I like to go back and read some of my posts on there and I sit and go "wow - I can't believe I wrote that" -- but in a good way. Other times I see stuff I wrote on there and feel it was from a completely different person!
  - tracker1 13y ago
    I have to admit, a fair amount of my posts outside of conversations like this, have been because X pissed me off... Some not so nice at all. I think that it really comes down to being young or older today that sets it all apart. I think that some people with utilize anything they can get as a weapon. I also think that in the next decade, some of the HR weenies out there will really need to grow a brain and look beyond their big brother rules and roles. (And I will never care if an HR weenie sees this and is offended, if you can't take criticism find a less offensive profession.)
- unimpressive 13y ago
  >Sure will make for an interesting addendum to some famous persons biography. The copyright status of forum posts probably means that they'll never be included in any book or work written this century except in the very limited form allowed by their authors. (Assuming that the current copyright ridiculousness is not quelled.) Which is too bad, as they're pretty interesting and I doubt their authors care so much unless you got rich off them.
  - arrrg 13y ago
    Eh? Summarising and paraphrasing what someone else wrote publicly is totally ok and legal. Biographers can at the very least use all the available material for their writing. Even quoting non-substantial parts of someone else’s writing – something that could be copyright infringement – is pretty uncontroversial and legal. It falls under fair use. And not the wobbly part of fair use you can easily shot holes into. Especially if the quotes are embedded in a much larger work (say, a biography). Copyright law sucks but it’s not that bad.
    - unimpressive 13y ago
      >Summarising and paraphrasing what someone else wrote publicly is totally ok and legal. It is, thankfully. The problem is that because of the ephemeral nature of digital media, it's quite possible for biographies to outlive their primary sources.[0] This means that a complete biography would need to include the actual article, if for no other reason than to preserve the original. [0]: This is one of the reasons why the Internet Archives mission is so important.
wyck 13y ago
Much ado about nothing.
- gcb0 13y ago
  to me it was about the lame state journalism is today (for some time) Instead of camping in congress to try to get some word from the politicians taking early flights home instead of voting on this, they are home, masturbating between forum searches trying to be the first ones to came up with the most page view generating dirty detail.
geetee 13y ago
Ironically, digging up someone's Internet post history and judging them on it is in part exactly what Snowden is trying to prevent the government from doing. We (collectively) can't hold the government to a standard that we can't even abide by.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Ironically, digging up someone's Internet post history and judging them on it is in part exactly what Snowden is trying to prevent the government from doing. That's only true if you ignore the distinction between intentionally public posts and e-mails, phone calls, and other communications intended to be privately exchanged. I suspect that there would be a lot less people upset about the NSA monitoring only intentionally public communications.
  - geetee 13y ago
    I absolutely agree that private communication is a whole different ball game. That said, intentionally public communications, especially on a forum, are not a clear indication of a person's morality or what have you. The best example I can come up with is drawing parallels to a comedian's stand up routine.
  - 205guy 13y ago
    You have to believe they do monitor all public postings, though that is a job in itself. 2 thoughts about that: 1) they could probably justify secret rooms and data gathering on the volume of public traffic alone. In other words if they are hitting the public APIs millions of times a day, Twitter, FB, et al. Would rather give them privileged access. Then whoops, might as well read all the private stuff as well. 2) just imagine the power of analyzing topics, trends, and personalities on all public forums across the Internet, US and international! Google indexes it, but what if the NSA were able to make sense of it somehow. From usernames and posting profiles alone (and maybe language analysis) they might be able to bullied a DB of online personas. Of course, if they could read everybody's email or get IP addresses from servers and ISPs, then they could easily correlate with actual persons.
rdl 13y ago
I would feel so sorry for the analyst(s) who had to read everything I've written online, even just in public and semi-public forums, over the past...23 years.
- jfb 13y ago
  Yeah, no kidding. "Sorry, faceless NSA algorithm. I'll buy you a beer next time I'm in the same zipcode as the server that you're running on."
  - rdl 13y ago
    I guess you're lucky/you win if you only ever get automated analysis :)
    - jfb 13y ago
      I don't even want to think about the beers I'd have to buy if a human were to be tasked with reading what my 20 yr old self thought was important enough to bray about in 1992. I shudder to think.
    - andrewflnr 13y ago
      My assumption has always been that there's too much data for the vast majority of cases to get anything more than automated analysis.
      - grey-area 13y ago
        The storage is the problem, not the analysis. After all, if anyone does anything notable, all their past conversations (public or private) can be pulled up for retrospective analysis. That's why anonymity on the internet is a mirage - better to assume that public postings can and will be used to construct a complete history of you at some point in the future.
gyepi 13y ago
I am reminded of the relatively recent poll on HN about whether to use real names. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721896 At the time, I was of the opinion that using real names was fine because the internet is a public space and one could self moderate. However, one big difference between this public space and public spaces INRL is that this one never forgets. I think this is a significant qualitative difference. With the ability to sift through the past, this means that your past self is not really past. I guess Faulkner was right. Imagine having to explain your past to every new person you meet!
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  Imagine having to explain your past to every new person you meet! Every time I try to imagine that, that person ends up failing to explain to me why they're so lame... I can honestly not think of anything I ever said that I would be ashamed of in comparison to that. Sure, sometimes "old stuff" can be an indicator for what to look out for in the "current stuff", and I am fine with that, even if just to not be a hypocrite. But other than that, obsessing about things that are months or even years past just betrays people who never learn and never change projecting their mediocrity on me - and if they cannot see that, I have to do it for them :)
- hobs 13y ago
  Don't worry, you are not that interesting.
  - gyepi 13y ago
    Not to you, at this point in time. In any case, the point stands regardless of your level of interest. Even boring people deserve the same measure of privacy as interesting people, maybe even more. Furthermore, I claim that when the costs (dollars or time) of finding out about anyone are low enough it won't take much interest to warrant a look at a person's history. How long did it take for people to start googling new acquaintances and potential dates?

142 points by jadell 13y ago

I remember seeing all my comp.sys.amiga posts return to life after DejaNews indexed them all. Shudder. I find it interesting to read peoples writings over the years to see where they have focussed and where they have moved on. Its like going through the boxes and boxes of snapshots which had been taken over the years. When my kids die, nearly their entire lives worth of bits of ephemera will probably be on some archive somewhere. Sure will make for an interesting addendum to some famous persons biography.

samstave 13y ago
There is a forum that I was active on daily since 2004, that was shut-off in 2008, though is still online in read-only-mode... I like to go back and read some of my posts on there and I sit and go "wow - I can't believe I wrote that" -- but in a good way. Other times I see stuff I wrote on there and feel it was from a completely different person!
- tracker1 13y ago
  I have to admit, a fair amount of my posts outside of conversations like this, have been because X pissed me off... Some not so nice at all. I think that it really comes down to being young or older today that sets it all apart. I think that some people with utilize anything they can get as a weapon. I also think that in the next decade, some of the HR weenies out there will really need to grow a brain and look beyond their big brother rules and roles. (And I will never care if an HR weenie sees this and is offended, if you can't take criticism find a less offensive profession.)
unimpressive 13y ago
>Sure will make for an interesting addendum to some famous persons biography. The copyright status of forum posts probably means that they'll never be included in any book or work written this century except in the very limited form allowed by their authors. (Assuming that the current copyright ridiculousness is not quelled.) Which is too bad, as they're pretty interesting and I doubt their authors care so much unless you got rich off them.
- arrrg 13y ago
  Eh? Summarising and paraphrasing what someone else wrote publicly is totally ok and legal. Biographers can at the very least use all the available material for their writing. Even quoting non-substantial parts of someone else’s writing – something that could be copyright infringement – is pretty uncontroversial and legal. It falls under fair use. And not the wobbly part of fair use you can easily shot holes into. Especially if the quotes are embedded in a much larger work (say, a biography). Copyright law sucks but it’s not that bad.
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    >Summarising and paraphrasing what someone else wrote publicly is totally ok and legal. It is, thankfully. The problem is that because of the ephemeral nature of digital media, it's quite possible for biographies to outlive their primary sources.[0] This means that a complete biography would need to include the actual article, if for no other reason than to preserve the original. [0]: This is one of the reasons why the Internet Archives mission is so important.

wyck 13y ago

Much ado about nothing.

gcb0 13y ago
to me it was about the lame state journalism is today (for some time) Instead of camping in congress to try to get some word from the politicians taking early flights home instead of voting on this, they are home, masturbating between forum searches trying to be the first ones to came up with the most page view generating dirty detail.

geetee 13y ago

Ironically, digging up someone's Internet post history and judging them on it is in part exactly what Snowden is trying to prevent the government from doing. We (collectively) can't hold the government to a standard that we can't even abide by.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Ironically, digging up someone's Internet post history and judging them on it is in part exactly what Snowden is trying to prevent the government from doing. That's only true if you ignore the distinction between intentionally public posts and e-mails, phone calls, and other communications intended to be privately exchanged. I suspect that there would be a lot less people upset about the NSA monitoring only intentionally public communications.
- geetee 13y ago
  I absolutely agree that private communication is a whole different ball game. That said, intentionally public communications, especially on a forum, are not a clear indication of a person's morality or what have you. The best example I can come up with is drawing parallels to a comedian's stand up routine.
- 205guy 13y ago
  You have to believe they do monitor all public postings, though that is a job in itself. 2 thoughts about that: 1) they could probably justify secret rooms and data gathering on the volume of public traffic alone. In other words if they are hitting the public APIs millions of times a day, Twitter, FB, et al. Would rather give them privileged access. Then whoops, might as well read all the private stuff as well. 2) just imagine the power of analyzing topics, trends, and personalities on all public forums across the Internet, US and international! Google indexes it, but what if the NSA were able to make sense of it somehow. From usernames and posting profiles alone (and maybe language analysis) they might be able to bullied a DB of online personas. Of course, if they could read everybody's email or get IP addresses from servers and ISPs, then they could easily correlate with actual persons.

rdl 13y ago

I would feel so sorry for the analyst(s) who had to read everything I've written online, even just in public and semi-public forums, over the past...23 years.

jfb 13y ago
Yeah, no kidding. "Sorry, faceless NSA algorithm. I'll buy you a beer next time I'm in the same zipcode as the server that you're running on."
- rdl 13y ago
  I guess you're lucky/you win if you only ever get automated analysis :)
  - jfb 13y ago
    I don't even want to think about the beers I'd have to buy if a human were to be tasked with reading what my 20 yr old self thought was important enough to bray about in 1992. I shudder to think.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    My assumption has always been that there's too much data for the vast majority of cases to get anything more than automated analysis.
    - grey-area 13y ago
      The storage is the problem, not the analysis. After all, if anyone does anything notable, all their past conversations (public or private) can be pulled up for retrospective analysis. That's why anonymity on the internet is a mirage - better to assume that public postings can and will be used to construct a complete history of you at some point in the future.

gyepi 13y ago

I am reminded of the relatively recent poll on HN about whether to use real names. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721896 At the time, I was of the opinion that using real names was fine because the internet is a public space and one could self moderate. However, one big difference between this public space and public spaces INRL is that this one never forgets. I think this is a significant qualitative difference. With the ability to sift through the past, this means that your past self is not really past. I guess Faulkner was right. Imagine having to explain your past to every new person you meet!

PavlovsCat 13y ago
Imagine having to explain your past to every new person you meet! Every time I try to imagine that, that person ends up failing to explain to me why they're so lame... I can honestly not think of anything I ever said that I would be ashamed of in comparison to that. Sure, sometimes "old stuff" can be an indicator for what to look out for in the "current stuff", and I am fine with that, even if just to not be a hypocrite. But other than that, obsessing about things that are months or even years past just betrays people who never learn and never change projecting their mediocrity on me - and if they cannot see that, I have to do it for them :)
hobs 13y ago
Don't worry, you are not that interesting.
- gyepi 13y ago
  Not to you, at this point in time. In any case, the point stands regardless of your level of interest. Even boring people deserve the same measure of privacy as interesting people, maybe even more. Furthermore, I claim that when the costs (dollars or time) of finding out about anyone are low enough it won't take much interest to warrant a look at a person's history. How long did it take for people to start googling new acquaintances and potential dates?