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I'm going to freely speculate here, but this seems obvious enough to any observer of international relations just to come out with it. Let's just call this stor

I'm going to freely speculate here, but this seems obvious enough to any observer of international relations just to come out with it. Let's just call this story the way it is. EU governments have been in bed with the US for decades with spying. Yes, they've postured and done a bunch of things to make themselves look good -- Google had better watch their step -- but at the end of the day the EU is as guilty as any other country. If you don't understand that, you should read up more. Intel is traded freely among EU states and the U.S. What the EU states don't get from spying on their own folks, the U.S. provides them. And let's not even get into the "special" relationship that the majority English-speaking nations have with each other. Now that they're in a PR corner over the Snowden revelations, of course, it's time for a lot of invective, investigations, and all sorts of spectacles. None of which will dig out the truth. But it will be awfully exciting, and I'm sure my good friends across the pond will hang on every bit of new data. But there's no Snowden over there, so there's no huge revelation, and all the players have no motivation to start coming clean, so a full understanding of just what the various EU intelligence services are doing in regards to privacy is about as likely as scientists discovering the moon is made of bleu cheese. And for good reason. What's often overlooked in this discussion, and I rant about the security state as much as anybody else, is that some of this is absolutely necessary and proper for a free society to prosper. It's a question of limits, and of degrees of intrusion. It's not a black and white issue. The way forward isn't to tear it all down, it's to have a public investigation that sets some hard limits for what is and isn't acceptable to the populace. </rant>

tokenizer 13y ago
> It's a question of limits, and of degrees of intrusion. Great point. Honestly, my biggest issue with this is the secret nature of the FISA court and the near 100% approval for warrants. You NEED to have watchdogs for the watchers. You can't simply have massive ABC orgs having all of this information unchecked like it is now. The cat is out of the bag however. We can't simply stop using our technology, the question is like what you said: regulation and discussion of how to use this technology.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Well, the 100% stat doesn't mean much by itself either. We should expect the government to be bringing cases with fairly solid proof for starters, so 100% is nearly indistinguishable from the ideal scenario. But more importantly if the judge indicates they won't sign it without changes, then the changes get made and it ends up eventually counting as a signed warrant. If the judge says they won't sign that warrant at all then the government withdraws it before formally filing it; again, keeping the stat near 100%. In fact the only warrants by these metrics that wouldn't end up signed are the ones that the government felt so sure about that they didn't even bother vetting it with the judge first before formally submitting it, and the judge had to actually reject it. With all that said, I do agree that this standard of oversight is severely lacking compared to the capabilities of the NSA. Allowing companies to give stats regarding NSLs and other warrants is only the tip of the iceberg of improvements that are needed to transparency, oversight, and accountability; not just with PRISM, and not just with NSA.

tokenizer 13y ago

> It's a question of limits, and of degrees of intrusion. Great point. Honestly, my biggest issue with this is the secret nature of the FISA court and the near 100% approval for warrants. You NEED to have watchdogs for the watchers. You can't simply have massive ABC orgs having all of this information unchecked like it is now. The cat is out of the bag however. We can't simply stop using our technology, the question is like what you said: regulation and discussion of how to use this technology.

mpyne 13y ago
Well, the 100% stat doesn't mean much by itself either. We should expect the government to be bringing cases with fairly solid proof for starters, so 100% is nearly indistinguishable from the ideal scenario. But more importantly if the judge indicates they won't sign it without changes, then the changes get made and it ends up eventually counting as a signed warrant. If the judge says they won't sign that warrant at all then the government withdraws it before formally filing it; again, keeping the stat near 100%. In fact the only warrants by these metrics that wouldn't end up signed are the ones that the government felt so sure about that they didn't even bother vetting it with the judge first before formally submitting it, and the judge had to actually reject it. With all that said, I do agree that this standard of oversight is severely lacking compared to the capabilities of the NSA. Allowing companies to give stats regarding NSLs and other warrants is only the tip of the iceberg of improvements that are needed to transparency, oversight, and accountability; not just with PRISM, and not just with NSA.