9 ms·

Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is

369 points by teawithcarl 13y ago

MarcScott 13y ago
Nobody outside the HN community seems to care about the Summer of Surveillance. Everyone I talk to has the same "meh" attitude. I find the lack of concern from friends and family to be more troubling than a lack of concern from the main stream media.
- joshuak 13y ago
  Or another way to look at it is before no one knew or cared, but now some people do. Important people, with the technical capability to start fixing it.
- zombio 13y ago
  I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were "Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching terrorists...". Both times they completely changed their mind by the end of our conversation. This proves that one big issue is people just not understanding what's going on... And no main stream media is going to tell them because a "where's Waldo/Snowden" chase is way more fun.
  - dominotw 13y ago
    can you link me to 'a common man's guide to why nsa surveillance is bad'. i have had really hard time convincing anyone in the past.
    - joshuak 13y ago
      How about this: Would you consider it ok if the NSA asked someone who cleans your house to take pictures of everything in your house when you're not there, and send them to the NSA for storage? How about if the NSA promises not to open the package until some future date that you are under investigation for a crime and they can get a warrant from a secret court? And then do you trust that they will never open that package before then? And are you ok with the process being supervised by a secret court that you may not petition or file suit in unless you have evidence that you have been specifically targeted? If this scenario would upset you then the current situation should also. Of course if only those committing crimes need privacy then by all means open up your house for inspection.
      - b1daly 13y ago
        Your example illustraTes the weakness of these articles. The internet is nothing like a house. Your example would make more sense if the NSA was secretly spying on your non internet connected computer, by secretly placing key loggers that transmitted over the air. The internet is a huge netWork, and you don't control the route of your message. I tHink it should more be considered like talking loudly in a public space. I also see that the problems of surveillance on the internet are related to the fact that it is a big network. The more players you have the less secure the whole thing becomes. But it's the huge number of nodes with reasonably low friction that define it. Let's just accept that if you want to keep something private don't put it on the internet, or on the discuss in private space only, this would solve the problem.
        joshuak 13y ago
        So you suppose that we don't (or shouldn't) put information on the internet that is the equivalent of someone photographing the inside of your house? That the internet, despite having password protected accounts is more akin to a 'public space' then a locked house? You assert that there should be zero expectation of privacy? Really, that is your position? I find that remarkable. You also believe that we have reached a steady state, in which we wouldn't want to keep increasing amounts of or personal information on the internet? Or perhaps you mean we are putting more and more personal information on the internet but that in the future we should have less privacy then we enjoy now? I do not agree. I consider password protected accounts by the very nature of keyed entry to cary an expectation of privacy. Weather they are effectively secure is not the issue, the fact that your back door lock is broken doesn't cause you to lose constitutional protection. I still think my example is an apt,and predominately accurate (if simplified) "common man's guide" as to why they should care about the NSA's activities.
    - stfu 13y ago
      This would be an excellent service for the EFF or any of the other internet defense groups: (Downloadable) one page sheets, with the most popular pro (NSA) opinions and very simple, fact based rebuttals. Just fighting fire with fire - isn't the NSA prepping news commentators with similar taking point memos?
    - impendia 13y ago
      What about the McCarthy era in the 1960s? Suppose we had a repeat of that in 2030, and the US wanted to purge everyone who believed in some "bad" ideology, summarized by a single word, like "communism", except which we can't hope to predict now. Imagine further that this purge is being enforced by halfwits who don't actually understand the ideology in question, who get wrapped up in their own hysteria, and who are looking for any excuse to burn witches at the stake. And finally, imagine that said halfwits have an indexed, fully searchable database of all the Facebook statuses you've ever posted, all the Google searches you've ever made, and all the e-mails you've ever sent. Scared yet?
    - srean 13y ago
      That in the hands of an eager government there would be no Turing, no civil rights movement, nor speeches that go "I have a dream". The problem is that many in US heartland will consider these to be a good thing. EDIT: could someone please upvote mkmkmmmmm. I think I managed to downvote his comment when trying to confirm it.
      - n00b101 13y ago
        > in the hands of an eager government there would be no Turing Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, which I think you could say was the NSA of its time.
        mkmkmmmmm 13y ago
        I think the point was questioning if he would have had the opportunity if they had known he was gay from the start. Or would he have spent his life getting "treatment"?
    - Proleps 13y ago
      We are not the only ones being watched, politicians are being watched as well. This means the NSA can probably blackmail a large portion of the politicians.
    - agilebyte 13y ago
      How about this: Did you ever run red lights? Did you ever smoke pot? Did you ever drink alcohol under age? Ever downloaded a copyrighted content off the net? If yes, then why did you not walk to your nearest police station to confess right after you did so? There are things that the state "frowns upon" yet we do anyway. We do so because we, as individuals, have decided we do not see no harm. Well, now it won't be up to us.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Nor does the murderer with his bloodstained knife, or the terrorist with his IED, see any point for walking himself down to the P.D. to confess. If your idea for law enforcement is just to wait for the crooks to turn themselves in then it's not a great idea. If your idea for law enforcement involves the possibility of the state being able to investigate crimes then you have to be ready for the idea that such investigations could, theoretically, be used under due process against anyone, not just criminals. This isn't to say that NSA surveillance is good, but I think the justification for why it's bad needs to be different, as all you've really said is that the state should disband the police, military, and all other parts of the national security apparatus that can be used without prior individual consent.
        agilebyte 13y ago
        I am sorry that my comment was misunderstood. The question was to come up with something that people could relate to. Mostly, I am hearing "nothing to hide". That is why I listed things where at least one is something you may have done. You do them because they are nothing like a bloodstained knife or an IED. That is the point. They are all "bad", but on a whole different level. So you do these activities because you can get away with it and also you do not see no harm even though they are officially not OK. Now imagine a surveillance state where even these lesser evils are known to the powers that be. Either you believe that the state won't act on that information or you really do have something to hide. If it is the latter then you should be at least aware of the fact that your privacy is being eroded and Summer of Surveillance is a prime example of that. That was my line of thinking.
- Sven7 13y ago
  People are ambivalent, because they have bigger problems in their lives. Like keeping a job, paying the mortgage, wondering if their kids can ever afford college, lack of health care coverage...the list is endless. The conversations/articles on HN mostly reflect the tech communities own echo chambers and biases more than anything else.
  - dominotw 13y ago
    While this is true. The general sentiment here at HN is that, more people seem to care about Zimmerman/trevor type media sensation than NSA scandals.
    - mathgladiator 13y ago
      > more people seem to care about Zimmerman/trevor type media sensation which is because they understand the implications of it. Most people, from my experience, have limited understanding of privacy and the consequences. The way I think of it is this: most people in this country don't realize they should be playing at least checkers while a very few people are actually playing chess. The thing that gets is the crap that you pass under the banner of "Think of the children". Once the investment and infrastructure is done "in the name of the children", then it takes a very few (and highly paid) individuals to turn that technology and infrastructure into anything they want. It's a slippery slope.
  - samstave 13y ago
    And tis should be a wakeup call; if the system was actually built correctly, they would not have to be worrying about their next meal or paycheck! Take all the MIC funding and redirect it into education, infra, science and social services. Make the world better rather than weaponizing idiocy to defend a farked up system.
    - hackcuit 13y ago
      The system is designed correctly. It's just not designed for you or me. It's designed for the people at the top. Education will always suck in this country because it's supposed to suck. Mandatory schooling is a relatively new idea that was funded by wealthy industrialist who wanted obedient workers. They don't want people smart enough to realize how badly they're getting fucked over.
- brymaster 13y ago
  > Everyone I talk to has the same "meh" attitude. Luckily we don't need everyone to be on board to defeat the surveillance state. Just need enough special interests (EFF, ACLU, tech community, a loud vocal minority) and money. The game has to be played like any other lobby.
  - northwest 13y ago
    > Luckily we don't need everyone to be on board to defeat the surveillance state. That very much depends. For encryption to work, you literally need everyone on board. You depend on society doing it, too. So better start educating people about it.
- goblin89 13y ago
  A comment in recent Joseph Bonneau AMA thread on Reddit seems representative in this regard, also being unusually well-written[0]. Apparently it has yielded its author Reddit Gold. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bonneau_2013_nsa_award_winner_for/cbbr1db http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bon...
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
"Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe...and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies" Whoa horsey. The author is making the same mistake as he accuses the press of: missing the story. If you want a good repeat-after-me line, repeat after me: "this has nothing to do with the NSA either" All intelligence agencies are either doing this or have plans to do it -- including lots of European ones which are breaking their own laws while doing so. That's yet another shoe that hasn't dropped. Who knows how long it'll take for our European friends to figure it out. Might be a while. But the larger point is valid: the internet as a conduit between a person and the larger world is a cesspool of corporate and government eavesdroppers. We're not operating the net: the net is monitoring our thoughts and recording them for others to inspect at their leisure. This is not a good thing. So the story isn't Snowden, and it's not the NSA either. It's what has become of the dream that was the internet, and the question of whether anybody is left that cares enough about privacy and anonymity to do something about it.
- br78 13y ago
  Your European friends have a long tradition of being skeptical of their governments too. The 'conversation' Naughton is referring to here will be between nation states about who exactly is most capably operating the implements of surveillance society. It falls to the citizens to try and drag those implements off their governments. I'm not sure if they collectively have the will for that tussle though.
- adestefan 13y ago
  You do realize that "the dream that was the internet" was so governments could maybe still communicate after they blasted each other back to the stone age?
  - fsck--off 13y ago
    From a footnote (#5) on "Brief History of the Internet": "It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks." http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/histor...
gulfie 13y ago
Don't cry for the internet, it's already gone.
lettergram 13y ago
The whole idea of surveillance truly doesn't bother me because there is literally nothing I can do if the higher end government did ever decided they wanted me. Since the 50's they've had the ability to listen into conversations via a laser on a window: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone and if anyone really ever believed that the internet would be much different they probably didn't think it all the way through. Sure the internet had that possibility not to be monitored and for a time it probably was, but clearly no longer. Further, I think the idea of mass data collection is monstrous however there is nothing I, nor you can really do about that except perhaps hiding as much of our data as we can (via encryption). Even if our data is encrypted in the end if they want your data they can get your data. The thing I find interesting about this article is the idea that eventually the internet could be closed off only to a few nation states. I disagree this would ever happen because Pandora's box has been opened and some communication will always be allowed via wireless connections, hidden cables, or some other method. Obviously, the average user might be affected, but just like the soviet union fell so would what ever country decided to block off their nation. People don't care about surveillance for the most part, as someone already commented: "I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were "Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching terrorists..."" They do however care if you disconnect their internet, and if any country was to do that in the end it would fail. The point being, the article stated that nation states of internet would develop and my reasoning points to that not happening (at least based off what i've seen). In my honest opinion, the internet has always been a place to communicate, but about as secure with my data as a friend you never quite trust with your secrets. What scares me is not the internet surveillance or my government hunting down (in my opinion) an innocent man. What horrifies me the most is that no matter what we do the surveillance will only become more intense (as the price of computing/computers gets lower) and there is no going back. 50 years from now, what am I going to be faced with and will I be able to continue to just ignore these B.S. laws we have, or if I unlock my cell phone will I really go to jail for 10 years? That's what thoughts keep me up at night, not the idea of my data being collected at mass online (although I would stop it if there was any way I could), but the idea that even offline walking down the street or in my own home I may be required to follow the laws which are outright ridiculous.
- 13y ago
hackcuit 13y ago
Nothing is going to change. It's only going to get worse. The best thing you can do in the meantime is assert your second amendment rights and buy a firearm. If it's your first, I recommend a rifle. Learn to shoot it and make sure it's kept away from at-risk people. Please realize that there's a reason why Dianne Feinstein, chairman U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who's known about these programs for years, doesn't want you to have any guns. People don't care about being spied on because they still have their bread and circuses. Take those away and I bet you'd see people in the streets in no time. Government is subsidizing corporations who pay their employees nothing via things like food stamps. Take away the food stamps and a lot of people won't be able to buy food. Do you think that they're going to go hungry? Hell no. They will start rioting in the streets. Looting from stores. This is what we need. Sure it will suck in the short term, but if you want actual change then people are going to have to suffer to some degree.
hamsternipples 13y ago
snowden is not the story. it has remained obvious to me that the NSA or whatever organization (rusian, chinese, or whatever) does not need some sort of dinosaur spygame facility to access this data. all they need is just one underpaid programmer without a soul working at facebook to compromise the whole database. wouldn't it be much easier in a case such as this one, for verizon to just have some retard patsy create that backdoor? I would imagine this to be a get out of jail free card for those guys really pulling the strings. all you gatta do is drop all the blame on some naive techie and let him go down in flames. IMO, the next up in this chess game, is a traitor techie willing to compromise a whole nation to pay his bills.
n00b101 13y ago
"So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder." This advertisement paid for by your friendly, co-located, on-premise, enterprise hardware vendors.
- goblin89 13y ago
  Indeed, you can always encrypt the data prior to putting it on AWS. To me, this stole the end-of-article emphasis from the issue about Internet stopping being global.
- lawrence 13y ago
  Bingo. If I were selling on premise software, this would be in my deck. Selling fear is one of the oldest sales tricks in the book. I do believe however that enterprises act more rationally than consumers. So while consumers seem to be falling in to the "meh, I don't have anything to hide" camp, enterprises tend to be a bit more conservative. The thought of the NSA's private contractors going through customer data and hr records could actually be enough to slow down some of these enterprise SaaS companies.
peterkelly 13y ago
If anything, I think this should be a wakeup call for those of us who have the capability to change things. I'm not talking about lobbying or raising attention to the issue, but the technical challenges of designing a network that is immune to all forms of surveillance. Let's treat this as an issue of computer science, not politics. Now I'm not claiming that this will be easy (and it may not even be possible), but this whole episode has made me seriously reconsider my long-term career direction in terms of the type of research I want to be doing. Pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created the "Internet 1" so to speak, and everything since then has been building on that. There's been plenty of projects that have worked towards getting around these surveillance measures (Tor for example), and I think we need more things like this. We need to fundamentally rethink the design of the Internet, because the current design is broken. Just like TCP/IP provides the infrastructure to abstract over different networking technologies and physical links (and the failure/slowness of individual links), we need something that abstracts over the basic, unencrypted (or encrypted but subject to centralised sabotage, like SSL) communication layer. Something that third parties can't intercept, at least not with anything like the ease with which they do today. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, that email is still unencrypted by default, and we don't have public-key cryptography built in to every mail client and turned on by default. Most importantly, we need more distribution, and to stop relying on centralised service providers, who are necessarily subject to the laws of the country in which they operate (see: recent articles discussing impacts of the issue on US cloud firms operating in foreign markets). Facebook should be a protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely different perspective. I certainly don't have the answers to these questions. But it's made me curious and it's something I'll be giving a great deal of thought to in the coming years. As Albert Einstein once said: "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them".
- codexon 13y ago
  While we're talking about rewriting the Internet, please fix ddos attacks. The current internet is especially prone to ddos attacks to the point where it costs 100x more money to defend than to start an attack of the same size. http://blog.cloudflare.com/deep-inside-a-dns-amplification-ddos-attack http://blog.cloudflare.com/deep-inside-a-dns-amplification-d...
acabal 13y ago
From talking to some non-tech people about this, I have a dim view of the possibility that Snowden's revelations will change anything on a political level. People seem to either not care about the power the NSA has over them, or think Snowden is a traitor that deserves death and that's enough to invalidate anything he might have revealed. Society forgets history--generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian state, and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's power could lead to grave harm. But I still do have hope, and the community at HN exemplifies it. Even if politics and society won't change enough to prevent further spying (or, on the scale of decades, a worse NSA-fueled catastrophe), at least all the smart techies of the world are growing aware, getting outraged, and getting organized over what's been revealed. In many ways, our real control over technological progress is the best we can ask for. If you know how to program, if you're thinking about learning, if your business depends on the internet, or if you're otherwise in a position to create technology of any flavor: the responsibility is on you--on us--to shape the internet and future technology in a way that will protect humanity's privacy and civil rights for generations to come.
- ceol 13y ago
  > generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian state, and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's power could lead to grave harm. Are you sure it's not just that the only people currently talking about this issue are white, college-aged, middle-to-upper class American men? And for you to whip that out, I really hope you aren't one of the born-here Americans you talk about, because you would be just as bad as the people who supposedly don't care: you would be appropriating the experiences of the underprivileged to back your own, unrelated endeavor.
  - bobbydavid 13y ago
    The extreme demographic subset you described doesn't even include the audience at HN. Surely you realize that the issue of internet privacy is talked about by more people. And why mustn't acabal be a "born-here American" to suggest that Americans have never lived under a totalitarian state? That's an off topic remark designed to call acabal's expertise into question as a means of discrediting them without directly addressing the points they bring up. I think acabal brings up a valid point. It's hard to whip people into action when they're not yet having direct negative consequences, even if we can clearly see the writing on the wall. People are resistant to change.
logical42 13y ago
While I agree with the general reasoning of the author, I hesitate to agree with its conclusion. Like most of us here on hacker news, I've been following the Snowden/Prism/NSA stories rather religiously and, for the most part, have been very happy with the rather overwhelming coverage here on HN. But there have been those getting tired of the news; understandably so, the repetitive hum of media coverage these days is enough to infuriate anyone who has the capacity to remember stuff. The author of this article seems to be pretty infuriated at the the public's fascination with Snowden and wants, rather ambitiously in my opinion, the public to shift their attention to the core of the issue. I'm not sure if the public is capable of maintaining interest in such a passive evil (I guess I probably don't think too highly of the public). I do think, however, that the public is capable of fixating on the Snowden story because it is a rather interesting story. And the longer the public stays fixated on Snowden, the weird guy living in a Russian airport, the longer the NSA's wrongdoings also stay in the public consciousness. I say, keep the melodrama coming, if only to keep alive the story of injustice to the public. The success of Snowden's whistleblowing (i.e. in terms of tangible impact) may actually rest on it.
D9u 13y ago
(from the article) US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it That part there really illustrates the corporate fascism which has permeated the US government. Who's to say that some analyst working for a private corporation isn't selling our stolen information to some nefarious third-party for whatever reasons? The idea that any "oversight" would preclude the above scenario is about as believable as the insistence by "high level" government appointees claiming that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" collect data from American's communications.
datalus 13y ago
What concerns me the most about all of this is that it puts us on a slippery slope. If always on surveillance becomes the norm for people to just take as a fact of life, then it just gets worse from there. I have a couple friends who run a startup and have told me they have given up the fact that privacy is an illusion/out moded when discussing this with them. So if being recorded all the time is the new norm and letting those outside of your own self connect data points about you is okay... where does that lead? That's what I'm really worried about. It spells out my worst fear of later generations of digital natives will actually live in a world best described as Orwellian or even post Orwellian... even more ridiculously pervasive. They wouldn't know any better. Ultimately data can never tell the whole story, but yet we'll act on it as if it does.
- mpyne 13y ago
  I think one of the other real concerns is that it's not even as if the government had to be careful when embarking on this journey of increased surveillance. The public has made it very clear how little they care about their privacy on the Internet when they started adopting things like GMail, Facebook, iCloud, etc. and not just as a convenience, but to actually run and manage their personal lives. People, businesses, everyone didn't just not resist the New World of digital surveillance, they explicitly begged and pleaded for these new capabilities to be pushed to the fore as a matter of convenience to them. So who do we blame for this 'new norm'?
guard-of-terra 13y ago
"If, as a political dissident, you had to choose between organizing your protest on Facebook or Vkontakte, Facebook’s Russian equivalent, you’d be far better off doing it on Facebook." Lol, no, you aren't. What you do is use every platform available.
- northwest 13y ago
  "What you do is use every platform available." Lol, no, you don't. What you do is exclusively use one of the "darknet" platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29 Of course, everybody wins from using one of the encrypted distributed p2p platforms, not just activists.
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    If you're an activist, you need numbers. Eyeballs. You don't care about surveillance - you care about censorships. So you use everything. For private coordination, that's another matter.
northwest 13y ago
> Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is. The fate of the internet's not the story. The fate of democracy is. The fate of democracy's not the story. The fate of our society is. The fate of our society's not the story. The fate of humanity is.
amac 13y ago
This story is pathetic, it will sell news but it's pretty much nonsense. Clearly, the new era of computing upon us - networked computing - and with it will bring with lots of opportunities as well as many problems to solve. Privacy is one such problem, but it's one we can work together to solve. Humans are capable of this, and capable of more than just writing stuff to cause division like the article.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
snambi 13y ago
why everyone is crying about spying issue. The original purpose of internet is military. US government gave access all of access to the internet, because we all wanted to use it. That doesn't mean US govt cannot use it the way it wants to use it.

369 points by teawithcarl 13y ago

Nobody outside the HN community seems to care about the Summer of Surveillance. Everyone I talk to has the same "meh" attitude. I find the lack of concern from friends and family to be more troubling than a lack of concern from the main stream media.

joshuak 13y ago
Or another way to look at it is before no one knew or cared, but now some people do. Important people, with the technical capability to start fixing it.
zombio 13y ago
I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were "Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching terrorists...". Both times they completely changed their mind by the end of our conversation. This proves that one big issue is people just not understanding what's going on... And no main stream media is going to tell them because a "where's Waldo/Snowden" chase is way more fun.
- dominotw 13y ago
  can you link me to 'a common man's guide to why nsa surveillance is bad'. i have had really hard time convincing anyone in the past.
  - joshuak 13y ago
    How about this: Would you consider it ok if the NSA asked someone who cleans your house to take pictures of everything in your house when you're not there, and send them to the NSA for storage? How about if the NSA promises not to open the package until some future date that you are under investigation for a crime and they can get a warrant from a secret court? And then do you trust that they will never open that package before then? And are you ok with the process being supervised by a secret court that you may not petition or file suit in unless you have evidence that you have been specifically targeted? If this scenario would upset you then the current situation should also. Of course if only those committing crimes need privacy then by all means open up your house for inspection.
    - b1daly 13y ago
      Your example illustraTes the weakness of these articles. The internet is nothing like a house. Your example would make more sense if the NSA was secretly spying on your non internet connected computer, by secretly placing key loggers that transmitted over the air. The internet is a huge netWork, and you don't control the route of your message. I tHink it should more be considered like talking loudly in a public space. I also see that the problems of surveillance on the internet are related to the fact that it is a big network. The more players you have the less secure the whole thing becomes. But it's the huge number of nodes with reasonably low friction that define it. Let's just accept that if you want to keep something private don't put it on the internet, or on the discuss in private space only, this would solve the problem.
      - joshuak 13y ago
        So you suppose that we don't (or shouldn't) put information on the internet that is the equivalent of someone photographing the inside of your house? That the internet, despite having password protected accounts is more akin to a 'public space' then a locked house? You assert that there should be zero expectation of privacy? Really, that is your position? I find that remarkable. You also believe that we have reached a steady state, in which we wouldn't want to keep increasing amounts of or personal information on the internet? Or perhaps you mean we are putting more and more personal information on the internet but that in the future we should have less privacy then we enjoy now? I do not agree. I consider password protected accounts by the very nature of keyed entry to cary an expectation of privacy. Weather they are effectively secure is not the issue, the fact that your back door lock is broken doesn't cause you to lose constitutional protection. I still think my example is an apt,and predominately accurate (if simplified) "common man's guide" as to why they should care about the NSA's activities.
  - stfu 13y ago
    This would be an excellent service for the EFF or any of the other internet defense groups: (Downloadable) one page sheets, with the most popular pro (NSA) opinions and very simple, fact based rebuttals. Just fighting fire with fire - isn't the NSA prepping news commentators with similar taking point memos?
  - impendia 13y ago
    What about the McCarthy era in the 1960s? Suppose we had a repeat of that in 2030, and the US wanted to purge everyone who believed in some "bad" ideology, summarized by a single word, like "communism", except which we can't hope to predict now. Imagine further that this purge is being enforced by halfwits who don't actually understand the ideology in question, who get wrapped up in their own hysteria, and who are looking for any excuse to burn witches at the stake. And finally, imagine that said halfwits have an indexed, fully searchable database of all the Facebook statuses you've ever posted, all the Google searches you've ever made, and all the e-mails you've ever sent. Scared yet?
  - srean 13y ago
    That in the hands of an eager government there would be no Turing, no civil rights movement, nor speeches that go "I have a dream". The problem is that many in US heartland will consider these to be a good thing. EDIT: could someone please upvote mkmkmmmmm. I think I managed to downvote his comment when trying to confirm it.
    - n00b101 13y ago
      > in the hands of an eager government there would be no Turing Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, which I think you could say was the NSA of its time.
      - mkmkmmmmm 13y ago
        I think the point was questioning if he would have had the opportunity if they had known he was gay from the start. Or would he have spent his life getting "treatment"?
  - Proleps 13y ago
    We are not the only ones being watched, politicians are being watched as well. This means the NSA can probably blackmail a large portion of the politicians.
  - agilebyte 13y ago
    How about this: Did you ever run red lights? Did you ever smoke pot? Did you ever drink alcohol under age? Ever downloaded a copyrighted content off the net? If yes, then why did you not walk to your nearest police station to confess right after you did so? There are things that the state "frowns upon" yet we do anyway. We do so because we, as individuals, have decided we do not see no harm. Well, now it won't be up to us.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Nor does the murderer with his bloodstained knife, or the terrorist with his IED, see any point for walking himself down to the P.D. to confess. If your idea for law enforcement is just to wait for the crooks to turn themselves in then it's not a great idea. If your idea for law enforcement involves the possibility of the state being able to investigate crimes then you have to be ready for the idea that such investigations could, theoretically, be used under due process against anyone, not just criminals. This isn't to say that NSA surveillance is good, but I think the justification for why it's bad needs to be different, as all you've really said is that the state should disband the police, military, and all other parts of the national security apparatus that can be used without prior individual consent.
      - agilebyte 13y ago
        I am sorry that my comment was misunderstood. The question was to come up with something that people could relate to. Mostly, I am hearing "nothing to hide". That is why I listed things where at least one is something you may have done. You do them because they are nothing like a bloodstained knife or an IED. That is the point. They are all "bad", but on a whole different level. So you do these activities because you can get away with it and also you do not see no harm even though they are officially not OK. Now imagine a surveillance state where even these lesser evils are known to the powers that be. Either you believe that the state won't act on that information or you really do have something to hide. If it is the latter then you should be at least aware of the fact that your privacy is being eroded and Summer of Surveillance is a prime example of that. That was my line of thinking.
Sven7 13y ago
People are ambivalent, because they have bigger problems in their lives. Like keeping a job, paying the mortgage, wondering if their kids can ever afford college, lack of health care coverage...the list is endless. The conversations/articles on HN mostly reflect the tech communities own echo chambers and biases more than anything else.
- dominotw 13y ago
  While this is true. The general sentiment here at HN is that, more people seem to care about Zimmerman/trevor type media sensation than NSA scandals.
  - mathgladiator 13y ago
    > more people seem to care about Zimmerman/trevor type media sensation which is because they understand the implications of it. Most people, from my experience, have limited understanding of privacy and the consequences. The way I think of it is this: most people in this country don't realize they should be playing at least checkers while a very few people are actually playing chess. The thing that gets is the crap that you pass under the banner of "Think of the children". Once the investment and infrastructure is done "in the name of the children", then it takes a very few (and highly paid) individuals to turn that technology and infrastructure into anything they want. It's a slippery slope.
- samstave 13y ago
  And tis should be a wakeup call; if the system was actually built correctly, they would not have to be worrying about their next meal or paycheck! Take all the MIC funding and redirect it into education, infra, science and social services. Make the world better rather than weaponizing idiocy to defend a farked up system.
  - hackcuit 13y ago
    The system is designed correctly. It's just not designed for you or me. It's designed for the people at the top. Education will always suck in this country because it's supposed to suck. Mandatory schooling is a relatively new idea that was funded by wealthy industrialist who wanted obedient workers. They don't want people smart enough to realize how badly they're getting fucked over.
brymaster 13y ago
> Everyone I talk to has the same "meh" attitude. Luckily we don't need everyone to be on board to defeat the surveillance state. Just need enough special interests (EFF, ACLU, tech community, a loud vocal minority) and money. The game has to be played like any other lobby.
- northwest 13y ago
  > Luckily we don't need everyone to be on board to defeat the surveillance state. That very much depends. For encryption to work, you literally need everyone on board. You depend on society doing it, too. So better start educating people about it.
goblin89 13y ago
A comment in recent Joseph Bonneau AMA thread on Reddit seems representative in this regard, also being unusually well-written[0]. Apparently it has yielded its author Reddit Gold. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bonneau_2013_nsa_award_winner_for/cbbr1db http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bon...

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

"Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe...and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies" Whoa horsey. The author is making the same mistake as he accuses the press of: missing the story. If you want a good repeat-after-me line, repeat after me: "this has nothing to do with the NSA either" All intelligence agencies are either doing this or have plans to do it -- including lots of European ones which are breaking their own laws while doing so. That's yet another shoe that hasn't dropped. Who knows how long it'll take for our European friends to figure it out. Might be a while. But the larger point is valid: the internet as a conduit between a person and the larger world is a cesspool of corporate and government eavesdroppers. We're not operating the net: the net is monitoring our thoughts and recording them for others to inspect at their leisure. This is not a good thing. So the story isn't Snowden, and it's not the NSA either. It's what has become of the dream that was the internet, and the question of whether anybody is left that cares enough about privacy and anonymity to do something about it.

br78 13y ago
Your European friends have a long tradition of being skeptical of their governments too. The 'conversation' Naughton is referring to here will be between nation states about who exactly is most capably operating the implements of surveillance society. It falls to the citizens to try and drag those implements off their governments. I'm not sure if they collectively have the will for that tussle though.
adestefan 13y ago
You do realize that "the dream that was the internet" was so governments could maybe still communicate after they blasted each other back to the stone age?
- fsck--off 13y ago
  From a footnote (#5) on "Brief History of the Internet": "It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks." http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/histor...

gulfie 13y ago

Don't cry for the internet, it's already gone.

lettergram 13y ago

The whole idea of surveillance truly doesn't bother me because there is literally nothing I can do if the higher end government did ever decided they wanted me. Since the 50's they've had the ability to listen into conversations via a laser on a window: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone and if anyone really ever believed that the internet would be much different they probably didn't think it all the way through. Sure the internet had that possibility not to be monitored and for a time it probably was, but clearly no longer. Further, I think the idea of mass data collection is monstrous however there is nothing I, nor you can really do about that except perhaps hiding as much of our data as we can (via encryption). Even if our data is encrypted in the end if they want your data they can get your data. The thing I find interesting about this article is the idea that eventually the internet could be closed off only to a few nation states. I disagree this would ever happen because Pandora's box has been opened and some communication will always be allowed via wireless connections, hidden cables, or some other method. Obviously, the average user might be affected, but just like the soviet union fell so would what ever country decided to block off their nation. People don't care about surveillance for the most part, as someone already commented: "I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were "Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching terrorists..."" They do however care if you disconnect their internet, and if any country was to do that in the end it would fail. The point being, the article stated that nation states of internet would develop and my reasoning points to that not happening (at least based off what i've seen). In my honest opinion, the internet has always been a place to communicate, but about as secure with my data as a friend you never quite trust with your secrets. What scares me is not the internet surveillance or my government hunting down (in my opinion) an innocent man. What horrifies me the most is that no matter what we do the surveillance will only become more intense (as the price of computing/computers gets lower) and there is no going back. 50 years from now, what am I going to be faced with and will I be able to continue to just ignore these B.S. laws we have, or if I unlock my cell phone will I really go to jail for 10 years? That's what thoughts keep me up at night, not the idea of my data being collected at mass online (although I would stop it if there was any way I could), but the idea that even offline walking down the street or in my own home I may be required to follow the laws which are outright ridiculous.

13y ago

hackcuit 13y ago

Nothing is going to change. It's only going to get worse. The best thing you can do in the meantime is assert your second amendment rights and buy a firearm. If it's your first, I recommend a rifle. Learn to shoot it and make sure it's kept away from at-risk people. Please realize that there's a reason why Dianne Feinstein, chairman U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who's known about these programs for years, doesn't want you to have any guns. People don't care about being spied on because they still have their bread and circuses. Take those away and I bet you'd see people in the streets in no time. Government is subsidizing corporations who pay their employees nothing via things like food stamps. Take away the food stamps and a lot of people won't be able to buy food. Do you think that they're going to go hungry? Hell no. They will start rioting in the streets. Looting from stores. This is what we need. Sure it will suck in the short term, but if you want actual change then people are going to have to suffer to some degree.

hamsternipples 13y ago

snowden is not the story. it has remained obvious to me that the NSA or whatever organization (rusian, chinese, or whatever) does not need some sort of dinosaur spygame facility to access this data. all they need is just one underpaid programmer without a soul working at facebook to compromise the whole database. wouldn't it be much easier in a case such as this one, for verizon to just have some retard patsy create that backdoor? I would imagine this to be a get out of jail free card for those guys really pulling the strings. all you gatta do is drop all the blame on some naive techie and let him go down in flames. IMO, the next up in this chess game, is a traitor techie willing to compromise a whole nation to pay his bills.

n00b101 13y ago

"So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder." This advertisement paid for by your friendly, co-located, on-premise, enterprise hardware vendors.

goblin89 13y ago
Indeed, you can always encrypt the data prior to putting it on AWS. To me, this stole the end-of-article emphasis from the issue about Internet stopping being global.
lawrence 13y ago
Bingo. If I were selling on premise software, this would be in my deck. Selling fear is one of the oldest sales tricks in the book. I do believe however that enterprises act more rationally than consumers. So while consumers seem to be falling in to the "meh, I don't have anything to hide" camp, enterprises tend to be a bit more conservative. The thought of the NSA's private contractors going through customer data and hr records could actually be enough to slow down some of these enterprise SaaS companies.

peterkelly 13y ago

If anything, I think this should be a wakeup call for those of us who have the capability to change things. I'm not talking about lobbying or raising attention to the issue, but the technical challenges of designing a network that is immune to all forms of surveillance. Let's treat this as an issue of computer science, not politics. Now I'm not claiming that this will be easy (and it may not even be possible), but this whole episode has made me seriously reconsider my long-term career direction in terms of the type of research I want to be doing. Pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created the "Internet 1" so to speak, and everything since then has been building on that. There's been plenty of projects that have worked towards getting around these surveillance measures (Tor for example), and I think we need more things like this. We need to fundamentally rethink the design of the Internet, because the current design is broken. Just like TCP/IP provides the infrastructure to abstract over different networking technologies and physical links (and the failure/slowness of individual links), we need something that abstracts over the basic, unencrypted (or encrypted but subject to centralised sabotage, like SSL) communication layer. Something that third parties can't intercept, at least not with anything like the ease with which they do today. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, that email is still unencrypted by default, and we don't have public-key cryptography built in to every mail client and turned on by default. Most importantly, we need more distribution, and to stop relying on centralised service providers, who are necessarily subject to the laws of the country in which they operate (see: recent articles discussing impacts of the issue on US cloud firms operating in foreign markets). Facebook should be a protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely different perspective. I certainly don't have the answers to these questions. But it's made me curious and it's something I'll be giving a great deal of thought to in the coming years. As Albert Einstein once said: "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them".

codexon 13y ago
While we're talking about rewriting the Internet, please fix ddos attacks. The current internet is especially prone to ddos attacks to the point where it costs 100x more money to defend than to start an attack of the same size. http://blog.cloudflare.com/deep-inside-a-dns-amplification-ddos-attack http://blog.cloudflare.com/deep-inside-a-dns-amplification-d...

acabal 13y ago

From talking to some non-tech people about this, I have a dim view of the possibility that Snowden's revelations will change anything on a political level. People seem to either not care about the power the NSA has over them, or think Snowden is a traitor that deserves death and that's enough to invalidate anything he might have revealed. Society forgets history--generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian state, and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's power could lead to grave harm. But I still do have hope, and the community at HN exemplifies it. Even if politics and society won't change enough to prevent further spying (or, on the scale of decades, a worse NSA-fueled catastrophe), at least all the smart techies of the world are growing aware, getting outraged, and getting organized over what's been revealed. In many ways, our real control over technological progress is the best we can ask for. If you know how to program, if you're thinking about learning, if your business depends on the internet, or if you're otherwise in a position to create technology of any flavor: the responsibility is on you--on us--to shape the internet and future technology in a way that will protect humanity's privacy and civil rights for generations to come.

ceol 13y ago
> generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian state, and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's power could lead to grave harm. Are you sure it's not just that the only people currently talking about this issue are white, college-aged, middle-to-upper class American men? And for you to whip that out, I really hope you aren't one of the born-here Americans you talk about, because you would be just as bad as the people who supposedly don't care: you would be appropriating the experiences of the underprivileged to back your own, unrelated endeavor.
- bobbydavid 13y ago
  The extreme demographic subset you described doesn't even include the audience at HN. Surely you realize that the issue of internet privacy is talked about by more people. And why mustn't acabal be a "born-here American" to suggest that Americans have never lived under a totalitarian state? That's an off topic remark designed to call acabal's expertise into question as a means of discrediting them without directly addressing the points they bring up. I think acabal brings up a valid point. It's hard to whip people into action when they're not yet having direct negative consequences, even if we can clearly see the writing on the wall. People are resistant to change.

logical42 13y ago

While I agree with the general reasoning of the author, I hesitate to agree with its conclusion. Like most of us here on hacker news, I've been following the Snowden/Prism/NSA stories rather religiously and, for the most part, have been very happy with the rather overwhelming coverage here on HN. But there have been those getting tired of the news; understandably so, the repetitive hum of media coverage these days is enough to infuriate anyone who has the capacity to remember stuff. The author of this article seems to be pretty infuriated at the the public's fascination with Snowden and wants, rather ambitiously in my opinion, the public to shift their attention to the core of the issue. I'm not sure if the public is capable of maintaining interest in such a passive evil (I guess I probably don't think too highly of the public). I do think, however, that the public is capable of fixating on the Snowden story because it is a rather interesting story. And the longer the public stays fixated on Snowden, the weird guy living in a Russian airport, the longer the NSA's wrongdoings also stay in the public consciousness. I say, keep the melodrama coming, if only to keep alive the story of injustice to the public. The success of Snowden's whistleblowing (i.e. in terms of tangible impact) may actually rest on it.

D9u 13y ago

(from the article) US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it That part there really illustrates the corporate fascism which has permeated the US government. Who's to say that some analyst working for a private corporation isn't selling our stolen information to some nefarious third-party for whatever reasons? The idea that any "oversight" would preclude the above scenario is about as believable as the insistence by "high level" government appointees claiming that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" collect data from American's communications.

datalus 13y ago

What concerns me the most about all of this is that it puts us on a slippery slope. If always on surveillance becomes the norm for people to just take as a fact of life, then it just gets worse from there. I have a couple friends who run a startup and have told me they have given up the fact that privacy is an illusion/out moded when discussing this with them. So if being recorded all the time is the new norm and letting those outside of your own self connect data points about you is okay... where does that lead? That's what I'm really worried about. It spells out my worst fear of later generations of digital natives will actually live in a world best described as Orwellian or even post Orwellian... even more ridiculously pervasive. They wouldn't know any better. Ultimately data can never tell the whole story, but yet we'll act on it as if it does.

mpyne 13y ago
I think one of the other real concerns is that it's not even as if the government had to be careful when embarking on this journey of increased surveillance. The public has made it very clear how little they care about their privacy on the Internet when they started adopting things like GMail, Facebook, iCloud, etc. and not just as a convenience, but to actually run and manage their personal lives. People, businesses, everyone didn't just not resist the New World of digital surveillance, they explicitly begged and pleaded for these new capabilities to be pushed to the fore as a matter of convenience to them. So who do we blame for this 'new norm'?

guard-of-terra 13y ago

"If, as a political dissident, you had to choose between organizing your protest on Facebook or Vkontakte, Facebook’s Russian equivalent, you’d be far better off doing it on Facebook." Lol, no, you aren't. What you do is use every platform available.

northwest 13y ago
"What you do is use every platform available." Lol, no, you don't. What you do is exclusively use one of the "darknet" platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29 Of course, everybody wins from using one of the encrypted distributed p2p platforms, not just activists.
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  If you're an activist, you need numbers. Eyeballs. You don't care about surveillance - you care about censorships. So you use everything. For private coordination, that's another matter.

northwest 13y ago

> Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is. The fate of the internet's not the story. The fate of democracy is. The fate of democracy's not the story. The fate of our society is. The fate of our society's not the story. The fate of humanity is.

amac 13y ago

This story is pathetic, it will sell news but it's pretty much nonsense. Clearly, the new era of computing upon us - networked computing - and with it will bring with lots of opportunities as well as many problems to solve. Privacy is one such problem, but it's one we can work together to solve. Humans are capable of this, and capable of more than just writing stuff to cause division like the article.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

snambi 13y ago

why everyone is crying about spying issue. The original purpose of internet is military. US government gave access all of access to the internet, because we all wanted to use it. That doesn't mean US govt cannot use it the way it wants to use it.