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First of all: keep the staggering to a minimum. Second: realizing that "we should have known" and "none of this is new" isn't so much about reading news articl

First of all: keep the staggering to a minimum. Second: realizing that "we should have known" and "none of this is new" isn't so much about reading news articles and being "plugged in", but rather having an understanding of how the Internet works. To oversimplify greatly, you're essentially playing a very precise game of telephone between around 10-20 different people, and usually about 1-3 different publicly-owned corporations. To be surprised at the possibility of storing packets is somewhat naive considering how simple it is to do.

cinquemb 13y ago
Third: NSA whistleblowers have been stating what was more or less going on for years… (here's a talk by Binney from last November [0]) Funny enough, I wrote a post on this subject matter too before the Snowden leaks where I included the video as well…[1] [0]: http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/21783?html5=true&size=full&custom_width=432&player=simple&external_stylesheet= http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/21783?html5=true&size=full&cust... [1]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/47787766458/why-so-silent http://blog.pictobar.com/post/47787766458/why-so-silent
kazagistar 13y ago
Maybe I am just having trouble seeing the point of "see I was right all along"? Why would we be upset at the newcomers to the ranks of the enlightened? I would prefer to just nod, point to the preexisting evidence, instead of driving people away with unproductive "I told you so" hostility.
- deveac 13y ago
  I agree completely. We need more education on the subject as opposed to back patting, and we definitely don't need to attack the very people that need to hear and understand the reporting most, as the person you are replying to is doing, by calling them naive. A bit sad imho.
  - cinquemb 13y ago
    My issue with the conversation now that this has gone "mainstream" is that people are now allowing the media to shape their viewpoints (like everything else that seems to blow up in peoples minds who are normally distracted with reality tv or how awesome they think their life is[personal experience from family members/friends/how I lived for some time]), without digging further beyond what people are talking about at the surface. The emotions are most likely to be anger and disgust of having their sense of reality shattered, inciting most people who feel powerless to change their habits, to go and protest. And as we all have seen around the world and even within the united states, protests can get pretty hairy, pretty quickly and not in the favor of people who want to live peacefully… Outside of the issue of inciting the masses to act out physically, there is very little public "mainstream" acknowledgement that corporations are collecting and sharing the same types of data (and more) between one another, where issues surrounding any type of morality become selling points for products. So then the theoretical situation becomes: Government agrees to stop its dragnet programs, non governmental entities will continue to do so as long as people use their services… where's the protest for that (and when that comes they'll hire private contractors to protect them and their interests [remember OWS 2011])? I posted this a while back on information asymmetry and the surveillance state [0], which lays out simply what is going on now in the minds of people and what is at the core of the issue people are talking about. I also propose an idea about the direction I feel would be more beneficial for the energy to be placed on my post as apposed to the logical conclusion of where all the anger will be placed by people who are now willing to enter the conversation from recent "mainstream" exposure [1]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042241 [1]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-source-were-open-source http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-...
- smacktoward 13y ago
  I agree with you 110%. That being said, I can also imagine how frustrating it must be to be a person who's spent years (maybe decades) worrying about something that's really happening, only to have their concerns dismissed with a wave of the hand or marginalized as "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theories. It's not hard to imagine how that could sour the disposition of even the sunniest person.
  - samstave 13y ago
    Welcome to /r/conspiracy - come on in!
noonespecial 13y ago
The technical possibility isn't the new and staggering part, it's the profound lack of morality, respect for any ideal whatsoever, and compete apathy towards the oaths these people took to serve us. They have compeley misused the power we granted them in sacred trust. We should remove it from them at once. If this has become impossible, we need to know that as soon as we can.
- clivestaples 13y ago
  I could not agree with you more re: removing them at once. Sadly, I don't think an overly militarized police force, rapid transfer of wealth to the top and the post-911 power grab is going to challenged anytime soon. Most Americans still believe they have more to lose than to gain by asserting themselves...
- s_q_b 13y ago
  > The technical possibility isn't the new and staggering part, it's the profound lack of morality, respect for any ideal whatsoever, and compete apathy towards the oaths these people took to serve us. Again, I'll chime in as the resident apologist. The people working at Fort Meade are not evil. They truly believe they're doing a great service to the nation. They may be wrong, and they've certainly thrown privacy out the window. But they are following an ideal: national security. Post 9/11, the nation went on a war footing. We reacted the way we did to the Nazis and the Soviets. And in their search for an existential threat, the intelligence community seized on nuclear terrorism. These analysts live in constant fear of the day they miss a piece of information and New York, Washington, or London is enveloped in a mushroom cloud. The best explanations for this type of reasoning that I have heard came from an unlikely source, my grandfather. He's a former FBI agent and WWII Navy veteran. In war time, we threw all sorts of civil, economic, and political liberties out the window to defend ourselves. When I asked him how this was allowed to happen, he said simply, "When you're facing an enemy that wants to cross over the hill into the valley where you, your family, and everyone you've ever known or loved lives, you'll do anything to protect them." Our grandparents grew up with the threat of the Nazis. Our parents faced the prospect of annihilation by the Soviets. We have had the luxury of coming of age in a time where there is no credible threat to our very national and physical existence. As a result, it's difficult for us to understand the mindset of someone that spends all day, every day, thinking of the most horrible ways we could be attacked, and then trying to devise countermeasures. It's almost inevitable their perspective on the balance between security and privacy is altered. I'm not saying this reasoning is morally correct or justifiable, especially when applied to the current surveillance programs, but simply that it is understandable. The key danger is that these efforts are qualitatively distinct from those in previous generations. The difference between extraordinary measures now and then is twofold. First, our capacity to surveil the citizenry has exploded over the past two decades, and our legal framework is still grappling with that change. The courts are having trouble understanding that a change in scale can be a change in kind. For example, it's one thing to have the occasional surveillance flight to search for drug operations. It's quite another to have aerostats and quadrotors watching every inch of a city all the time. But the legal rational that there is no right to privacy in public spaces allows both. Similarly, it's one thing to say the records generated by my water company are business records not subject to the Fourth Amendment, but it's quite another to use that rationale to justify monitoring the location of my cell phone simply because my cellular provider maintains the records. Second, wars have a point where they end, and the extraordinary measures are supposed to be reversed. That's why the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs" are so dangerous to civil liberties. They essentially extend the extraordinary measures during wartime to police problems that have no logical end. I agree that we've gone too far as a nation. The fact that these queries don't require FISA orders flat out shocked me, even as a careful observer of these issues. But let's not demonize the individuals. After all, they're only doing what the people demanded after we were attacked. This is a democracy, and immediately after 9/11 such measures were resoundingly approved by the public and our representatives, beginning with the PATRIOT Act. None of that changes the current reality however. We must slowly learn the lesson the British did when dealing with terrorism. If you treat it as an ordinary police matter, something that will always be present, you deprive it of its power to shock, from which it derives its effectiveness. The fact is that the war on terror must now end. It's time for a return to normalcy.
deveac 13y ago
>Second: realizing that "we should have known" and "none of this is new" isn't so much about reading news articles and being "plugged in", but rather having an understanding of how the Internet works. These are exactly the kinds of comments I'm talking about. The preponderance of people affected by this program on the globe (a staggering amount if you will) had no knowledge of this because the media failed, and are not, in fact, technically savvy on any level and don't understand, at all how the internet works in relation to the technologies employed by these programs. >To be surprised at the possibility of storing packets is somewhat naive considering how simple it is to do. For the vast majority of the potential consumers of this knowledge, this just simply is not the case. At all. They aren't being naive. This is highly technical to them and severely under-reported, and where it was reported it was not explained terribly well, nor was there meaningful conversation surrounding the reporting's aftermath. But congratulations, rmrfrmrf, on being one of the select few that are not naive. We need to get you some sort of prize.
- graycat 13y ago
  > These are exactly the kinds of comments I'm talking about. The preponderance of people affected by this program on the globe (a staggering amount if you will) had no knowledge of this because the media failed, and are not, in fact, technically savvy on any level and don't understand, at all how the internet works in relation to the technologies employed by these programs. Of course at least the mainstream media (MSM) failed. Why? It's a very old story, rock solid in the media: An MSM media company is in business to make money. They have some old techniques for doing so. Their main technique is to get eyeballs for ad revenue; for that their main technique is to grab people by the heart, gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears; the content is essentially only light entertainment following the framework of the ancient Greeks we now call formula fiction; the content is nearly never the information needed by an "informed citizenry". The best hope for the information citizens need is Web sites on the Internet and search engines that can help people find that information.
md224 13y ago
I understand your point, but you fail to realize that comments like "why are you surprised?" induce a kind of digital bystander effect: they're essentially defusing moral outrage via social proof. If you read a comment like that, you may think to yourself, "well, this originally seemed like something worth loudly protesting, but if everyone already knows about it, then I guess it must not be that big of a deal." It has the effect of numbing outrage regardless of the outrage's merit, and I can't see how that's productive. If you feel that the outrage is in fact without merit, then attack that on logical/rational grounds, not by appealing to social proof.
jhermsmeyer 13y ago
To paraphrase (or is it a direct quote?) Jacob Applebaum, "Quiet, please. Adults are talking." This is staggering, and to chide others for being staggered is the worst kind of truculence. More relevant, and useful: What are we going to collectively do about it now that we know, beyond a doubt, what exactly is happening?

cinquemb 13y ago

Third: NSA whistleblowers have been stating what was more or less going on for years… (here's a talk by Binney from last November [0]) Funny enough, I wrote a post on this subject matter too before the Snowden leaks where I included the video as well…[1] [0]: http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/21783?html5=true&size=full&custom_width=432&player=simple&external_stylesheet= http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/21783?html5=true&size=full&cust... [1]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/47787766458/why-so-silent http://blog.pictobar.com/post/47787766458/why-so-silent

kazagistar 13y ago

Maybe I am just having trouble seeing the point of "see I was right all along"? Why would we be upset at the newcomers to the ranks of the enlightened? I would prefer to just nod, point to the preexisting evidence, instead of driving people away with unproductive "I told you so" hostility.

deveac 13y ago
I agree completely. We need more education on the subject as opposed to back patting, and we definitely don't need to attack the very people that need to hear and understand the reporting most, as the person you are replying to is doing, by calling them naive. A bit sad imho.
- cinquemb 13y ago
  My issue with the conversation now that this has gone "mainstream" is that people are now allowing the media to shape their viewpoints (like everything else that seems to blow up in peoples minds who are normally distracted with reality tv or how awesome they think their life is[personal experience from family members/friends/how I lived for some time]), without digging further beyond what people are talking about at the surface. The emotions are most likely to be anger and disgust of having their sense of reality shattered, inciting most people who feel powerless to change their habits, to go and protest. And as we all have seen around the world and even within the united states, protests can get pretty hairy, pretty quickly and not in the favor of people who want to live peacefully… Outside of the issue of inciting the masses to act out physically, there is very little public "mainstream" acknowledgement that corporations are collecting and sharing the same types of data (and more) between one another, where issues surrounding any type of morality become selling points for products. So then the theoretical situation becomes: Government agrees to stop its dragnet programs, non governmental entities will continue to do so as long as people use their services… where's the protest for that (and when that comes they'll hire private contractors to protect them and their interests [remember OWS 2011])? I posted this a while back on information asymmetry and the surveillance state [0], which lays out simply what is going on now in the minds of people and what is at the core of the issue people are talking about. I also propose an idea about the direction I feel would be more beneficial for the energy to be placed on my post as apposed to the logical conclusion of where all the anger will be placed by people who are now willing to enter the conversation from recent "mainstream" exposure [1]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042241 [1]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-source-were-open-source http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-...
smacktoward 13y ago
I agree with you 110%. That being said, I can also imagine how frustrating it must be to be a person who's spent years (maybe decades) worrying about something that's really happening, only to have their concerns dismissed with a wave of the hand or marginalized as "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theories. It's not hard to imagine how that could sour the disposition of even the sunniest person.
- samstave 13y ago
  Welcome to /r/conspiracy - come on in!

noonespecial 13y ago

The technical possibility isn't the new and staggering part, it's the profound lack of morality, respect for any ideal whatsoever, and compete apathy towards the oaths these people took to serve us. They have compeley misused the power we granted them in sacred trust. We should remove it from them at once. If this has become impossible, we need to know that as soon as we can.

clivestaples 13y ago
I could not agree with you more re: removing them at once. Sadly, I don't think an overly militarized police force, rapid transfer of wealth to the top and the post-911 power grab is going to challenged anytime soon. Most Americans still believe they have more to lose than to gain by asserting themselves...
s_q_b 13y ago
> The technical possibility isn't the new and staggering part, it's the profound lack of morality, respect for any ideal whatsoever, and compete apathy towards the oaths these people took to serve us. Again, I'll chime in as the resident apologist. The people working at Fort Meade are not evil. They truly believe they're doing a great service to the nation. They may be wrong, and they've certainly thrown privacy out the window. But they are following an ideal: national security. Post 9/11, the nation went on a war footing. We reacted the way we did to the Nazis and the Soviets. And in their search for an existential threat, the intelligence community seized on nuclear terrorism. These analysts live in constant fear of the day they miss a piece of information and New York, Washington, or London is enveloped in a mushroom cloud. The best explanations for this type of reasoning that I have heard came from an unlikely source, my grandfather. He's a former FBI agent and WWII Navy veteran. In war time, we threw all sorts of civil, economic, and political liberties out the window to defend ourselves. When I asked him how this was allowed to happen, he said simply, "When you're facing an enemy that wants to cross over the hill into the valley where you, your family, and everyone you've ever known or loved lives, you'll do anything to protect them." Our grandparents grew up with the threat of the Nazis. Our parents faced the prospect of annihilation by the Soviets. We have had the luxury of coming of age in a time where there is no credible threat to our very national and physical existence. As a result, it's difficult for us to understand the mindset of someone that spends all day, every day, thinking of the most horrible ways we could be attacked, and then trying to devise countermeasures. It's almost inevitable their perspective on the balance between security and privacy is altered. I'm not saying this reasoning is morally correct or justifiable, especially when applied to the current surveillance programs, but simply that it is understandable. The key danger is that these efforts are qualitatively distinct from those in previous generations. The difference between extraordinary measures now and then is twofold. First, our capacity to surveil the citizenry has exploded over the past two decades, and our legal framework is still grappling with that change. The courts are having trouble understanding that a change in scale can be a change in kind. For example, it's one thing to have the occasional surveillance flight to search for drug operations. It's quite another to have aerostats and quadrotors watching every inch of a city all the time. But the legal rational that there is no right to privacy in public spaces allows both. Similarly, it's one thing to say the records generated by my water company are business records not subject to the Fourth Amendment, but it's quite another to use that rationale to justify monitoring the location of my cell phone simply because my cellular provider maintains the records. Second, wars have a point where they end, and the extraordinary measures are supposed to be reversed. That's why the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs" are so dangerous to civil liberties. They essentially extend the extraordinary measures during wartime to police problems that have no logical end. I agree that we've gone too far as a nation. The fact that these queries don't require FISA orders flat out shocked me, even as a careful observer of these issues. But let's not demonize the individuals. After all, they're only doing what the people demanded after we were attacked. This is a democracy, and immediately after 9/11 such measures were resoundingly approved by the public and our representatives, beginning with the PATRIOT Act. None of that changes the current reality however. We must slowly learn the lesson the British did when dealing with terrorism. If you treat it as an ordinary police matter, something that will always be present, you deprive it of its power to shock, from which it derives its effectiveness. The fact is that the war on terror must now end. It's time for a return to normalcy.

deveac 13y ago

>Second: realizing that "we should have known" and "none of this is new" isn't so much about reading news articles and being "plugged in", but rather having an understanding of how the Internet works. These are exactly the kinds of comments I'm talking about. The preponderance of people affected by this program on the globe (a staggering amount if you will) had no knowledge of this because the media failed, and are not, in fact, technically savvy on any level and don't understand, at all how the internet works in relation to the technologies employed by these programs. >To be surprised at the possibility of storing packets is somewhat naive considering how simple it is to do. For the vast majority of the potential consumers of this knowledge, this just simply is not the case. At all. They aren't being naive. This is highly technical to them and severely under-reported, and where it was reported it was not explained terribly well, nor was there meaningful conversation surrounding the reporting's aftermath. But congratulations, rmrfrmrf, on being one of the select few that are not naive. We need to get you some sort of prize.

graycat 13y ago
> These are exactly the kinds of comments I'm talking about. The preponderance of people affected by this program on the globe (a staggering amount if you will) had no knowledge of this because the media failed, and are not, in fact, technically savvy on any level and don't understand, at all how the internet works in relation to the technologies employed by these programs. Of course at least the mainstream media (MSM) failed. Why? It's a very old story, rock solid in the media: An MSM media company is in business to make money. They have some old techniques for doing so. Their main technique is to get eyeballs for ad revenue; for that their main technique is to grab people by the heart, gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears; the content is essentially only light entertainment following the framework of the ancient Greeks we now call formula fiction; the content is nearly never the information needed by an "informed citizenry". The best hope for the information citizens need is Web sites on the Internet and search engines that can help people find that information.

md224 13y ago

I understand your point, but you fail to realize that comments like "why are you surprised?" induce a kind of digital bystander effect: they're essentially defusing moral outrage via social proof. If you read a comment like that, you may think to yourself, "well, this originally seemed like something worth loudly protesting, but if everyone already knows about it, then I guess it must not be that big of a deal." It has the effect of numbing outrage regardless of the outrage's merit, and I can't see how that's productive. If you feel that the outrage is in fact without merit, then attack that on logical/rational grounds, not by appealing to social proof.

jhermsmeyer 13y ago

To paraphrase (or is it a direct quote?) Jacob Applebaum, "Quiet, please. Adults are talking." This is staggering, and to chide others for being staggered is the worst kind of truculence. More relevant, and useful: What are we going to collectively do about it now that we know, beyond a doubt, what exactly is happening?