10 ms·

The NSA is turning the Internet into a total surveillance system

233 points by northwest 13y ago

dubs99 13y ago
I wish the headlines of these articles would read "The American Government is turning the Internet into a total surveillance system". Although it seems the government has no control over the NSA or even know what they're up too, it would be good to see the focus of this problem turned to the policy makers.
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
  Also, Google and Facebook are turning the Internet into a total surveillance system.
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    We, through our own behaviour, are turning the World into a total surveillance system.
    - alan_cx 13y ago
      Are you a terrorist?
      - w_t_payne 13y ago
        What do you think? For your information, I believe that violence and destruction are counter-productive. As with most people, I rely on a global system of trade and cooperation for my livelihood. I do not wish to disrupt that. Fundamentally, most people wish to simply get on with their lives; to spend their time, attention and energies on their own job, on feeding themselves and their family, on keeping a roof over their heads, on maintaining their relationships with their friends, and on pursuing whatever it is that makes each of them individually happy. This political pissing-match is not something that they know or care about. Indeed, the pool is now so polluted, who would want to swim here? We did not ask for terrorists to come here and try to kill us ... just as we did not ask for the authorities to poke their noses into our private lives and threaten us with what they find. However, as much as I would like both of these groups to go away and scw themselves, I have to acknowledge that we have no real choice in the matter. If some random psycho decides he does not like my religion or the colour of my skin, and decides to murder me and my family for it ... well, in all likelihood there is not much I can do about it. Ditto for the machinations of the uncaring zombie bureaucracies that we call the "Nation State". In truth, we are utterly powerless, and these things are done to us with neither pity nor mercy nor any real thought for us as individuals whatsoever. I do not seek change, for in a massively connected world of billions, it cannot be but like this. My bitterness and rage are futile; less than nothingness; feeble against the unstoppable forces of inevitability. The thought that I might get up and do something is laughable -- at best it might tar me with the same disease that infects those responsible for all of this -- optimism, and a horribly, destructively misplaced belief that we have any power whatsoever to alter things.
gulfie 13y ago
Turning? I think the tense might be slightly wrong. Has turned.
ohwp 13y ago
Don't get me wrong, but why is everybody so upset about the NSA when they post everything on Facebook and use Google/Apple/Microsoft? Are they upset because they lack the choice of who is tracking them? Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  - because it is involuntary - because they said they didn't - because we don't all live in the USA - because we have some expectations of privacy regarding mail - because the reason why ('terrorism') is a fig leaf - because some people feel that surveillance can lead to a police state And so on... The mail one is tricky because somehow people expect that to carry over to email but email is an entirely different beast than regular mail.
  - bostik 13y ago
    > And so on... The part that falls under "so on" is the scary one. From the article: "NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds." Note the weasel wording: "certain keywords". You don't know what those keywords are. You don't even know what topics they happen to cover. Once you somehow become flagged for suspicious activity, the NSA can go back in time and see everything you have said about _all_ of their "suspicious" topics. You are now an even bigger suspect. And once you are a suspect, anything and everything in your past can be interpreted in the light of you seeking to commit the questionable activity. Thanks to NSA storing only the material that matched their keywords, they now have a stash of incriminating material that has a very strong selection bias. I'm pretty sure even Franz Kafka would have been proud.
    - w_t_payne 13y ago
      Indeed ... not to mention that once you have a security apparatus in place ... the imperative is to use it ... to justify it's existence by making arrests. The system becomes it's own justification. Reminds me a bit of the movie: "The Cube".
DanBC 13y ago
They have huge amounts of data. This is good, because now people can analyse it and see how effective the measures are. Spending all that money must have some tangible, measurable, benefit, right? So, show us. Show us how many people have been caught as a result of all this monitoring. I don't think the results are going to be impressive. See, for another example, the fingerprint collection at US airports. > Collect it all I wonder how many Americans know about the scheme to collect at airports the fingerprints of visitors to the US? Here's an article from 2008 (http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-fingerprints-idUSN2538685320080325 http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-finger...), submitted to HN here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196375) > The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of $1.7 billion. > [...] On an average day, almost 14,400 international visitors undergo the fingerprinting process at Kennedy, officials said. > More than 2,000 criminal and visa fraud cases have been detected by the screening process, introduced in response to security concerns following the attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. officials said. Roughly they've scanned fingerprints for 36,792,000 visitors (who may be repeat visitors), and caught more than 2,000 people. (Between 2001/9/11 and 2008/9/11.)
- api 13y ago
  That requires transparency. If there is no transparency, we'll never know... and the administrators of these programs have every careerist incentive to put the best possible shine on them.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  But did they catch those people because of the fingerprints or would they have caught them in some other way. And was the stated reason for installing this program in the first place that they were going after criminal and visa fraud cases and if so is the damage that those people would have incurred post their capture greater than the cost of the system? Preferably substantially greater. I no longer visit the US in part because I refuse to be treated like a suspected criminal simply because I'm not an American. As a one man boycott it likely won't have much effect but I suspect I'm not the only one doing this. The TSA/US Customs combo is the worst possible way to welcome a new visitor to your country.
ForFreedom 13y ago
The Person Of Interest (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/) is coming true.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Except there are orders of magnitude fewer checks on that power than in the show.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    What checks does the machine have on it (let alone the Chinese machine that is presumed to exist) its already broken free of 100% human control.
_yields 13y ago
Americans control you're government, it is out of control. Regards, the rest of the world.
- L4mppu 13y ago
  Your.
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    Actually, lots of state security services are doing the exact same thing. Many are much much worse. America is the only country (so far) to have somebody brave and public spirited enough to stand up and blow the whistle, and the only country (so far) to have politicians with enough gumption and common sense to make the requisite fuss, and to start to stand up against the encroaching tide. It might be ugly, but it sure beats the silent acquiescence we see elsewhere. In other words, America is the only country where the political system is actually working to protect the general population against an overreaching security state. As far as I can see, that puts America far far ahead of the rest of the world, thank you very much.
    - MisterWebz 13y ago
      There are german politicians that propose to take extreme measures such as banning US companies if they don't comply with stricter regulation. And you'll see there's a lot of other stuff going on in Europe. Of course you won't hear about that in your US-centric media.
      - w_t_payne 13y ago
        OK, Fair enough -- to an extent. (Although I am not actually American).
    - L4mppu 13y ago
      Wasn't saying that others are not, all I was doing was correcting his spelling.
madaxe 13y ago
What good is a panopticon if you can't make sense of what you're looking at?
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  You don't have to make sense of it. All you have to do is scare people sh*tless.
logn 13y ago
This isn't really news at all. It's the guardian regurgitating prior news to make money and HN posting it to re-explain what we all already know and agree upon. I hope the next story on the NSA involves someone inventing something to fix our problems. The best news I read all day was: https://gnunet.org https://gnunet.org
- acqq 13y ago
  You're wrong. It is important to write and talk about it. The NYT story has the biggest claims up to now and it appears that it was almost ignored by everybody (I guess it's because the story comes from the unnamed "government official" instead of the out-of-the-real-life-thriller-is-he-hero-or-antihero Snowden). It is extremely important to concentrate on up to now the most dramatic information. Discuss, write, ask.
- drunkenmasta 13y ago
  Yea it's a shame that Snowden risked so much just so that a newspaper could rewrite the same story 50 times. We could use more leaks and less grandstanding and posturing.
  - acqq 13y ago
    It's completely not the same story. NYT's "unnamed government official" claims much more than any other story explicitly claimed before. Have you tried to comprehend and compare? Guardian was able to show that UK services collect everything it goes through their nodes, nobody up to 8.8.2013 was able to say so about US, especially not that all the data are automatically searched through, including those of US citizens, theoretically protected by the Constitution.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  How can we expand the debate beyond the HN community & Grauniad readership? Perhaps an ad campaign?
  - logn 13y ago
    If the ad campaign isn't online, then would be good. I think the problem is that the tech savvy people all mostly agree (on some level), but that the non-technical people are not aware of the full context, the risks, etc., and they're not easily reached via the Internet (which is probably not coincidence). My $.02, make a protest sign, and go out a hold it somewhere. People will approach you and talk to you, and you can have a discussion with them like we have on HN everyday. Those people love debate, and they'll listen, and they'll probably go engage others intelligently too.
miguelindurain 13y ago
I wish there were more emphasis on human rights for worldwide citizens rather than on the 4th amendment. But maybe the goal is to target US public opinion so that they do something about this.
icantthinkofone 13y ago
I question why HNs sole source of information seems to only be The Guardian.
- gjm11 13y ago
  It isn't. (Obviously.) Recent HN postings, political and newsy rather than technical, about the NSA, have included stories from: The Atlantic Wire (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059446), Security Week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054198), USA Today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850606, article from 2006 but posted a couple of months ago), C-SPAN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899226). Those were just the first few I found with a trivial Google search. There are a number of stories from the Guardian. That would be because they (1) have run a lot of stories about this stuff and (2) have a good website. Do you see a problem with that?
- northwest 13y ago
  It's the NSA-related articles that often come from The Guardian. That's simply because this paper is the window for Snowden (not sure if they have an exclusive agreement, maybe). They have the balls to stand behind him, unlike a lot of other outlets. Also, know that the rest of the main stream media don't seem to like the idea of discussing this mess and any possible solutions - probably b/c they're ultimately controlled by influential politicians or other moneyed interests.
  - ianhawes 13y ago
    Actually, MSM has been covering Snowden and his leaks fairly consistently since they occurred. Perhaps you should watch Fox News or CNN before you go off making unsubstantiated claims.
jjguy 13y ago
Looks like the Guardian got hacked. I clicked, saw the article header, but was then redirected to a NSFW ad for Teen Party Sluts.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  You may want to check your computer for viruses/trojans, disable toolbars.
squozzer 13y ago
Expect more revelations, as the "cross-border" criterion for information capture disappears from the debate. All communication will be captured all of the time. The upshot -- we have the best excuse in years to begin purging our ruling class. Does the NSA have dirt on them? Did Snowden manage to get some of that dirt and hand it over to Putin? Probably not, but as the mafiosi in Casino said, why take the chance?
john_b 13y ago
Reading between the lines of various NSA statements, it seems like they interpret the relevant sections of the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act to only apply to "collected" data, and "collected" data they consider only that which a person looks at and stores. Apparently, they think that the restrictions imposed on them don't apply to automated machine reading of data, or any data that might possibly (51% or more) have a foreign source or destination. Since they define the criteria for what is "interesting", it gives them the ability to inspect essentially all of the data they collect, and there is at present no real check on the loosening of what constitutes "interesting" over time.
djvu9 13y ago
Along with wearable and/or implanted devices and a little bit AI this could become the prototype of the Matrix...
walshemj 13y ago
says the site with 17 sets of tracking code on the home page :-)
mncolinlee 13y ago
Well, there's only one response to those that would tag defenders of civil liberties as traitors. There was once a ragtag band of traitors who felt the same way. Their names included: Jefferson, Adams, Hancock, Franklin, and 52 other signers of the Declaration of Independence from England. One only needs to look at the influence of the British "Star Chamber" on the writing of our U.S. Constitution to understand exactly how our Founders would feel about a secret court with secret evidence chosen by only one man to decide which people get to violate their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination every single day... Or worse yet, to have a non-judicial secret court chosen by the executive that decides which American citizens to kill by drone strike. Regardless of what party or president runs our country, many things must change.

233 points by northwest 13y ago

I wish the headlines of these articles would read "The American Government is turning the Internet into a total surveillance system". Although it seems the government has no control over the NSA or even know what they're up too, it would be good to see the focus of this problem turned to the policy makers.

ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
Also, Google and Facebook are turning the Internet into a total surveillance system.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  We, through our own behaviour, are turning the World into a total surveillance system.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Are you a terrorist?
    - w_t_payne 13y ago
      What do you think? For your information, I believe that violence and destruction are counter-productive. As with most people, I rely on a global system of trade and cooperation for my livelihood. I do not wish to disrupt that. Fundamentally, most people wish to simply get on with their lives; to spend their time, attention and energies on their own job, on feeding themselves and their family, on keeping a roof over their heads, on maintaining their relationships with their friends, and on pursuing whatever it is that makes each of them individually happy. This political pissing-match is not something that they know or care about. Indeed, the pool is now so polluted, who would want to swim here? We did not ask for terrorists to come here and try to kill us ... just as we did not ask for the authorities to poke their noses into our private lives and threaten us with what they find. However, as much as I would like both of these groups to go away and scw themselves, I have to acknowledge that we have no real choice in the matter. If some random psycho decides he does not like my religion or the colour of my skin, and decides to murder me and my family for it ... well, in all likelihood there is not much I can do about it. Ditto for the machinations of the uncaring zombie bureaucracies that we call the "Nation State". In truth, we are utterly powerless, and these things are done to us with neither pity nor mercy nor any real thought for us as individuals whatsoever. I do not seek change, for in a massively connected world of billions, it cannot be but like this. My bitterness and rage are futile; less than nothingness; feeble against the unstoppable forces of inevitability. The thought that I might get up and do something is laughable -- at best it might tar me with the same disease that infects those responsible for all of this -- optimism, and a horribly, destructively misplaced belief that we have any power whatsoever to alter things.

gulfie 13y ago

Turning? I think the tense might be slightly wrong. Has turned.

ohwp 13y ago

Don't get me wrong, but why is everybody so upset about the NSA when they post everything on Facebook and use Google/Apple/Microsoft? Are they upset because they lack the choice of who is tracking them? Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you.

jacquesm 13y ago
- because it is involuntary - because they said they didn't - because we don't all live in the USA - because we have some expectations of privacy regarding mail - because the reason why ('terrorism') is a fig leaf - because some people feel that surveillance can lead to a police state And so on... The mail one is tricky because somehow people expect that to carry over to email but email is an entirely different beast than regular mail.
- bostik 13y ago
  > And so on... The part that falls under "so on" is the scary one. From the article: "NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds." Note the weasel wording: "certain keywords". You don't know what those keywords are. You don't even know what topics they happen to cover. Once you somehow become flagged for suspicious activity, the NSA can go back in time and see everything you have said about _all_ of their "suspicious" topics. You are now an even bigger suspect. And once you are a suspect, anything and everything in your past can be interpreted in the light of you seeking to commit the questionable activity. Thanks to NSA storing only the material that matched their keywords, they now have a stash of incriminating material that has a very strong selection bias. I'm pretty sure even Franz Kafka would have been proud.
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    Indeed ... not to mention that once you have a security apparatus in place ... the imperative is to use it ... to justify it's existence by making arrests. The system becomes it's own justification. Reminds me a bit of the movie: "The Cube".

DanBC 13y ago

They have huge amounts of data. This is good, because now people can analyse it and see how effective the measures are. Spending all that money must have some tangible, measurable, benefit, right? So, show us. Show us how many people have been caught as a result of all this monitoring. I don't think the results are going to be impressive. See, for another example, the fingerprint collection at US airports. > Collect it all I wonder how many Americans know about the scheme to collect at airports the fingerprints of visitors to the US? Here's an article from 2008 (http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-fingerprints-idUSN2538685320080325 http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-finger...), submitted to HN here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196375) > The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of $1.7 billion. > [...] On an average day, almost 14,400 international visitors undergo the fingerprinting process at Kennedy, officials said. > More than 2,000 criminal and visa fraud cases have been detected by the screening process, introduced in response to security concerns following the attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. officials said. Roughly they've scanned fingerprints for 36,792,000 visitors (who may be repeat visitors), and caught more than 2,000 people. (Between 2001/9/11 and 2008/9/11.)

api 13y ago
That requires transparency. If there is no transparency, we'll never know... and the administrators of these programs have every careerist incentive to put the best possible shine on them.
jacquesm 13y ago
But did they catch those people because of the fingerprints or would they have caught them in some other way. And was the stated reason for installing this program in the first place that they were going after criminal and visa fraud cases and if so is the damage that those people would have incurred post their capture greater than the cost of the system? Preferably substantially greater. I no longer visit the US in part because I refuse to be treated like a suspected criminal simply because I'm not an American. As a one man boycott it likely won't have much effect but I suspect I'm not the only one doing this. The TSA/US Customs combo is the worst possible way to welcome a new visitor to your country.

ForFreedom 13y ago

The Person Of Interest (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/) is coming true.

mtgx 13y ago
Except there are orders of magnitude fewer checks on that power than in the show.
- walshemj 13y ago
  What checks does the machine have on it (let alone the Chinese machine that is presumed to exist) its already broken free of 100% human control.

_yields 13y ago

Americans control you're government, it is out of control. Regards, the rest of the world.

L4mppu 13y ago
Your.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  Actually, lots of state security services are doing the exact same thing. Many are much much worse. America is the only country (so far) to have somebody brave and public spirited enough to stand up and blow the whistle, and the only country (so far) to have politicians with enough gumption and common sense to make the requisite fuss, and to start to stand up against the encroaching tide. It might be ugly, but it sure beats the silent acquiescence we see elsewhere. In other words, America is the only country where the political system is actually working to protect the general population against an overreaching security state. As far as I can see, that puts America far far ahead of the rest of the world, thank you very much.
  - MisterWebz 13y ago
    There are german politicians that propose to take extreme measures such as banning US companies if they don't comply with stricter regulation. And you'll see there's a lot of other stuff going on in Europe. Of course you won't hear about that in your US-centric media.
    - w_t_payne 13y ago
      OK, Fair enough -- to an extent. (Although I am not actually American).
  - L4mppu 13y ago
    Wasn't saying that others are not, all I was doing was correcting his spelling.

madaxe 13y ago

What good is a panopticon if you can't make sense of what you're looking at?

w_t_payne 13y ago
You don't have to make sense of it. All you have to do is scare people sh*tless.

logn 13y ago

This isn't really news at all. It's the guardian regurgitating prior news to make money and HN posting it to re-explain what we all already know and agree upon. I hope the next story on the NSA involves someone inventing something to fix our problems. The best news I read all day was: https://gnunet.org https://gnunet.org

acqq 13y ago
You're wrong. It is important to write and talk about it. The NYT story has the biggest claims up to now and it appears that it was almost ignored by everybody (I guess it's because the story comes from the unnamed "government official" instead of the out-of-the-real-life-thriller-is-he-hero-or-antihero Snowden). It is extremely important to concentrate on up to now the most dramatic information. Discuss, write, ask.
drunkenmasta 13y ago
Yea it's a shame that Snowden risked so much just so that a newspaper could rewrite the same story 50 times. We could use more leaks and less grandstanding and posturing.
- acqq 13y ago
  It's completely not the same story. NYT's "unnamed government official" claims much more than any other story explicitly claimed before. Have you tried to comprehend and compare? Guardian was able to show that UK services collect everything it goes through their nodes, nobody up to 8.8.2013 was able to say so about US, especially not that all the data are automatically searched through, including those of US citizens, theoretically protected by the Constitution.
w_t_payne 13y ago
How can we expand the debate beyond the HN community & Grauniad readership? Perhaps an ad campaign?
- logn 13y ago
  If the ad campaign isn't online, then would be good. I think the problem is that the tech savvy people all mostly agree (on some level), but that the non-technical people are not aware of the full context, the risks, etc., and they're not easily reached via the Internet (which is probably not coincidence). My $.02, make a protest sign, and go out a hold it somewhere. People will approach you and talk to you, and you can have a discussion with them like we have on HN everyday. Those people love debate, and they'll listen, and they'll probably go engage others intelligently too.

miguelindurain 13y ago

I wish there were more emphasis on human rights for worldwide citizens rather than on the 4th amendment. But maybe the goal is to target US public opinion so that they do something about this.

icantthinkofone 13y ago

I question why HNs sole source of information seems to only be The Guardian.

gjm11 13y ago
It isn't. (Obviously.) Recent HN postings, political and newsy rather than technical, about the NSA, have included stories from: The Atlantic Wire (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059446), Security Week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054198), USA Today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850606, article from 2006 but posted a couple of months ago), C-SPAN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899226). Those were just the first few I found with a trivial Google search. There are a number of stories from the Guardian. That would be because they (1) have run a lot of stories about this stuff and (2) have a good website. Do you see a problem with that?
northwest 13y ago
It's the NSA-related articles that often come from The Guardian. That's simply because this paper is the window for Snowden (not sure if they have an exclusive agreement, maybe). They have the balls to stand behind him, unlike a lot of other outlets. Also, know that the rest of the main stream media don't seem to like the idea of discussing this mess and any possible solutions - probably b/c they're ultimately controlled by influential politicians or other moneyed interests.
- ianhawes 13y ago
  Actually, MSM has been covering Snowden and his leaks fairly consistently since they occurred. Perhaps you should watch Fox News or CNN before you go off making unsubstantiated claims.

jjguy 13y ago

Looks like the Guardian got hacked. I clicked, saw the article header, but was then redirected to a NSFW ad for Teen Party Sluts.

jacquesm 13y ago
You may want to check your computer for viruses/trojans, disable toolbars.

squozzer 13y ago

Expect more revelations, as the "cross-border" criterion for information capture disappears from the debate. All communication will be captured all of the time. The upshot -- we have the best excuse in years to begin purging our ruling class. Does the NSA have dirt on them? Did Snowden manage to get some of that dirt and hand it over to Putin? Probably not, but as the mafiosi in Casino said, why take the chance?

john_b 13y ago

Reading between the lines of various NSA statements, it seems like they interpret the relevant sections of the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act to only apply to "collected" data, and "collected" data they consider only that which a person looks at and stores. Apparently, they think that the restrictions imposed on them don't apply to automated machine reading of data, or any data that might possibly (51% or more) have a foreign source or destination. Since they define the criteria for what is "interesting", it gives them the ability to inspect essentially all of the data they collect, and there is at present no real check on the loosening of what constitutes "interesting" over time.

djvu9 13y ago

Along with wearable and/or implanted devices and a little bit AI this could become the prototype of the Matrix...

walshemj 13y ago

says the site with 17 sets of tracking code on the home page :-)

mncolinlee 13y ago

Well, there's only one response to those that would tag defenders of civil liberties as traitors. There was once a ragtag band of traitors who felt the same way. Their names included: Jefferson, Adams, Hancock, Franklin, and 52 other signers of the Declaration of Independence from England. One only needs to look at the influence of the British "Star Chamber" on the writing of our U.S. Constitution to understand exactly how our Founders would feel about a secret court with secret evidence chosen by only one man to decide which people get to violate their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination every single day... Or worse yet, to have a non-judicial secret court chosen by the executive that decides which American citizens to kill by drone strike. Regardless of what party or president runs our country, many things must change.