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Commandeering implies control, and the NSA does not have control. No one has "control" over the Internet. I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric that

Commandeering implies control, and the NSA does not have control. No one has "control" over the Internet. I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric that this story has turned some people towards, where the NSA are the unequivocal bad guys and we, the "little people", are the unequivocal good guys. That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (Bruce), on our side. It's paranoid delusion to think the NSA is actively out to get us - at least ostensibly, the NSA is trying to help the citizens of the US. What we should be doing is asking for changes and modifications to how things are done. There are some not-so-big tweaks to the currently running programs which can feasibly be made without compromising these program's efficacy while also providing more insight into what's going on. We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy) - it's possible. That's what we should be figuring out, not this chicken little/us vs. them bullshit.

pdonis 13y ago
the NSA does not have control. How do you know? The Internet backbone was developed using US government funding. How do you know that the US government did not put backdoors there? It did in the case of the long-distance telephone network. We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy) I agree that this could be done in theory; I'm not sure it can be done in practice.
- diminoten 13y ago
  I don't know in the epistemological sense, but there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true.
  - Sauer_Kraut 13y ago
    Aside from the details that show the NSA having employees in companies install monitoring hardware worldwide? Or those that assist in providing data in return for some themselves? None of that counts to you because "there's just no reason to believe such a thing." You are essentially saying you don't believe anything you may have read in the past few years counts as control. What IS control then, other than the ability to control others, which the US/NSA has attempting to keep on top of since the shift in data traffic trends in the 1990s.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      Did you just ask "What is control, other than the ability to control others"? Do you honestly not recognize the shell-game you're playing with that question? You're responding to all of the things I said with tricks and games. You don't want to talk facts, so I don't want to talk with you. I'm done, unless you want to stop drawing conclusions and start painting a real picture.
      - APoliteRequest 13y ago
        Could you acknowledge how having control is indeed having control? These installations didn't just trip and fall into place.
  - ImprovedSilence 13y ago
    There is also no reason to believe it's not true, no?
    - diminoten 13y ago
      Correct. Just like there is also no reason not to believe in ghosts or magic or bigfoot or unicorns.
  - pdonis 13y ago
    there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true No reason to believe what to be true? The US government's placing of backdoors in the long-distance telephone network is historical fact. That historical fact is a reason to believe that what the US government has done once, it could do again. It may not be a reason you want to accept, but it's still a reason.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      The NSA can't stop you from visiting Hacker News. That's what control means, the ability to alter your behavior or the course of events. The NSA does not have the ability to do this. So no, this is not historical fact.
      - pdonis 13y ago
        That's what control means, the ability to alter your behavior or the course of events. When it became public knowledge that the US government had backdoors in the long distance telephone network, that did alter people's behavior and the course of events. Similarly, the public knowledge that the NSA is spying on the Internet is altering people's behavior and the course of events. I agree the NSA can't stop people from visiting HN, but they can certainly change the incentives faced by people using the Internet. Perhaps this doesn't meet your definition of the word "control", but you still seem to find it significant. this is not historical fact What isn't? Are you saying that you don't believe the US government put backdoors into the long distance telephone network? Or that you don't believe the NSA is spying on the Internet? Or are you just saying you don't care, because you can still visit HN? That doesn't change the historical fact; it just means you don't care about that particular historical fact.
        diminoten 13y ago
        Wrong kind of alter. You're talking about practical changes, but in no way was anyone forced to change their behavior. In this instance, 'alter' would be something the NSA did which literally changed an outcome. As in, block access to Hacker News, or redirect gmail.com to gmail.nsa.gov. The NSA does not have this power, nor has the US government ever done this. So again no, it is not historical fact.
Spearchucker 13y ago
Maybe the adversarial approach is needed to make the point. His post is a communication to an audience that, I suspect, will be more likely to respond if words are chosen with that audience in mind.
jacquesm 13y ago
> The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (Bruce), on our side. Define 'our side' please. I'm not convinced of that. And if you take the temporal element into account you might very well find that the NSA is even against 'your side' in the longer term. Information gathered indiscriminately has a tendency to concentrate on the bad parts. If I vacuum up all your communications over the last 20 years or so and pick out the bad bits while deleting the good bits you'll look like a pretty bad person no matter how saintly you are in real life. A disputed quote (but generally attributed to Richelieu and quite applicable): "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The potential of abuse of this data is simply too large, no matter what the potential benefits and whether or not the NSA is on 'our side'.
- reader5000 13y ago
  "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him...and then nobody will because everybody understands this basic principle."
- diminoten 13y ago
  The potential of abuse for guns is pretty damn large, but some would argue that the US was founded on the idea of gun ownership. There's a lot of speculation about what could happen, but if we look only at what has happened, people aren't being snatched up off the streets because of the NSA's monitoring programs. The language of the above article seems too adversarial to be effective at getting anything done. If we continue to take this "death to the NSA" stance, we're not going to get anything that we want because, like it or not, the NSA, or someone else doing the same things, is going to have to exist on some level for the remainder of the US's existence as a representative democracy. We need to be talking scope and extent, not existence/abolishment, and this article is a little too polemic to be helpful.
  - apalmer 13y ago
    'There's a lot of speculation about what could happen, but if we look only at what has happened, people aren't being snatched up off the streets because of the NSA's monitoring programs.' How can you possibly know this? In fact I would argue as much as we 'know' anything at all related to the NSA program we know that it has lead to interventions. The NSA claims this surveillance has been instrumental to stopping 'dozens' of terrorist plots, which would mean by definition people ARE being snatched off the streets because of the NSA monitoring programs.
TallGuyShort 13y ago
>> We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy) Until the definition of a "terrorist" grows to include people who engage in activities previously considered harmless and private.
- diminoten 13y ago
  So we're ready to convict the government of thought-crimes? Just because they can, doesn't mean they will. Gun owners could all go out and harm innocent people, but they generally don't, do they? At least we don't convict them before they do.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    Gun owners typically shouldn't get to decide who is innocent and who is not. They're not judge, jury and executioner. So whenever they do hurt someone it's a case for an actual judge to figure out what happened and if we class it as self defence or not. Gun owners harm innocent people more often than not.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      Does the US government prosecute people for potential murder, simply because they have the means to commit this murder?
  - TallGuyShort 13y ago
    Whoa, slow down there - where do I mention convicting the government of thought-crimes? My point is that granting the federal government powers (because, under the constitution, they have no power that isn't explicitly granted to them) under the umbrella of counter-terrorism initiatives is inevitably going to expand in scope and usage, and will still be labelled as "counter-terrorism".
    - diminoten 13y ago
      Where do you mention convicting the government of thought-crimes? In the very next sentence! You are not capable of predicting the future, you don't know what is going to happen if we grant the federal government additional powers.
apalmer 13y ago
This is overly ideological. Agreed that the NSA probably doesn't control the Internet, however the argument that the government does or doesn't control the Internet cannot be assumed either way at this point. We do know the government has desired/requested control of the internet before, the kill switch initiative is well documented. Whether this has actually panned out for the Gov in any concrete way we do not know, and if it did pan out it would probably be classified. As for 'the little people' being the good guys, that's kind of fundamentally what a democracy implies. Now whether the paranoid HN types really represents the people, or the soccer mom who would scream bloody murder if their family was injured because a terrorist plot went off that 'could' have been stopped with widespread snooping without warrants really represents the people is an entirely different question.
jivatmanx 13y ago
Keith Alexander believes that terrorists live amongst us, trying to implement Sharia and create a Caliphate. To fight this, he needs to "Collect it all". It's just as important to understand his motivation as it is to understand ours, and assess the reasonableness of each in comparison to the other, comparing our current situation to others in history that were similar, and the result they had.
- saraid216 13y ago
  Alexander actually sounds like J. Edgar Hoover in that regard, which is pretty disturbing.
- diminoten 13y ago
  Firstly, does he seriously believe that, or are you just demonizing him because it'll get you agreement? If he said something to that effect, that's concerning, but if he hasn't, can we stick to things which have actually happened? And secondly, is not the motivation to stop terrorists in the US from harming US citizens a noble goal, in theory? Now granted, we shouldn't have to sacrifice our privacy to get that done, but it's not like Keith Alexander is trying to harm the US. He wants to help, and depending on who you ask, may be misguided, on the money, or completely wrong in how he plans to help. It'd be more useful to correct than to abolish, because abolishment of the NSA and it's surveillance programs is never, ever going to happen, nor should it. ZERO surveillance (this might be arguable, I suppose) results in US citizens dead on US soil. Unacceptable.
  - apalmer 13y ago
    Very few movers and shakers in the history of the world are intrinsically 'evil' in their own judgement. Whether Alexander is purposefully trying to harm the US or not is immaterial. Agree with you on the charicterization going on here, its one thing to feel his motivations are a given way, another to imply he has public made statements indicating this to be fact.
    - diminoten 13y ago
saraid216 13y ago
> That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. I agree. I've actually been having trouble deciding whether or not this us vs them mentality has been deliberately cultivated by people who don't want things to get better or not. It would not surprise me to be told that there's an NSA program intended to do that; after all, the FBI sent in undercover cops to suspected terrorist groups who ended up being overzealous, so it's not like such false flagging is unknown.
ledge 13y ago
Well they certainly aren't on my side, and I don't want to be on their side. They aggregate and analyze data used to conduct drone strikes, spy on the world indiscriminately, and assist brutal agencies like the DEA in destroying the lives of millions of innocent Americans. Is it a paranoid delusion if you're a drug dealer to think that the NSA is out to get you? Not anymore. What about a drug user? What about a file-sharer? A child porn viewer? You might not be any of these things, but a huge portion of the American citizenry is, and I'd argue they're not doing anything wrong. Sorry but I'm not going to just take it on faith that the NSA is on 'our side'.
- diminoten 13y ago
  You'd argue that a child porn viewer isn't doing anything wrong? Your opinion officially doesn't matter any more. Sorry, I have a 10 yr old sister and I simply can't abide folks who won't even do the research to understand what it means when they say things.
  - ledge 13y ago
    Yes I said that without doing any research on the subject ever. And yes one opinion of mine invalidates every other opinion I have, how true. You win, good arguments. Edit: For a more serious reply, there is evidence that countries that have decriminalized viewing child pornography (not production) have seen decreased rates of child sex abuse. Also, the definition of child pornography is so broad that we have a lot of people rotting in jail for looking at a naked picture that a 14 year old took of themselves in the mirror. Once in jail, these people become targets for violence and ironically sexual abuse. The topic is not black and white, and when you try to shut down conversation the way you did, it's not helping anyone, children included.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      Are you seriously trying to defend child pornography?
      - 13y ago
Sauer_Kraut 13y ago
"No one has "control" over the Internet." Aside from the people who control the hardware, and the NSA/others seem to have control over those people, getting them to install monitoring hardware. "I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric" I am able to be prosecuted for creating "hacking tools" while Endgame Systems has the NSA pay them a million+ a year to access data from those "hacking tools." 'There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million.[1]' In this environment of immunity granted to profiteers while my friends and I are prosecuted, it is "us vs. them." Stop attempting to blow out meaningless opinions like "The NSA is on our side" in response to articles showing the opposite. [1] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems
- diminoten 13y ago
  wiki.echelon2.org, huh? The US military uses weapons citizens are not allowed to own or create on a regular basis. Is Lockheed Martin or Boeing not on our side because they make fighter jets that only the US government can buy? It's only "us vs. them" in your head. You're why we can't get jack shit done in congress - people like you get time of day from congressmen and women and then when someone like me wants to talk the same conversation (except, you know, rationally), I get lumped in with crazies like you.
  - APoliteRequest 13y ago
    "You're why we can't get jack shit done in congress - people like you.." Well you turned rather insulting.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      You're uninterested in a dialog, so I'm uninterested in being nice.
ceol 13y ago
I really appreciate your reasonable argument, but if the past few weeks have been any indication, there isn't any room for that here. HN has gone from interesting tech discussions to extremist, us-vs-them political rhetoric, and anyone who takes a different stance is jumped on and downvoted — as you can tell from your post having more replies than the entire rest of the thread. Of course, you won't see the story about a federal judge ruling NYPD's stop-and-frisk was illegal[0], despite it being a much graver offense to individual rights, because it doesn't affect rich, white techies. But an email service you never used shut down and cited "NSA did it!" as its reason? Put that shit all over the front page! [0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-practice-violated-rights-judge-rules.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-pr...
- pessimizer 13y ago
  I am black and not rich, and I think that NSA/Lavabit stories are more relevant to HN than stop-and-frisk stories, because they are about techies and technology. Call me crazy.
  - drivingmenuts 13y ago
    For what it's worth, I agree from the perspective that HN is (I thought) primarily concerned with tech and innovation, etc. The stop-and-frisk program doesn't really have anything to do with technology and is a social issue about race and expectation. Technology can't even begin to fix that one - it comes from some other place inside us. It worries me that HN seems to be turning into more of a sub-reddit than anything.
  - ceol 13y ago
    HN has always had stories not directly related to tech and startups. NYC is a thriving city for entrepreneurs; it hosts 10gen (MongoDB developers), Tumblr, Etsy, AppNexus, Gilt, Makerbot, Kickstarter, and FourSquare. A major news story centering around government abuse for that city should be on the front page along with the random science articles and "look what I made in a weekend! (but really it took me two years)" posts, especially when the abuse is far more outrageous than the NSA scanning international mail. I'm just pointing out how polarized and hypocritical this community has become. You just have to mention the NSA[0] (and bring absolutely no new information to the discussion) and it hits the top 5, but post about how an abusive program was ruled unconstitutional? Don't care.[1] Realize that if this keeps up, HN will go from "industry and startup news" to "/r/politics-lite" as it drives away the people who are here to talk tech and tire of the NSA/Snowden rehashing. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197546 [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6200193 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6200193
w_t_payne 13y ago
True. The "Us-vs-Them" rhetoric directly feeds our pack-animal drive for tribalism, from which nothing good ever emerged. However, it does make for some amusing rabble-rousing. Now that the rabble has been roused, so to speak, we need to move the debate onto a more mature phase: 1. We need to work out how to live our lives in a state of total surveillance - when our lives are transparent not only to the NSA but also to innumerable other state & non-state security services. 2. We need to work out how to maintain the balance of power between the individual and the state. 3. We need to work out how to maintain business & personal relationships in an era of total transparency. 4. We need to work out how to maintain our freedom and independence of thought when the objects of our attention, our knowledge and our feelings can be observed and (potentially) controlled in detail.
- e3pi 13y ago
  >1. ... > 4. We need to work out how to maintain our freedom and independence of thought when the objects of our attention, our knowledge and our feelings can be observed and (potentially) controlled in detail. 5. We need to become familiar with what are the functions of the new Fort Meade agencies, having to be recently created to supplement the NSA. The NARUS moniker goes "See Clearly, Act Quickly". NSA's `Unbounded Awareness' et al, gets repeated discussion day after day, this is brought about by Snowden's leaks. The `Intelligence Made Actionable' side of the scale has not even been `tin-foiled' yet. It is believable McCain's poking Putin's eye is no idle threat, or even possibly Russia will be coerced into extraditing Snowden back to US by orchestrated `Action'. This new `Parallel Construction', Bruce's `NSA Creep' is all I've seen suggesting this `Act Quickly'. Who are these new unknown silent baddest alpha predators --without peer-- being fashioned to be released onto the unbounded wild, to take action, or manufacture outcomes whatever USG wants?
jmcmichael 13y ago
There are many lines that one could draw to divide this whole mess into two sides. Who's the 'us' and who's the 'them'? I can think of quite a few lines to divide up the power-centers and sociological groups, and the intelligence community/military-industrial complex is almost always on the wrong side. How about Congress vs. the Executive? The people in congress, our elected representatives, have been asking serious questions about these programs behind closed doors, and they have been lied to. They have been lied to by the representatives of the intelligence community (IC) in open court. Representatives of the IC continue to lie and dissemble on national TV, getting softball questions from sycophantic 'journalists'. How about the IC vs. the Internet community as represented by open standards bodies and the rest of the international internet? The IC has been involved in numerous plots to undermine the basic security of the Internet both by engineering military-class viruses and trojans (Stuxnet), and inserting their hardwired and software backdoors in critical infrastructure - all unilateral decisions done w/o consultation of any of the open governing bodies of the Internet. I could go on. These are critically important actions and concepts being debated here. The IC has given absolutely no indication that they are willing to compromise or work with the rest of the world, and almost every positive step towards openness has required civil disobedience. How is this not an 'us vs. them' battle on almost every front one could draw?
- diminoten 13y ago
  Because every group you've named has the same overarching goal - to keep people free and safe. Pretending like the intelligence community is some kind of evil monster is a great way to get ignored by the intelligence community, and for good reason.
  - jmcmichael 13y ago
    > Because every group you've named has the same overarching goal - to keep people free and safe. This statement sounds hopelessly naive to me. Sure, those groups say they work to keep people free and save, but their track record with those goals is tragically abysmal. In fact, there is mountainous and credible evidence that their activities are accomplishing the exact opposite of their stated goals (see the history of intelligence activities in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the rest of the Americas and familiarize yourself with the phenomenon of 'blowback'). Additionally, even if we take them at their words, their efforts at secrecy prevent us as citizens from any kind of meaningful oversight. > Pretending like the intelligence community is some kind of evil monster is a great way to get ignored by the intelligence community, and for good reason. Given that the intelligence community ignores the questions and objections of the very powerful - our Senators and Represenatives - how is anything I say going to effect who they ignore or pay attention to? Oh noes, they're going to ignore us even harder! What are we going to do?!?!
alan_cx 13y ago
Once you have information, you have control. We now have given them control, by behaving differently, because we now know they have our information. Its the same thing with implied political blackmail. Politicians know the NSA has all their data, so best not annoy the NSA.
natrius 13y ago
Congress and the NSA believe it is both constitutional and acceptable to collect and store any data they can get their hands on. They supposedly draw a fuzzy line to exclude most Americans when searching the stored data, but storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy. It just takes one bad actor with access to that information to control elections and entire lives. The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you.
- diminoten 13y ago
  > storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy Is it? > The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you. So I'm either wrong or unamerican? Right.
  - natrius 13y ago
    No need to interpret ill will here. I clearly think you're wrong. The conditional there was to highlight the values I aim to protect that you likely share.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      I was asking you to elaborate on why you think the storing of some of the communications of some Americans is a) blatantly unconstitutional and b) dangerous for our democracy. I'm also asking you why you think anyone who believes there are small changes we can make for the better is unamerican, or as you put it, "preserving privacy and democracy matters to you"?
      - natrius 13y ago
        A plain reading of the Fourth Amendment clearly prohibits this sort of mass surveillance. Constitutional arguments tend to degenerate into semantic ones, so let's ignore that argument for now. The threat to privacy and democracy is that anyone with access to this data can blackmail anyone. The NSA is storing as much data as possible for as long as possible. This means they have the communications (metadata or otherwise) of every potential politician, and thus the ability to blackmail them to distort their decisions. We're told that there are safeguards in place to prevent such abuse, but those safeguards are secret, and I can't imagine any safeguards being foolproof. The best safeguard to protect our democracy is to not allow such a system to be built.
marssaxman 13y ago
> The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (Bruce), on our side. Like hell it is. The NSA is part of the US Government, which is on its own side, and is only on "our side" to the degree that it depends on us for tax revenue and political legitimacy.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  And that's if you're from the USA. If you are not then the NSA isn't on your side, period.
- diminoten 13y ago
  The US government is on the same side as the US citizenry. I realize how unpopular that statement is on this website, but it's demonstrably true in hundreds of thousands, millions, of examples.
dictum 13y ago
>us vs. them bullshit Surely not an appropriate point to raise when defending an agency whose raison d'etre is to acquire and analyze all foreign communications. Its existence comes from a us vs. them mentality. What's happening is that for the USG, "them" now includes not only foreigner suspects; it includes all foreigners and many Americans—probably all Americans. I don't expect the intelligence agencies of a dictatorship to explain to me, as a non-citizen, how they're "on my side". I wish I could have better expectations for a non-dictatorship, the US: I wish, as foreigner, I wasn't assumed to be an enemy. So no, the NSA is not on my side, and it's probably not on most Americans' side. Also, things change, and all they're collecting will be using against you when they decide to no longer be on your side.
- diminoten 13y ago
  Okay so you're not in a dictatorship, and the NSA isn't "out to get" you. If you're a US citizen, then the NSA is trying, at least, to prevent you from being harmed by foreign threats by gathering data on those threats and alerting other US government agencies. That's what they do. As long as the US exists, someone will have to do this. If you're not a US citizen, then the NSA will take a look at you. Period. That's what they do, and your government will be taking a look at me in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons. Neither of our respective intel groups are assuming either of us are enemies, but that doesn't mean these intelligence groups aren't going to look at us. Being investigated does not mean you're an enemy. You're not a "them" just because someone looks at you, I don't know why people think this is how it is. So no, if you're not a US citizen, the NSA is no more on your side than the British NHS will pay for my appendix removal.
  - dictum 13y ago
    As far as I'm aware, the country of which I am a citizen does not take an adversarial approach to other countries. If I learned that it's spying on people of other countries, I'd be just as concerned as I am about the NSA/the USG. None of that changes the fact that the NSA and the USG have a us vs. them mentality and it's only natural that Americans look at their government with a corresponding us vs. them view. I can understand the USG watching a tourist, since they might commit a crime on US soil. But I'm a not a tourist. I'm not on American soil. My data is flowing through servers in the US, American-developed routers and American-developed OSes only because of the historical accident that the US loved globalization so much that its corporations now dominate the world and made the technical standards the whole world depends on. If I could limit my exposure to the USG, I would. I want nothing from them, just as I don't expect an appendix removal from the NHS. The line drawn between foreigners and American citizens stands on very thin ground. It's fraying. Think about it: who are the people with the greatest power to commit a terrorist act, the people who are already inside the US or the people who are outside? Americans will be spied on. The NSA merely collects all data, and the magic of parallel construction will distribute it to the FBI or your friendly corrupt local authority.

pdonis 13y ago

the NSA does not have control. How do you know? The Internet backbone was developed using US government funding. How do you know that the US government did not put backdoors there? It did in the case of the long-distance telephone network. We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy) I agree that this could be done in theory; I'm not sure it can be done in practice.

diminoten 13y ago
I don't know in the epistemological sense, but there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true.
- Sauer_Kraut 13y ago
  Aside from the details that show the NSA having employees in companies install monitoring hardware worldwide? Or those that assist in providing data in return for some themselves? None of that counts to you because "there's just no reason to believe such a thing." You are essentially saying you don't believe anything you may have read in the past few years counts as control. What IS control then, other than the ability to control others, which the US/NSA has attempting to keep on top of since the shift in data traffic trends in the 1990s.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    Did you just ask "What is control, other than the ability to control others"? Do you honestly not recognize the shell-game you're playing with that question? You're responding to all of the things I said with tricks and games. You don't want to talk facts, so I don't want to talk with you. I'm done, unless you want to stop drawing conclusions and start painting a real picture.
    - APoliteRequest 13y ago
      Could you acknowledge how having control is indeed having control? These installations didn't just trip and fall into place.
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  There is also no reason to believe it's not true, no?
  - diminoten 13y ago
    Correct. Just like there is also no reason not to believe in ghosts or magic or bigfoot or unicorns.
- pdonis 13y ago
  there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true No reason to believe what to be true? The US government's placing of backdoors in the long-distance telephone network is historical fact. That historical fact is a reason to believe that what the US government has done once, it could do again. It may not be a reason you want to accept, but it's still a reason.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    The NSA can't stop you from visiting Hacker News. That's what control means, the ability to alter your behavior or the course of events. The NSA does not have the ability to do this. So no, this is not historical fact.
    - pdonis 13y ago
      That's what control means, the ability to alter your behavior or the course of events. When it became public knowledge that the US government had backdoors in the long distance telephone network, that did alter people's behavior and the course of events. Similarly, the public knowledge that the NSA is spying on the Internet is altering people's behavior and the course of events. I agree the NSA can't stop people from visiting HN, but they can certainly change the incentives faced by people using the Internet. Perhaps this doesn't meet your definition of the word "control", but you still seem to find it significant. this is not historical fact What isn't? Are you saying that you don't believe the US government put backdoors into the long distance telephone network? Or that you don't believe the NSA is spying on the Internet? Or are you just saying you don't care, because you can still visit HN? That doesn't change the historical fact; it just means you don't care about that particular historical fact.
      - diminoten 13y ago
        Wrong kind of alter. You're talking about practical changes, but in no way was anyone forced to change their behavior. In this instance, 'alter' would be something the NSA did which literally changed an outcome. As in, block access to Hacker News, or redirect gmail.com to gmail.nsa.gov. The NSA does not have this power, nor has the US government ever done this. So again no, it is not historical fact.

Spearchucker 13y ago

Maybe the adversarial approach is needed to make the point. His post is a communication to an audience that, I suspect, will be more likely to respond if words are chosen with that audience in mind.

jacquesm 13y ago

> The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (Bruce), on our side. Define 'our side' please. I'm not convinced of that. And if you take the temporal element into account you might very well find that the NSA is even against 'your side' in the longer term. Information gathered indiscriminately has a tendency to concentrate on the bad parts. If I vacuum up all your communications over the last 20 years or so and pick out the bad bits while deleting the good bits you'll look like a pretty bad person no matter how saintly you are in real life. A disputed quote (but generally attributed to Richelieu and quite applicable): "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The potential of abuse of this data is simply too large, no matter what the potential benefits and whether or not the NSA is on 'our side'.

reader5000 13y ago
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him...and then nobody will because everybody understands this basic principle."
diminoten 13y ago
The potential of abuse for guns is pretty damn large, but some would argue that the US was founded on the idea of gun ownership. There's a lot of speculation about what could happen, but if we look only at what has happened, people aren't being snatched up off the streets because of the NSA's monitoring programs. The language of the above article seems too adversarial to be effective at getting anything done. If we continue to take this "death to the NSA" stance, we're not going to get anything that we want because, like it or not, the NSA, or someone else doing the same things, is going to have to exist on some level for the remainder of the US's existence as a representative democracy. We need to be talking scope and extent, not existence/abolishment, and this article is a little too polemic to be helpful.
- apalmer 13y ago
  'There's a lot of speculation about what could happen, but if we look only at what has happened, people aren't being snatched up off the streets because of the NSA's monitoring programs.' How can you possibly know this? In fact I would argue as much as we 'know' anything at all related to the NSA program we know that it has lead to interventions. The NSA claims this surveillance has been instrumental to stopping 'dozens' of terrorist plots, which would mean by definition people ARE being snatched off the streets because of the NSA monitoring programs.

TallGuyShort 13y ago

>> We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy) Until the definition of a "terrorist" grows to include people who engage in activities previously considered harmless and private.

diminoten 13y ago
So we're ready to convict the government of thought-crimes? Just because they can, doesn't mean they will. Gun owners could all go out and harm innocent people, but they generally don't, do they? At least we don't convict them before they do.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  Gun owners typically shouldn't get to decide who is innocent and who is not. They're not judge, jury and executioner. So whenever they do hurt someone it's a case for an actual judge to figure out what happened and if we class it as self defence or not. Gun owners harm innocent people more often than not.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    Does the US government prosecute people for potential murder, simply because they have the means to commit this murder?
- TallGuyShort 13y ago
  Whoa, slow down there - where do I mention convicting the government of thought-crimes? My point is that granting the federal government powers (because, under the constitution, they have no power that isn't explicitly granted to them) under the umbrella of counter-terrorism initiatives is inevitably going to expand in scope and usage, and will still be labelled as "counter-terrorism".
  - diminoten 13y ago
    Where do you mention convicting the government of thought-crimes? In the very next sentence! You are not capable of predicting the future, you don't know what is going to happen if we grant the federal government additional powers.

apalmer 13y ago

This is overly ideological. Agreed that the NSA probably doesn't control the Internet, however the argument that the government does or doesn't control the Internet cannot be assumed either way at this point. We do know the government has desired/requested control of the internet before, the kill switch initiative is well documented. Whether this has actually panned out for the Gov in any concrete way we do not know, and if it did pan out it would probably be classified. As for 'the little people' being the good guys, that's kind of fundamentally what a democracy implies. Now whether the paranoid HN types really represents the people, or the soccer mom who would scream bloody murder if their family was injured because a terrorist plot went off that 'could' have been stopped with widespread snooping without warrants really represents the people is an entirely different question.

jivatmanx 13y ago

Keith Alexander believes that terrorists live amongst us, trying to implement Sharia and create a Caliphate. To fight this, he needs to "Collect it all". It's just as important to understand his motivation as it is to understand ours, and assess the reasonableness of each in comparison to the other, comparing our current situation to others in history that were similar, and the result they had.

saraid216 13y ago
Alexander actually sounds like J. Edgar Hoover in that regard, which is pretty disturbing.
diminoten 13y ago
Firstly, does he seriously believe that, or are you just demonizing him because it'll get you agreement? If he said something to that effect, that's concerning, but if he hasn't, can we stick to things which have actually happened? And secondly, is not the motivation to stop terrorists in the US from harming US citizens a noble goal, in theory? Now granted, we shouldn't have to sacrifice our privacy to get that done, but it's not like Keith Alexander is trying to harm the US. He wants to help, and depending on who you ask, may be misguided, on the money, or completely wrong in how he plans to help. It'd be more useful to correct than to abolish, because abolishment of the NSA and it's surveillance programs is never, ever going to happen, nor should it. ZERO surveillance (this might be arguable, I suppose) results in US citizens dead on US soil. Unacceptable.
- apalmer 13y ago
  Very few movers and shakers in the history of the world are intrinsically 'evil' in their own judgement. Whether Alexander is purposefully trying to harm the US or not is immaterial. Agree with you on the charicterization going on here, its one thing to feel his motivations are a given way, another to imply he has public made statements indicating this to be fact.
  - diminoten 13y ago

saraid216 13y ago

> That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. I agree. I've actually been having trouble deciding whether or not this us vs them mentality has been deliberately cultivated by people who don't want things to get better or not. It would not surprise me to be told that there's an NSA program intended to do that; after all, the FBI sent in undercover cops to suspected terrorist groups who ended up being overzealous, so it's not like such false flagging is unknown.

ledge 13y ago

Well they certainly aren't on my side, and I don't want to be on their side. They aggregate and analyze data used to conduct drone strikes, spy on the world indiscriminately, and assist brutal agencies like the DEA in destroying the lives of millions of innocent Americans. Is it a paranoid delusion if you're a drug dealer to think that the NSA is out to get you? Not anymore. What about a drug user? What about a file-sharer? A child porn viewer? You might not be any of these things, but a huge portion of the American citizenry is, and I'd argue they're not doing anything wrong. Sorry but I'm not going to just take it on faith that the NSA is on 'our side'.

diminoten 13y ago
You'd argue that a child porn viewer isn't doing anything wrong? Your opinion officially doesn't matter any more. Sorry, I have a 10 yr old sister and I simply can't abide folks who won't even do the research to understand what it means when they say things.
- ledge 13y ago
  Yes I said that without doing any research on the subject ever. And yes one opinion of mine invalidates every other opinion I have, how true. You win, good arguments. Edit: For a more serious reply, there is evidence that countries that have decriminalized viewing child pornography (not production) have seen decreased rates of child sex abuse. Also, the definition of child pornography is so broad that we have a lot of people rotting in jail for looking at a naked picture that a 14 year old took of themselves in the mirror. Once in jail, these people become targets for violence and ironically sexual abuse. The topic is not black and white, and when you try to shut down conversation the way you did, it's not helping anyone, children included.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    Are you seriously trying to defend child pornography?
    - 13y ago

Sauer_Kraut 13y ago

"No one has "control" over the Internet." Aside from the people who control the hardware, and the NSA/others seem to have control over those people, getting them to install monitoring hardware. "I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric" I am able to be prosecuted for creating "hacking tools" while Endgame Systems has the NSA pay them a million+ a year to access data from those "hacking tools." 'There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million.[1]' In this environment of immunity granted to profiteers while my friends and I are prosecuted, it is "us vs. them." Stop attempting to blow out meaningless opinions like "The NSA is on our side" in response to articles showing the opposite. [1] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems

diminoten 13y ago
wiki.echelon2.org, huh? The US military uses weapons citizens are not allowed to own or create on a regular basis. Is Lockheed Martin or Boeing not on our side because they make fighter jets that only the US government can buy? It's only "us vs. them" in your head. You're why we can't get jack shit done in congress - people like you get time of day from congressmen and women and then when someone like me wants to talk the same conversation (except, you know, rationally), I get lumped in with crazies like you.
- APoliteRequest 13y ago
  "You're why we can't get jack shit done in congress - people like you.." Well you turned rather insulting.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    You're uninterested in a dialog, so I'm uninterested in being nice.

ceol 13y ago

I really appreciate your reasonable argument, but if the past few weeks have been any indication, there isn't any room for that here. HN has gone from interesting tech discussions to extremist, us-vs-them political rhetoric, and anyone who takes a different stance is jumped on and downvoted — as you can tell from your post having more replies than the entire rest of the thread. Of course, you won't see the story about a federal judge ruling NYPD's stop-and-frisk was illegal[0], despite it being a much graver offense to individual rights, because it doesn't affect rich, white techies. But an email service you never used shut down and cited "NSA did it!" as its reason? Put that shit all over the front page! [0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-practice-violated-rights-judge-rules.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-pr...

pessimizer 13y ago
I am black and not rich, and I think that NSA/Lavabit stories are more relevant to HN than stop-and-frisk stories, because they are about techies and technology. Call me crazy.
- drivingmenuts 13y ago
  For what it's worth, I agree from the perspective that HN is (I thought) primarily concerned with tech and innovation, etc. The stop-and-frisk program doesn't really have anything to do with technology and is a social issue about race and expectation. Technology can't even begin to fix that one - it comes from some other place inside us. It worries me that HN seems to be turning into more of a sub-reddit than anything.
- ceol 13y ago
  HN has always had stories not directly related to tech and startups. NYC is a thriving city for entrepreneurs; it hosts 10gen (MongoDB developers), Tumblr, Etsy, AppNexus, Gilt, Makerbot, Kickstarter, and FourSquare. A major news story centering around government abuse for that city should be on the front page along with the random science articles and "look what I made in a weekend! (but really it took me two years)" posts, especially when the abuse is far more outrageous than the NSA scanning international mail. I'm just pointing out how polarized and hypocritical this community has become. You just have to mention the NSA[0] (and bring absolutely no new information to the discussion) and it hits the top 5, but post about how an abusive program was ruled unconstitutional? Don't care.[1] Realize that if this keeps up, HN will go from "industry and startup news" to "/r/politics-lite" as it drives away the people who are here to talk tech and tire of the NSA/Snowden rehashing. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197546 [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6200193 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6200193

w_t_payne 13y ago

True. The "Us-vs-Them" rhetoric directly feeds our pack-animal drive for tribalism, from which nothing good ever emerged. However, it does make for some amusing rabble-rousing. Now that the rabble has been roused, so to speak, we need to move the debate onto a more mature phase: 1. We need to work out how to live our lives in a state of total surveillance - when our lives are transparent not only to the NSA but also to innumerable other state & non-state security services. 2. We need to work out how to maintain the balance of power between the individual and the state. 3. We need to work out how to maintain business & personal relationships in an era of total transparency. 4. We need to work out how to maintain our freedom and independence of thought when the objects of our attention, our knowledge and our feelings can be observed and (potentially) controlled in detail.

e3pi 13y ago
>1. ... > 4. We need to work out how to maintain our freedom and independence of thought when the objects of our attention, our knowledge and our feelings can be observed and (potentially) controlled in detail. 5. We need to become familiar with what are the functions of the new Fort Meade agencies, having to be recently created to supplement the NSA. The NARUS moniker goes "See Clearly, Act Quickly". NSA's `Unbounded Awareness' et al, gets repeated discussion day after day, this is brought about by Snowden's leaks. The `Intelligence Made Actionable' side of the scale has not even been `tin-foiled' yet. It is believable McCain's poking Putin's eye is no idle threat, or even possibly Russia will be coerced into extraditing Snowden back to US by orchestrated `Action'. This new `Parallel Construction', Bruce's `NSA Creep' is all I've seen suggesting this `Act Quickly'. Who are these new unknown silent baddest alpha predators --without peer-- being fashioned to be released onto the unbounded wild, to take action, or manufacture outcomes whatever USG wants?

jmcmichael 13y ago

There are many lines that one could draw to divide this whole mess into two sides. Who's the 'us' and who's the 'them'? I can think of quite a few lines to divide up the power-centers and sociological groups, and the intelligence community/military-industrial complex is almost always on the wrong side. How about Congress vs. the Executive? The people in congress, our elected representatives, have been asking serious questions about these programs behind closed doors, and they have been lied to. They have been lied to by the representatives of the intelligence community (IC) in open court. Representatives of the IC continue to lie and dissemble on national TV, getting softball questions from sycophantic 'journalists'. How about the IC vs. the Internet community as represented by open standards bodies and the rest of the international internet? The IC has been involved in numerous plots to undermine the basic security of the Internet both by engineering military-class viruses and trojans (Stuxnet), and inserting their hardwired and software backdoors in critical infrastructure - all unilateral decisions done w/o consultation of any of the open governing bodies of the Internet. I could go on. These are critically important actions and concepts being debated here. The IC has given absolutely no indication that they are willing to compromise or work with the rest of the world, and almost every positive step towards openness has required civil disobedience. How is this not an 'us vs. them' battle on almost every front one could draw?

diminoten 13y ago
Because every group you've named has the same overarching goal - to keep people free and safe. Pretending like the intelligence community is some kind of evil monster is a great way to get ignored by the intelligence community, and for good reason.
- jmcmichael 13y ago
  > Because every group you've named has the same overarching goal - to keep people free and safe. This statement sounds hopelessly naive to me. Sure, those groups say they work to keep people free and save, but their track record with those goals is tragically abysmal. In fact, there is mountainous and credible evidence that their activities are accomplishing the exact opposite of their stated goals (see the history of intelligence activities in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the rest of the Americas and familiarize yourself with the phenomenon of 'blowback'). Additionally, even if we take them at their words, their efforts at secrecy prevent us as citizens from any kind of meaningful oversight. > Pretending like the intelligence community is some kind of evil monster is a great way to get ignored by the intelligence community, and for good reason. Given that the intelligence community ignores the questions and objections of the very powerful - our Senators and Represenatives - how is anything I say going to effect who they ignore or pay attention to? Oh noes, they're going to ignore us even harder! What are we going to do?!?!

alan_cx 13y ago

Once you have information, you have control. We now have given them control, by behaving differently, because we now know they have our information. Its the same thing with implied political blackmail. Politicians know the NSA has all their data, so best not annoy the NSA.

natrius 13y ago

Congress and the NSA believe it is both constitutional and acceptable to collect and store any data they can get their hands on. They supposedly draw a fuzzy line to exclude most Americans when searching the stored data, but storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy. It just takes one bad actor with access to that information to control elections and entire lives. The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you.

diminoten 13y ago
> storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy Is it? > The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you. So I'm either wrong or unamerican? Right.
- natrius 13y ago
  No need to interpret ill will here. I clearly think you're wrong. The conditional there was to highlight the values I aim to protect that you likely share.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    I was asking you to elaborate on why you think the storing of some of the communications of some Americans is a) blatantly unconstitutional and b) dangerous for our democracy. I'm also asking you why you think anyone who believes there are small changes we can make for the better is unamerican, or as you put it, "preserving privacy and democracy matters to you"?
    - natrius 13y ago
      A plain reading of the Fourth Amendment clearly prohibits this sort of mass surveillance. Constitutional arguments tend to degenerate into semantic ones, so let's ignore that argument for now. The threat to privacy and democracy is that anyone with access to this data can blackmail anyone. The NSA is storing as much data as possible for as long as possible. This means they have the communications (metadata or otherwise) of every potential politician, and thus the ability to blackmail them to distort their decisions. We're told that there are safeguards in place to prevent such abuse, but those safeguards are secret, and I can't imagine any safeguards being foolproof. The best safeguard to protect our democracy is to not allow such a system to be built.

marssaxman 13y ago

> The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (Bruce), on our side. Like hell it is. The NSA is part of the US Government, which is on its own side, and is only on "our side" to the degree that it depends on us for tax revenue and political legitimacy.

jacquesm 13y ago
And that's if you're from the USA. If you are not then the NSA isn't on your side, period.
diminoten 13y ago
The US government is on the same side as the US citizenry. I realize how unpopular that statement is on this website, but it's demonstrably true in hundreds of thousands, millions, of examples.

dictum 13y ago

>us vs. them bullshit Surely not an appropriate point to raise when defending an agency whose raison d'etre is to acquire and analyze all foreign communications. Its existence comes from a us vs. them mentality. What's happening is that for the USG, "them" now includes not only foreigner suspects; it includes all foreigners and many Americans—probably all Americans. I don't expect the intelligence agencies of a dictatorship to explain to me, as a non-citizen, how they're "on my side". I wish I could have better expectations for a non-dictatorship, the US: I wish, as foreigner, I wasn't assumed to be an enemy. So no, the NSA is not on my side, and it's probably not on most Americans' side. Also, things change, and all they're collecting will be using against you when they decide to no longer be on your side.

diminoten 13y ago
Okay so you're not in a dictatorship, and the NSA isn't "out to get" you. If you're a US citizen, then the NSA is trying, at least, to prevent you from being harmed by foreign threats by gathering data on those threats and alerting other US government agencies. That's what they do. As long as the US exists, someone will have to do this. If you're not a US citizen, then the NSA will take a look at you. Period. That's what they do, and your government will be taking a look at me in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons. Neither of our respective intel groups are assuming either of us are enemies, but that doesn't mean these intelligence groups aren't going to look at us. Being investigated does not mean you're an enemy. You're not a "them" just because someone looks at you, I don't know why people think this is how it is. So no, if you're not a US citizen, the NSA is no more on your side than the British NHS will pay for my appendix removal.
- dictum 13y ago
  As far as I'm aware, the country of which I am a citizen does not take an adversarial approach to other countries. If I learned that it's spying on people of other countries, I'd be just as concerned as I am about the NSA/the USG. None of that changes the fact that the NSA and the USG have a us vs. them mentality and it's only natural that Americans look at their government with a corresponding us vs. them view. I can understand the USG watching a tourist, since they might commit a crime on US soil. But I'm a not a tourist. I'm not on American soil. My data is flowing through servers in the US, American-developed routers and American-developed OSes only because of the historical accident that the US loved globalization so much that its corporations now dominate the world and made the technical standards the whole world depends on. If I could limit my exposure to the USG, I would. I want nothing from them, just as I don't expect an appendix removal from the NHS. The line drawn between foreigners and American citizens stands on very thin ground. It's fraying. Think about it: who are the people with the greatest power to commit a terrorist act, the people who are already inside the US or the people who are outside? Americans will be spied on. The NSA merely collects all data, and the magic of parallel construction will distribute it to the FBI or your friendly corrupt local authority.