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It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it?

443 points by _pius 13y ago

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sandstrom 13y ago
One thing I find interesting is that it's somehow okay as long as it's directed at 'the foreigners'. Who are these foreigners? Is it Sergey Brin or Larry Page, before they moved to the US? Elon Musk? Peter Thiel? Many Americans need not look further than their grandparents to see a 'foreigner' (and, excluding a few natives, the entire nation has been built by foreigners). Would it not makes sense to show the same courtesy for peoples privacy to people who weren't necessarily born here.
- JimboOmega 13y ago
  It's not okay; it's still morally questionable at best. But it is infinitely more legal. The government has all sorts of restrictions on what it can do (e.g., the 4th amendment), that apply to citizens, but not foreign nationals. If they are not even bothering to respect the distinction, it's the case that they violate both the spirit and the letter of the law without a care; it's a much more dangerous position of disrespect for regulation.
  - npsimons 13y ago
    The government has all sorts of restrictions on what it can do (e.g., the 4th amendment), that apply to citizens, but not foreign nationals. Are you sure about that? IANAL, and I've not kept up with more recent laws, but the forth doesn't say anything about "citizens", it says "people".
    - ilyanep 13y ago
      It says "the people"
    - coffeemug 13y ago
      The distinction comes from the SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution, not the constitution itself. They've been quite consistent in limiting the constitutional rights to American citizens/soil/etc.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      "The People" is commonly interpreted to mean the citizens, i.e.: We the People of the United States There is no way to interpret "people" in that line as including Saudis and Chinese.
  - Zimahl 13y ago
    But it is infinitely more legal. Infinitely. And I don't get the outrage that foreigners have that the American people aren't outraged that we are spying on foreigners. That's what spies do - for both sides. The electronic monitoring of foreign communications is the charter of the NSA. By the way, China is quite silent on all of this because they are hacking the shit out of the US trying to steal everything from political to military to commercial secrets. The outrage about the NSA is domestic spying. Intercepting communications of Americans outside of the US is a gray area but doing it to Americans on US soil is completely against the NSAs charter, tramples due process, and takes a dump on the Constitution. Anyone who said that was ok needs to be thrown into prison.
    - grey-area 13y ago
      Infinitely. And I don't get the outrage that foreigners have that the American people aren't outraged that we are spying on foreigners. That's what spies do - for both sides. Well, for many people, the spies have gone too far (and apparently you think they have domestically). To my mind what you are defending here is the building of a tyrannical superstate the likes of which the world has never seen, with absolutely no restrictions on spying because 'spies will be spies', and spying easily crosses boundaries. To apply that rule domestically and then give free reign when turned on others is the height of hypocrisy, and will gain you nothing anyway, because the NSA interprets anything involving foreigners or crossing a border as within their remit, and of course your laws have no meaning for fellow 5-eyes states in your view, so all your data is fair game to them, and they'll just have to share it with the NSA. If you don't like that and you think others should be spied on in the same way, frankly, why should we care? If you accept restrictions on spying and gov. intrusion, they should apply equally to all people, at least that's what the founders of the US thought: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. They were responding to an unreasonable, tyrannical state which wanted far too much control of their lives, but now we have come full circle and the US, with UK connivance, is behaving in exactly the same way toward its vassal states and their citizens (in fact toward the entire world), and yet we still hear that as long as it is done to foreigners, it's ok, because everyone does this sort of thing. Well no, everyone doesn't, and because some governments do doesn't make it ok with the people concerned, just as its not ok with you. This spying should be cut back right to the essential purpose, which is protecting the nation from attack, not economic espionage, political espionage, or dragnet surveillance of any kind - that is just far too dangerous in my view. The electronic monitoring of foreign communications is the charter of the NSA. By the way, China is quite silent on all of this because they are hacking the shit out of the US trying to steal everything from political to military to commercial secrets. Great to hear that compared to the totalitarian regime in China, the US is not quite as evil, that's quite an achievement.
- blah314 13y ago
  As a "foreigner", I don't really have a problem with that. Covertly gaining advantage for their own team is what spies are supposed to do. The rest of the world needs to encrypt and, where possible, route around the damaged areas.
- ilyanep 13y ago
  Not to speak toward the validity of your comment, more to nitpick, but Larry Page was born in Michigan, so there was no "moving to the US" :)
- ENGNR 13y ago
  As the article said, the USA turned away Huawei because they were too closely tied to the Chinese Government. The rest of the world could eventually do the same to Silicon Valley for the same reasons. It's actually really short sighted, because by costing US companies the rest of the world as customers or forcing the rise of zero-knowledge companies, they're losing the ability to subpoena information on credible threats and actual criminals.
- IvyMike 13y ago
  > Larry Page, before [he] moved to the US Michigan is admittedly weird but it's not technically another country.
- aragot 13y ago
  Je plussoie. As I read the HN pres about NSA, it sounds as if the rest of the world has no human rights at all. Apple, Google and Microsoft are international, and I'm appalled Europe doesn't find a way to constraint them to respect EU citizen privacy in an equal manner, to which I have the following answer: Should EU pass laws to forbid the use of american services? That's the only consistent way to protect our constitutional rights. The same happens for social rights when moving countries: When moving, say from France to Australia, you temporarily or permanently lose your social cover: unemployment, health, retirement, unless you pay 2 systems at a time. Today's civilization is international and we ought to protect "mobile citizen" under an equality banner.
JimboOmega 13y ago
"Now, Silicon Valley needs to join them." - because we otherwise approve of the snooping, but for this latest outrage? I'm honestly wondering - what's the other side of this? Who's defending and explaining this? I have not seen an article that "takes the other side" in some time, and that might be a result of the echo chamber that is the bay area... Or it might be the result of an "intelligence community" that really IS in its own world; intentionally blocked from any outside observation and judgment, taking actions that, honestly, really don't have many if any supporters.
- devx 13y ago
  With people like the POTUS, the Chief of the Intelligence Committee, and half of Congress backing them, not to mention most of the military industrial complex, who needs "supporters"?
  - JimboOmega 13y ago
    Well, right - so long as both the democrat party line and the republican party line are the same on the issue, there's really nothing to be done about it. My point is, though, that the question the article is posing - that it's time for us to ask: "Is it worth it?" has already been asked and answered with a resounding no! Even without the privacy breaches, the financial cost alone isn't justified. But the privacy breaches are huge and problematic too.
- selmnoo 13y ago
  In a way, we (or at least, the decision-makers in the valley at least) do approve of the snooping. Google did something very drastic when it was found out that the Chinese were looking into people's e-mails: they pulled out from China. They were lauded for this move: we all said it was courageous for a company to do this, it was morally correct, and so on we went with praise. But what are they going to do now with the knowledge from recent revelations? Pulling out would mean an end to the money coming in. Are they going to do that? Are they truly going to do something drastic, something substantial? I'm of the opinion that nothing will basically change. Having talked with many tech CEOs I've learned that the people making the decisions just don't care about this (and those that do, care about it less than they care about making money). What's more -- a lot openly declare this is needed for a functioning society -- John Doerr was on the verge of saying this in the Arrington interview. I might sound jaded and defeated when I say this, but I think this is really it. I don't think our future will have considerably less snooping going on, this will go on, little will change.
kghose 13y ago
I don't know. If some one charged me with gathering intel I would be drawing up all sorts of battle plans, including weakness analyses like these. Hell, I would even try them out in the field. I would consider this my JOB.
- marvin 13y ago
  The relevant questions here would be _who_ tasked you to do this and _why_. Working on technology to be used for indiscriminate surveilance is simply outside of my ethics. I would resign rather than do this job. Obviously not everyone agrees, but there are plenty of tech people who have a strong moral compass which prevents them from doing this kind of work.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    What if your task was to find weaknesses in operating systems? You join the organisation, and are told that "the enemy" is using a particular OS, and it is your job to get as many exploits for that OS as possible. Those exploits are passed along to someone else to actually deploy. So far, you have no idea that your organisation is spying on citizens of its own country.
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pvnick 13y ago
I read the article and at the end muttered "abso-fucking-lutely"
ForHackernews 13y ago
I had trouble taking this article seriously because it kept referring to David Foster Wallace as "Foster Wallace". His last name is just Wallace. It's not a compound, hyphenated last name or anything strange like that.
usefulcat 13y ago
potential_for_abuse = power / accountability
denzil_correa 13y ago
>American tech companies, in other words, are now the Huaweis of everywhere else. This can only stop IF the companies proactively make an attempt to get out of bed from the organizations which hold a gun over their head. Currently, the companies want to "spy" (for marketing, advertisements etc.) on their customers as much as governments.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Given the existence and current legality of NSLs and other tools, they likely cannot get out of bed without a legal repudiation of the third-party doctrine. Until then, they can be compelled to stay in bed whether they want to or not.
  - McPants 13y ago
    Could the companies that are under threat of legal action work together and risk the threat all at once? What I am saying is that if one company such as Google was to breach their gag order from the government regarding these things then they would be in a pretty bad situation which could result in a major loss of money to the company. However a lot of these tech companies are American and for them to all breach the gag order at once would have a large impact on the already struggling economy. Could they not use this potential economic disaster as a get out of jail token? I mean it's kinda what the banks did with the too big to fail stuff. Putting a lot of companies in jeopardy at once could force the government to not act on prosecuting them. I could also be talking out of my butt.
sharkweek 13y ago
I have an honest and serious question -- who are the developers and designers who put these systems into place for the NSA? Are they aware of what they're doing or is it all classified and contracted out? Are they proud of their work? Is it just a paycheck? Surely someone with such a high aptitude could easily get a job elsewhere -- I guess I'm just unable to make the connection on who willingly builds this kind of stuff. I'm not trying to be intentionally obtuse, I just legitimately am curious
- anthonycerra 13y ago
  I think it's similar to people in the military who are given a gun and told to shoot someone they've never met. There are many people who believe what they're doing is for the good of their country and trust the people giving the orders.
- wellboy 13y ago
  If you tell a graduate engineer about the great mathematical problems there are to solve and that solving them will protect the American people, it's quite easy to get a strong workforce behind you. And if they were just engineering small parts it was probably hard to see the whole picture, even more so to judge if it's right or wrong. However, this big PR outrage will probably have them come to their senses and crumble down the NSA workforce. Checks and balances.
  - sharkweek 13y ago
    Yeah I suppose I buy into the micro/macro argument -- "Oh, I'm just working on this awesome data crawling problem that our country will use to stop bad people from entering the country" x 1000s of employees, and then you get a few dedicated folks at the top who put it all together, it gets pretty easy to see how that could result in the types of programs we're seeing
    - wellboy 13y ago
      Yup
    - deleted 13y ago
notahacker 13y ago
I'm a bit confused by the whole "liberty needs a lobbyist" argument. Lobbying for what exactly? Intelligence agencies to pretend to stop spying on you? I think that's as much as you can reasonably hope for lobbying to achieve. The wider implications are earlier in the article. Wearable recording devices and biometric security devices shared in the cloud? Probably better to assume the government will compromise them if it wants to, and might well do anyway, just in case, with or without the blessing of Silicon Valley. That's something to take into account when deciding if you actually want them. It's not an entirely new phenomenon though; the same was true of brick-sized mobile phones a couple of decades back.[1] Your chances of having your life seriously affected by PRISM may or may not be higher than your chances of having your life seriously affected by terrorism [2] but it's a stone cold certainty that public criticism isn't putting the spooks to bed. Intelligence agencies have never really depended on being in tune with public sentiment or in line with the law. [1]There's a well-publicised trial going on at the moment in the UK over "phone hacking" in the 1990s, where the organizations snooping on people's voicemails were newspapers. In a beautifully ironic touch, one of the major revelations of the trial so far is that two of the media moguls in question were having an affair. They were incriminated by a Word document; a love letter that may never even have been sent, and certainly wouldn't have come to light if they hadn't had to hand over their computers to prosecutors. [2]both are higher than the article's "1 in 20 million", but not high enough to be likely if you're not a major public figure
- XorNot 13y ago
  I'm constantly amazed that its like everyone has suddenly forgotten that during Occupy Wall St, protests before and since, and the entire Arab Spring revolution, it was portable and mobile recording devices widely dispersed amongst the populace that enabled successful revolution against government and evidence and checks of the abuses of power of police and other authorities.
  - penguindev 13y ago
    OWS was successful at something? What would that be...
einehexe 13y ago
The elephant it the room that everyone is wants to ignore is that Google's data was intercepted by the British. It is quite interesting how that is conveniently overlooked to push a certain narrative.
- prawn 13y ago
  I think at some level (e.g., international power and security to maintain that), US/UK/CA/AU/NZ are the same thing.
- rodgerd 13y ago
  If you aren't aware of the Five Eyes and Echelon arrangements, you don't have an opinion worth airing.
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south11235 13y ago
Maybe it is time to start considering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance
mingmecca 13y ago
To answer the question in the title: I'd rather be dead than live my life in a fishbowl and watched most of the time. I'd rather live with the reality of a dangerous world instead of suspecting that some CPU or agent is analyzing my calls & emails. To the defenders of the NSA, this sentiment is abhorrent, I'm sure.
- johnpowell 13y ago
  Do you still use Google? Or any of the companies mentioned in the PRISM leaks?
kbar13 13y ago
can someone explain what the big deal is with the smiley face?
freshhawk 13y ago
I find it strange that the assumption is made that "Silicon Valley" is clearly going to be on the side of the general public in this. Why? Isn't the smart money going to side with the real power? If those well connected enough to attempt to predict things see the odds of the US rolling back the surveillance state to be low and the odds of the levels of surveillance growing then certainly brokering user data and developing better surveillance tech and more popular services that produce personal data is a growth industry? I personally think it would be insane to bet on a significant overhaul of the american defense and security industry. Everyone understands why the giants didn't pull a Lavabit and just helped cover things up, and carefully prepared inaccurate statements when it came out. The exact same reasons are why it's a much better business decision to go along with this, to step on your competitors to help further the surveillance state rather than fight it. I only see two arguments for this: That they will lose customers because people demand privacy and will stop using their services if they cooperate. This hasn't happened yet and, if history repeats itself, would just take a big marketing spend to stop anyway. The user experience of any company taking a stand would probably be worse than a cooperating company, so people would have to make a sacrifice to secure their privacy. Also something that is clearly not what people do right now. This is clearly going to be the free market ideologue's argument. Fair warning: I'm going to ignore "people will boycott Google because they are self interested rational actors and it would be irrational to sacrifice privacy for convenience" like I would ignore other naive religious arguments. The other argument seems to boil down to just: "But that's my team/tribe and they're the good guys" or that it's felt that rich and powerful people in the tech industry are fundamentally different kinds of people and will readily risk their money and power for reasons that obviously don't motivate most other rich and powerful people. Neither is particularly convincing.
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  I think the argument is that Google and others stand to lose a great deal of business around the world if they're seen as a front for US government intelligence agencies. That gives them a real financial interest in opposing this kind of surveillance.
  - freshhawk 13y ago
amag 13y ago
I find it ironic that the reason for all this surveillance and data-gathering is to protect people from terrorists. Terrorism isn't about killing people, it's about making us all afraid (terrified). That fear will then lead us to limit our personal freedom. We say: "Please Mr. Government, protect us from the evil terrorists" and with that we give the government the mandate to introduce massive surveillance. As the magnitude of the surveillance starts to dawn on us, we start censuring ourselves online, not to risk a visit from the men in black. Even if what we do online today isn't illegal, laws will change and it's not unheard of people being persecuted for their political/religious alignment, even in western countries, even today. So we shrivel and crawl back into the hole we crawled out of and wait for change. All this is perfectly aligned with what the terrorists want. So they won. We killed them, but they won. As long as we are guided by our fear of terrorism, as long as we let our countries be guided by our fear of terrorism, the terrorists have won.
njharman 13y ago
> The US government says the surveillance is necessary to thwart terrorists. Even if it is necessary, that does not mean it should automatically be allowed. Liberty is not "free". People have died for it and people will die for it in the future. And Liberty is worth that cost.
justinhj 13y ago
Not really directly related to the article but it is filled with spelling mistakes. I couldn't read past the fifth one
jcampbell1 13y ago
Google needs to fight back. The first thing Google should do is encourage HTTPS everywhere. Google should change the algorithm to prefer sites that support HTTPS everywhere. Matt Cutts should make some video like: "Google uses over 200 different signals to determine page relevancy. Our users value privacy, so one of the signals we use is whether the site uses HTTPS. We tend to prefer to send search users to secure sites... blah blah blah ... Enabling HTTPS with PFS will increase your search rank. HTTPS will slow page load times, but the privacy boost exceeds the speed penalty for 99% of sites." The only reason I don't use HTTPS always is because it slows down page loads, and page speed is huge for PPC performance, and big for SEO. Google needs to hardcode a "privacy" boost into the rankings and make that public. Within a year, 80% of the web would be HTTPS.
- ihsw 13y ago
  HTTPS everywhere carries a cost to Google -- crawling the web. There certainly are increased costs associated with crawling an HTTPS-only internet, and the search appliance no doubt prioritizes HTTP over HTTPS.
  - karterk 13y ago
    Even at Google's scale, at this point, I think it's a negligible cost.
- gph 13y ago
  But can we still trust Certificate Authorities at this point? If HTTPS was widely adopted, that would just give the NSA a new point of attack. CAs have already been compromised, and there are probably plenty that have handed over keys to the NSA that we don't know about.
- hyperbovine 13y ago
  That would be great, but it would not have done a thing against the most recently revealed NSA attack vector. NSA compromised the private fiber intranet connecting Google's datacenters. Perhaps those should have been encrypted but at any rate, client-server encryption isn't going to guard against that sort of attack. It's really appalling.
kudu 13y ago
There seems to be a misunderstanding that a "debate" on the merits and disadvantages of authoritarian surveillance needs to be had. These inexistent pros and numerous cons were already weighed when the 4th Amendment was passed, so unless they want a constitutional amendment, there is no need to have a debate, they should simply respect the supreme law of the land.
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SurfScore 13y ago
Ironically enough, when I first saw this title I thought it was going to be a piece about the astronomical cost of living. Oh well...
brianberns 13y ago
Serious question: What exactly is objectionable about the "smiley face" diagram? Except for that tiny face, it seems to be a totally innocent network diagram that shows how Google's private network connects to the public internet. I understand the implication is that the NSA is tapping connections between Google's data centers, but there's nothing in the diagram itself that supports this claim. I'd like to know what about it made those two Google-related engineers "explode in profanity". http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_404h/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/10/30/Local/Images/GOOGLE-CLOUD-EXPLOITATION1383148810.jpg http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_404h/2010-2019/Washin...
csears 13y ago
Not to make light of the situation, but that sketched smiley face does work well as a meme/icon for the NSA's hubris in all this. Also makes for a subtly humorous t-shirt... http://teespring.com/nsaface http://teespring.com/nsaface Happy to share the vector source if anyone's interested.
aet 13y ago
Why don't the journalists release everything they have?
jbpadgett 13y ago
Perhaps a solution to this problem is for the NSA to provide "opt-in" well-known collection points for everyone. If only a small amount of metadata is what they use, then the massive copy everything on the wires approach is not needed. Private companies and even individuals could choose to submit some activities that comprise useful metadata for storage and analysis. Those they choose to not opt-in would simply not have a data-stream piped to the well-known collection points. Maybe some variant of this approach? If we still don't trust them (and likely won't for some time), we work collectively to do what the PandoDaily piece suggested which is use valley power to push for more effective oversight. In lieu of that, perhaps we have a collective checkbook pay for a counter-surveillance org to watch the watchers.
smkelly 13y ago
Today HHS announced that Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Red Hat will be helping fix HealthCare.gov. Now would be a good time for all four companies to issue press releases stating "We are very happy to lend our support to the Obama administration in exchange for their scaling back of domestic and corporate spying efforts."
Wishbeen 13y ago
Reform is needed all over the place... it's just dismaying to see so many public institutions simply ignoring morals in favor of exploiting the letter of the law to the fullest extent.
humannature 13y ago
where is the technical proof that they actually hacked into google's fiber? Put some diagrams on a piece of paper and at the top it says TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN and everyone automatically believes it? although I'm not totally doubting it, just want to see some proof.
keithpeter 13y ago
That smiley slide will enter history in the same way as the fatuous comments made by agents when they forced the Guardian to destroy computers that had been used to process Snowden's files in London. Utter contempt for 'little people' isn't viable long term. The 'little people' eventually realise what is going on. Then the politicians have to change their approach.
csandreasen 13y ago
I think this is less a story of the NSA/GCHQ getting caught with their pants down than it is Google and Yahoo getting caught. According to yesterday's leaks, Google and Yahoo were (and continue to in Yahoo's case) sending customer data between disparate locations across the globe unencrypted. That means that not only could NSA/GCHQ have been pulling data from it - so could China, Russia, Iran, any other nation with a reasonably developed intelligence service, organized crime syndicates, etc. We know that they collect unencrypted data against their targets. Every intelligence service does using whatever means legally available to them. That's the nature of collecting intelligence. The NSA isn't going to hurt their bottom line, but failing to take proper security measures to secure their customers' data might. The outrage that's been pervasive throughout the tech community is based on the idea that the NSA is collecting data on everyone. This article bases a good deal of its argument on that assumption. All of the leaks have dealt with their sources and methods, though - not their targeting. I've mentioned it in previous comments, but the media does a huge disservice by not giving us any insight into who they're targeting. If the NSA/GCHQ is targeting regular people/business executives/members of their own country's government, show the evidence and let them face judgment for it. Telling people that they could be conducting surveillance on everyone does nothing but generate fear and hype, tip off legitimate intelligence targets, and now possibly cause financial damage to major internet companies. Some problems from the article that I'd also like to address, since I see them so often: * The NSA claims that it targets only foreigners, but it needs only 51 percent certainty that those targets are actually outside the US. That’s pretty much a coin toss.* The whole 51 percent thing came from the Washington Post's original writeup on the PRISM slides, The quote was: The supervisor must endorse the analyst's "reasonable belief," defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection. The NSA's wording quoted by WaPo is "reasonable belief"; WaPo's wording is "51 percent confidence". Nowhere in any of the leaked documents does anyone ever mention "51 percent", nor is it mentioned in any Congressional hearing to date. The phrases "reasonable belief" and "reasonable articulable suspicion" do come up. In the Congressional hearing from earlier this week they discuss the differences between that and "probable cause", which is a much higher standard, but to say that an NSA analyst could flip a slightly weighted coin to meet the legal criteria for targeting under FAA 702 authorities is disingenuous. Meanwhile, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack, including overseas, are about 1 in 20 million. “Your odds of dying in a terrorist attack are still far, far lower than dying from just about anything else,” the Post noted. It's interesting that the author specifically mentions overseas locations - the author forgot about the military in doing so. It's worth noting that the NSA is an organization subordinate to the Department of Defense, and one its primary responsibilities is to provide signals intelligence to military. The same military which has employed quite a few Americans in hostile areas overseas, Since there are fewer than 20 million Americans serving in the military, one could use that figure to conclude that no serviceman has been killed during the past decade by anyone affiliated with a known terrorist organization. I recently visited a family member being treated at a military hospital. It was a bit shocking seeing the number of people moving past me in their wheelchairs using their 1-3 remaining limbs for propulsion and thinking to myself that these were the lucky ones. You can debate the merits of war and whether or not they should have been over there in the first place, but claiming that today Americans aren't getting killed by people working for the same organization that killed three thousand Americans back in 2001 is just wrong. But in 2011, when the surveillance program was firmly in place and the anti-terrorism laws long since passed, there were nine recorded attacks in the US deemed as terrorism. The NSA doesn't have the authority to target people on US soil. This is written in the law, rehashed at every Congressional hearing, and even confirmed by Snowden's own leaks [1]. If an international terrorist group like Al-Qaeda struck the US again, it would be fair to call out the NSA for failing to protect US citizens. You can't fault them for failing to prevent a terrorist attack hatched entirely on US soil by US persons, which is why Congress call the FBI director to answer for Boston bombings, not the NSA director. [1] http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/758651-1qcy12-violations.html http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/758651-1qcy12-violati... (see page 6 - the section on "roamers")
louischatriot 13y ago
I really dislike the line drawn between "collecting data on American people" vs non-American people. So it would be ok to spy on Europe but not the US? Come on ...
spenvo 13y ago
The NSA has reveled in the joy of invading our privacy, has undermined our ability to hold a secret (by intentionally weakening/undermining cryptography), paid its employees outrageous salaries, and is a caricature of George Orwell's "Big Brother"[1] - surpassing even the Stasi of Soviet Russia in its pervasiveness. The Patriot Act (among others) needs to be repealed. Period. But that will never happen, because bureaucracy doesn't shrink. Period. This explains my libertarian-leanings --> laws aren't written by the people, they are written by those who stand to benefit most directly from their passing. And the devil of a bill is always in its details, which laymen (sometimes even the congressman presenting the bill) can't understand/decipher. Read the Pulitzer-prize winning biography "The Powerbroker" if you want a lesson in how to abuse the public's ignorance through the cunning drafting of legislation. There is no CTRL-Z in DC. There are movements, gaining traction, to introduce state-sponsored "internets" - because this is the path we have prescribed to the world. Yet such a profound outcome was not mindfully chosen by the people, it was incidental to the law. We therefore have forfeited the greatest invention of our time through our collective lack of understanding and/or vulnerable&reactionary mindsets. I'll be spending the rest of my life ruminating on this simple fact: the internet is sick, and my government is the disease. [1] - And now that caricature-metaphor has a literal face, drawn by one of NSA's own--if you ever wanted to know what Big Brother "looked like."
- snitko 13y ago
  Why do you describe it as libertarian leanings? What in the libertarian philosophy still makes you uncomfortable?
  - nardi 13y ago
    I can't answer for spenvo, but for myself, I would be happy to call myself "libertarian," except that extremely limited government is bad at protecting the poor from the rich, and libertarianism places a little too much emphasis on individualism to the detriment of communities.
    - TelmoMenezes 13y ago
michaelochurch 13y ago
Liberty needs a lobbyist, and that lobbyist has to be Silicon Valley. So, liberty's lobbyist is to be a bunch of out-of-touch, arrogant billionaires who collect peoples' data and sell it to advertisers, and who can't even make a small city (San Francisco is not nearly the size or complexity of New York) a decent place to live? There are (stating the obvious warning) major issues with governments, including ours, but I don't think for a second that the current SV elite would do a better or even adequately comparable job. Also, is it just me, or is it hilarious that these one-big-hit-makes-wisdom billionaires who whine about government-- except, of course, when they're exploiting tax loopholes and using NIMBY regulations to keep Bay Area real estate expensive-- and talk about how wonderful the world would be if they were running it, then go ahead and get pwn3d by that supposedly inefficient, antiquated institution? The poetic justice here is powerful.
nyan_sandwich 13y ago
Less Voice, more Exit. The solution is not more democracy; everyone'e been pretty consistently complaining about Washington's power for years and it's only gotten worse. The solution is "Google Republic".
genecavanaugh 13y ago
Eventually the data will be sold by <someone> (more likely a bunch of <someones> to support, say, addictions, etc., if we don't stop it. That will severely (and unpredictably) impact everyone's bottom line.
dreamdu5t 13y ago
Surprise! An institution created to spy on people spies on them! I'm trying to wrap my head around this discussion where people seem to both want a government that spies on people but is also mad that said government spies on people. How about this? The government and the NSA are criminal organizations that have no more of a right to trespass on my private communication than Coca-Cola. They are terrorists. That's all there really is to it. They will spy on us as long as we continue to accept the legitimacy of such an organization. They will continue to spy on us after this media circle-jerk about it is over.. that's for sure.
MakeUsersWant 13y ago
Everybody is protesting. But there must be huge business opportunities in mass surveillance. The biggest obstacle is politics, i.e. how to weasel your way to the data. Maybe an inexpensive stockpile of skill/personality/mental health profiles could make hiring/outsourcing more convenient? Better ideas, anybody?

443 points by _pius 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

One thing I find interesting is that it's somehow okay as long as it's directed at 'the foreigners'. Who are these foreigners? Is it Sergey Brin or Larry Page, before they moved to the US? Elon Musk? Peter Thiel? Many Americans need not look further than their grandparents to see a 'foreigner' (and, excluding a few natives, the entire nation has been built by foreigners). Would it not makes sense to show the same courtesy for peoples privacy to people who weren't necessarily born here.

JimboOmega 13y ago
It's not okay; it's still morally questionable at best. But it is infinitely more legal. The government has all sorts of restrictions on what it can do (e.g., the 4th amendment), that apply to citizens, but not foreign nationals. If they are not even bothering to respect the distinction, it's the case that they violate both the spirit and the letter of the law without a care; it's a much more dangerous position of disrespect for regulation.
- npsimons 13y ago
  The government has all sorts of restrictions on what it can do (e.g., the 4th amendment), that apply to citizens, but not foreign nationals. Are you sure about that? IANAL, and I've not kept up with more recent laws, but the forth doesn't say anything about "citizens", it says "people".
  - ilyanep 13y ago
    It says "the people"
  - coffeemug 13y ago
    The distinction comes from the SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution, not the constitution itself. They've been quite consistent in limiting the constitutional rights to American citizens/soil/etc.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    "The People" is commonly interpreted to mean the citizens, i.e.: We the People of the United States There is no way to interpret "people" in that line as including Saudis and Chinese.
- Zimahl 13y ago
  But it is infinitely more legal. Infinitely. And I don't get the outrage that foreigners have that the American people aren't outraged that we are spying on foreigners. That's what spies do - for both sides. The electronic monitoring of foreign communications is the charter of the NSA. By the way, China is quite silent on all of this because they are hacking the shit out of the US trying to steal everything from political to military to commercial secrets. The outrage about the NSA is domestic spying. Intercepting communications of Americans outside of the US is a gray area but doing it to Americans on US soil is completely against the NSAs charter, tramples due process, and takes a dump on the Constitution. Anyone who said that was ok needs to be thrown into prison.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    Infinitely. And I don't get the outrage that foreigners have that the American people aren't outraged that we are spying on foreigners. That's what spies do - for both sides. Well, for many people, the spies have gone too far (and apparently you think they have domestically). To my mind what you are defending here is the building of a tyrannical superstate the likes of which the world has never seen, with absolutely no restrictions on spying because 'spies will be spies', and spying easily crosses boundaries. To apply that rule domestically and then give free reign when turned on others is the height of hypocrisy, and will gain you nothing anyway, because the NSA interprets anything involving foreigners or crossing a border as within their remit, and of course your laws have no meaning for fellow 5-eyes states in your view, so all your data is fair game to them, and they'll just have to share it with the NSA. If you don't like that and you think others should be spied on in the same way, frankly, why should we care? If you accept restrictions on spying and gov. intrusion, they should apply equally to all people, at least that's what the founders of the US thought: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. They were responding to an unreasonable, tyrannical state which wanted far too much control of their lives, but now we have come full circle and the US, with UK connivance, is behaving in exactly the same way toward its vassal states and their citizens (in fact toward the entire world), and yet we still hear that as long as it is done to foreigners, it's ok, because everyone does this sort of thing. Well no, everyone doesn't, and because some governments do doesn't make it ok with the people concerned, just as its not ok with you. This spying should be cut back right to the essential purpose, which is protecting the nation from attack, not economic espionage, political espionage, or dragnet surveillance of any kind - that is just far too dangerous in my view. The electronic monitoring of foreign communications is the charter of the NSA. By the way, China is quite silent on all of this because they are hacking the shit out of the US trying to steal everything from political to military to commercial secrets. Great to hear that compared to the totalitarian regime in China, the US is not quite as evil, that's quite an achievement.
blah314 13y ago
As a "foreigner", I don't really have a problem with that. Covertly gaining advantage for their own team is what spies are supposed to do. The rest of the world needs to encrypt and, where possible, route around the damaged areas.
ilyanep 13y ago
Not to speak toward the validity of your comment, more to nitpick, but Larry Page was born in Michigan, so there was no "moving to the US" :)
ENGNR 13y ago
As the article said, the USA turned away Huawei because they were too closely tied to the Chinese Government. The rest of the world could eventually do the same to Silicon Valley for the same reasons. It's actually really short sighted, because by costing US companies the rest of the world as customers or forcing the rise of zero-knowledge companies, they're losing the ability to subpoena information on credible threats and actual criminals.
IvyMike 13y ago
> Larry Page, before [he] moved to the US Michigan is admittedly weird but it's not technically another country.
aragot 13y ago
Je plussoie. As I read the HN pres about NSA, it sounds as if the rest of the world has no human rights at all. Apple, Google and Microsoft are international, and I'm appalled Europe doesn't find a way to constraint them to respect EU citizen privacy in an equal manner, to which I have the following answer: Should EU pass laws to forbid the use of american services? That's the only consistent way to protect our constitutional rights. The same happens for social rights when moving countries: When moving, say from France to Australia, you temporarily or permanently lose your social cover: unemployment, health, retirement, unless you pay 2 systems at a time. Today's civilization is international and we ought to protect "mobile citizen" under an equality banner.

JimboOmega 13y ago

"Now, Silicon Valley needs to join them." - because we otherwise approve of the snooping, but for this latest outrage? I'm honestly wondering - what's the other side of this? Who's defending and explaining this? I have not seen an article that "takes the other side" in some time, and that might be a result of the echo chamber that is the bay area... Or it might be the result of an "intelligence community" that really IS in its own world; intentionally blocked from any outside observation and judgment, taking actions that, honestly, really don't have many if any supporters.

devx 13y ago
With people like the POTUS, the Chief of the Intelligence Committee, and half of Congress backing them, not to mention most of the military industrial complex, who needs "supporters"?
- JimboOmega 13y ago
  Well, right - so long as both the democrat party line and the republican party line are the same on the issue, there's really nothing to be done about it. My point is, though, that the question the article is posing - that it's time for us to ask: "Is it worth it?" has already been asked and answered with a resounding no! Even without the privacy breaches, the financial cost alone isn't justified. But the privacy breaches are huge and problematic too.
selmnoo 13y ago
In a way, we (or at least, the decision-makers in the valley at least) do approve of the snooping. Google did something very drastic when it was found out that the Chinese were looking into people's e-mails: they pulled out from China. They were lauded for this move: we all said it was courageous for a company to do this, it was morally correct, and so on we went with praise. But what are they going to do now with the knowledge from recent revelations? Pulling out would mean an end to the money coming in. Are they going to do that? Are they truly going to do something drastic, something substantial? I'm of the opinion that nothing will basically change. Having talked with many tech CEOs I've learned that the people making the decisions just don't care about this (and those that do, care about it less than they care about making money). What's more -- a lot openly declare this is needed for a functioning society -- John Doerr was on the verge of saying this in the Arrington interview. I might sound jaded and defeated when I say this, but I think this is really it. I don't think our future will have considerably less snooping going on, this will go on, little will change.

kghose 13y ago

I don't know. If some one charged me with gathering intel I would be drawing up all sorts of battle plans, including weakness analyses like these. Hell, I would even try them out in the field. I would consider this my JOB.

marvin 13y ago
The relevant questions here would be _who_ tasked you to do this and _why_. Working on technology to be used for indiscriminate surveilance is simply outside of my ethics. I would resign rather than do this job. Obviously not everyone agrees, but there are plenty of tech people who have a strong moral compass which prevents them from doing this kind of work.
- DanBC 13y ago
  What if your task was to find weaknesses in operating systems? You join the organisation, and are told that "the enemy" is using a particular OS, and it is your job to get as many exploits for that OS as possible. Those exploits are passed along to someone else to actually deploy. So far, you have no idea that your organisation is spying on citizens of its own country.

deleted 13y ago

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pvnick 13y ago

I read the article and at the end muttered "abso-fucking-lutely"

ForHackernews 13y ago

I had trouble taking this article seriously because it kept referring to David Foster Wallace as "Foster Wallace". His last name is just Wallace. It's not a compound, hyphenated last name or anything strange like that.

usefulcat 13y ago

potential_for_abuse = power / accountability

denzil_correa 13y ago

>American tech companies, in other words, are now the Huaweis of everywhere else. This can only stop IF the companies proactively make an attempt to get out of bed from the organizations which hold a gun over their head. Currently, the companies want to "spy" (for marketing, advertisements etc.) on their customers as much as governments.

rhizome 13y ago
Given the existence and current legality of NSLs and other tools, they likely cannot get out of bed without a legal repudiation of the third-party doctrine. Until then, they can be compelled to stay in bed whether they want to or not.
- McPants 13y ago
  Could the companies that are under threat of legal action work together and risk the threat all at once? What I am saying is that if one company such as Google was to breach their gag order from the government regarding these things then they would be in a pretty bad situation which could result in a major loss of money to the company. However a lot of these tech companies are American and for them to all breach the gag order at once would have a large impact on the already struggling economy. Could they not use this potential economic disaster as a get out of jail token? I mean it's kinda what the banks did with the too big to fail stuff. Putting a lot of companies in jeopardy at once could force the government to not act on prosecuting them. I could also be talking out of my butt.

sharkweek 13y ago

I have an honest and serious question -- who are the developers and designers who put these systems into place for the NSA? Are they aware of what they're doing or is it all classified and contracted out? Are they proud of their work? Is it just a paycheck? Surely someone with such a high aptitude could easily get a job elsewhere -- I guess I'm just unable to make the connection on who willingly builds this kind of stuff. I'm not trying to be intentionally obtuse, I just legitimately am curious

anthonycerra 13y ago
I think it's similar to people in the military who are given a gun and told to shoot someone they've never met. There are many people who believe what they're doing is for the good of their country and trust the people giving the orders.
wellboy 13y ago
If you tell a graduate engineer about the great mathematical problems there are to solve and that solving them will protect the American people, it's quite easy to get a strong workforce behind you. And if they were just engineering small parts it was probably hard to see the whole picture, even more so to judge if it's right or wrong. However, this big PR outrage will probably have them come to their senses and crumble down the NSA workforce. Checks and balances.
- sharkweek 13y ago
  Yeah I suppose I buy into the micro/macro argument -- "Oh, I'm just working on this awesome data crawling problem that our country will use to stop bad people from entering the country" x 1000s of employees, and then you get a few dedicated folks at the top who put it all together, it gets pretty easy to see how that could result in the types of programs we're seeing
  - wellboy 13y ago
    Yup
  - deleted 13y ago

notahacker 13y ago

I'm a bit confused by the whole "liberty needs a lobbyist" argument. Lobbying for what exactly? Intelligence agencies to pretend to stop spying on you? I think that's as much as you can reasonably hope for lobbying to achieve. The wider implications are earlier in the article. Wearable recording devices and biometric security devices shared in the cloud? Probably better to assume the government will compromise them if it wants to, and might well do anyway, just in case, with or without the blessing of Silicon Valley. That's something to take into account when deciding if you actually want them. It's not an entirely new phenomenon though; the same was true of brick-sized mobile phones a couple of decades back.[1] Your chances of having your life seriously affected by PRISM may or may not be higher than your chances of having your life seriously affected by terrorism [2] but it's a stone cold certainty that public criticism isn't putting the spooks to bed. Intelligence agencies have never really depended on being in tune with public sentiment or in line with the law. [1]There's a well-publicised trial going on at the moment in the UK over "phone hacking" in the 1990s, where the organizations snooping on people's voicemails were newspapers. In a beautifully ironic touch, one of the major revelations of the trial so far is that two of the media moguls in question were having an affair. They were incriminated by a Word document; a love letter that may never even have been sent, and certainly wouldn't have come to light if they hadn't had to hand over their computers to prosecutors. [2]both are higher than the article's "1 in 20 million", but not high enough to be likely if you're not a major public figure

XorNot 13y ago
I'm constantly amazed that its like everyone has suddenly forgotten that during Occupy Wall St, protests before and since, and the entire Arab Spring revolution, it was portable and mobile recording devices widely dispersed amongst the populace that enabled successful revolution against government and evidence and checks of the abuses of power of police and other authorities.
- penguindev 13y ago
  OWS was successful at something? What would that be...

einehexe 13y ago

The elephant it the room that everyone is wants to ignore is that Google's data was intercepted by the British. It is quite interesting how that is conveniently overlooked to push a certain narrative.

prawn 13y ago
I think at some level (e.g., international power and security to maintain that), US/UK/CA/AU/NZ are the same thing.
rodgerd 13y ago
If you aren't aware of the Five Eyes and Echelon arrangements, you don't have an opinion worth airing.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

south11235 13y ago

Maybe it is time to start considering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance

mingmecca 13y ago

To answer the question in the title: I'd rather be dead than live my life in a fishbowl and watched most of the time. I'd rather live with the reality of a dangerous world instead of suspecting that some CPU or agent is analyzing my calls & emails. To the defenders of the NSA, this sentiment is abhorrent, I'm sure.

johnpowell 13y ago
Do you still use Google? Or any of the companies mentioned in the PRISM leaks?

kbar13 13y ago

can someone explain what the big deal is with the smiley face?

freshhawk 13y ago

I find it strange that the assumption is made that "Silicon Valley" is clearly going to be on the side of the general public in this. Why? Isn't the smart money going to side with the real power? If those well connected enough to attempt to predict things see the odds of the US rolling back the surveillance state to be low and the odds of the levels of surveillance growing then certainly brokering user data and developing better surveillance tech and more popular services that produce personal data is a growth industry? I personally think it would be insane to bet on a significant overhaul of the american defense and security industry. Everyone understands why the giants didn't pull a Lavabit and just helped cover things up, and carefully prepared inaccurate statements when it came out. The exact same reasons are why it's a much better business decision to go along with this, to step on your competitors to help further the surveillance state rather than fight it. I only see two arguments for this: That they will lose customers because people demand privacy and will stop using their services if they cooperate. This hasn't happened yet and, if history repeats itself, would just take a big marketing spend to stop anyway. The user experience of any company taking a stand would probably be worse than a cooperating company, so people would have to make a sacrifice to secure their privacy. Also something that is clearly not what people do right now. This is clearly going to be the free market ideologue's argument. Fair warning: I'm going to ignore "people will boycott Google because they are self interested rational actors and it would be irrational to sacrifice privacy for convenience" like I would ignore other naive religious arguments. The other argument seems to boil down to just: "But that's my team/tribe and they're the good guys" or that it's felt that rich and powerful people in the tech industry are fundamentally different kinds of people and will readily risk their money and power for reasons that obviously don't motivate most other rich and powerful people. Neither is particularly convincing.

ForHackernews 13y ago
I think the argument is that Google and others stand to lose a great deal of business around the world if they're seen as a front for US government intelligence agencies. That gives them a real financial interest in opposing this kind of surveillance.
- freshhawk 13y ago

amag 13y ago

I find it ironic that the reason for all this surveillance and data-gathering is to protect people from terrorists. Terrorism isn't about killing people, it's about making us all afraid (terrified). That fear will then lead us to limit our personal freedom. We say: "Please Mr. Government, protect us from the evil terrorists" and with that we give the government the mandate to introduce massive surveillance. As the magnitude of the surveillance starts to dawn on us, we start censuring ourselves online, not to risk a visit from the men in black. Even if what we do online today isn't illegal, laws will change and it's not unheard of people being persecuted for their political/religious alignment, even in western countries, even today. So we shrivel and crawl back into the hole we crawled out of and wait for change. All this is perfectly aligned with what the terrorists want. So they won. We killed them, but they won. As long as we are guided by our fear of terrorism, as long as we let our countries be guided by our fear of terrorism, the terrorists have won.

njharman 13y ago

> The US government says the surveillance is necessary to thwart terrorists. Even if it is necessary, that does not mean it should automatically be allowed. Liberty is not "free". People have died for it and people will die for it in the future. And Liberty is worth that cost.

justinhj 13y ago

Not really directly related to the article but it is filled with spelling mistakes. I couldn't read past the fifth one

jcampbell1 13y ago

Google needs to fight back. The first thing Google should do is encourage HTTPS everywhere. Google should change the algorithm to prefer sites that support HTTPS everywhere. Matt Cutts should make some video like: "Google uses over 200 different signals to determine page relevancy. Our users value privacy, so one of the signals we use is whether the site uses HTTPS. We tend to prefer to send search users to secure sites... blah blah blah ... Enabling HTTPS with PFS will increase your search rank. HTTPS will slow page load times, but the privacy boost exceeds the speed penalty for 99% of sites." The only reason I don't use HTTPS always is because it slows down page loads, and page speed is huge for PPC performance, and big for SEO. Google needs to hardcode a "privacy" boost into the rankings and make that public. Within a year, 80% of the web would be HTTPS.

ihsw 13y ago
HTTPS everywhere carries a cost to Google -- crawling the web. There certainly are increased costs associated with crawling an HTTPS-only internet, and the search appliance no doubt prioritizes HTTP over HTTPS.
- karterk 13y ago
  Even at Google's scale, at this point, I think it's a negligible cost.
gph 13y ago
But can we still trust Certificate Authorities at this point? If HTTPS was widely adopted, that would just give the NSA a new point of attack. CAs have already been compromised, and there are probably plenty that have handed over keys to the NSA that we don't know about.
hyperbovine 13y ago
That would be great, but it would not have done a thing against the most recently revealed NSA attack vector. NSA compromised the private fiber intranet connecting Google's datacenters. Perhaps those should have been encrypted but at any rate, client-server encryption isn't going to guard against that sort of attack. It's really appalling.

kudu 13y ago

There seems to be a misunderstanding that a "debate" on the merits and disadvantages of authoritarian surveillance needs to be had. These inexistent pros and numerous cons were already weighed when the 4th Amendment was passed, so unless they want a constitutional amendment, there is no need to have a debate, they should simply respect the supreme law of the land.

deleted 13y ago

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SurfScore 13y ago

Ironically enough, when I first saw this title I thought it was going to be a piece about the astronomical cost of living. Oh well...

brianberns 13y ago

Serious question: What exactly is objectionable about the "smiley face" diagram? Except for that tiny face, it seems to be a totally innocent network diagram that shows how Google's private network connects to the public internet. I understand the implication is that the NSA is tapping connections between Google's data centers, but there's nothing in the diagram itself that supports this claim. I'd like to know what about it made those two Google-related engineers "explode in profanity". http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_404h/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/10/30/Local/Images/GOOGLE-CLOUD-EXPLOITATION1383148810.jpg http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_404h/2010-2019/Washin...

csears 13y ago

Not to make light of the situation, but that sketched smiley face does work well as a meme/icon for the NSA's hubris in all this. Also makes for a subtly humorous t-shirt... http://teespring.com/nsaface http://teespring.com/nsaface Happy to share the vector source if anyone's interested.

aet 13y ago

Why don't the journalists release everything they have?

jbpadgett 13y ago

Perhaps a solution to this problem is for the NSA to provide "opt-in" well-known collection points for everyone. If only a small amount of metadata is what they use, then the massive copy everything on the wires approach is not needed. Private companies and even individuals could choose to submit some activities that comprise useful metadata for storage and analysis. Those they choose to not opt-in would simply not have a data-stream piped to the well-known collection points. Maybe some variant of this approach? If we still don't trust them (and likely won't for some time), we work collectively to do what the PandoDaily piece suggested which is use valley power to push for more effective oversight. In lieu of that, perhaps we have a collective checkbook pay for a counter-surveillance org to watch the watchers.

smkelly 13y ago

Today HHS announced that Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Red Hat will be helping fix HealthCare.gov. Now would be a good time for all four companies to issue press releases stating "We are very happy to lend our support to the Obama administration in exchange for their scaling back of domestic and corporate spying efforts."

Wishbeen 13y ago

Reform is needed all over the place... it's just dismaying to see so many public institutions simply ignoring morals in favor of exploiting the letter of the law to the fullest extent.

humannature 13y ago

where is the technical proof that they actually hacked into google's fiber? Put some diagrams on a piece of paper and at the top it says TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN and everyone automatically believes it? although I'm not totally doubting it, just want to see some proof.

keithpeter 13y ago

That smiley slide will enter history in the same way as the fatuous comments made by agents when they forced the Guardian to destroy computers that had been used to process Snowden's files in London. Utter contempt for 'little people' isn't viable long term. The 'little people' eventually realise what is going on. Then the politicians have to change their approach.

csandreasen 13y ago

I think this is less a story of the NSA/GCHQ getting caught with their pants down than it is Google and Yahoo getting caught. According to yesterday's leaks, Google and Yahoo were (and continue to in Yahoo's case) sending customer data between disparate locations across the globe unencrypted. That means that not only could NSA/GCHQ have been pulling data from it - so could China, Russia, Iran, any other nation with a reasonably developed intelligence service, organized crime syndicates, etc. We know that they collect unencrypted data against their targets. Every intelligence service does using whatever means legally available to them. That's the nature of collecting intelligence. The NSA isn't going to hurt their bottom line, but failing to take proper security measures to secure their customers' data might. The outrage that's been pervasive throughout the tech community is based on the idea that the NSA is collecting data on everyone. This article bases a good deal of its argument on that assumption. All of the leaks have dealt with their sources and methods, though - not their targeting. I've mentioned it in previous comments, but the media does a huge disservice by not giving us any insight into who they're targeting. If the NSA/GCHQ is targeting regular people/business executives/members of their own country's government, show the evidence and let them face judgment for it. Telling people that they could be conducting surveillance on everyone does nothing but generate fear and hype, tip off legitimate intelligence targets, and now possibly cause financial damage to major internet companies. Some problems from the article that I'd also like to address, since I see them so often: * The NSA claims that it targets only foreigners, but it needs only 51 percent certainty that those targets are actually outside the US. That’s pretty much a coin toss.* The whole 51 percent thing came from the Washington Post's original writeup on the PRISM slides, The quote was: The supervisor must endorse the analyst's "reasonable belief," defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection. The NSA's wording quoted by WaPo is "reasonable belief"; WaPo's wording is "51 percent confidence". Nowhere in any of the leaked documents does anyone ever mention "51 percent", nor is it mentioned in any Congressional hearing to date. The phrases "reasonable belief" and "reasonable articulable suspicion" do come up. In the Congressional hearing from earlier this week they discuss the differences between that and "probable cause", which is a much higher standard, but to say that an NSA analyst could flip a slightly weighted coin to meet the legal criteria for targeting under FAA 702 authorities is disingenuous. Meanwhile, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack, including overseas, are about 1 in 20 million. “Your odds of dying in a terrorist attack are still far, far lower than dying from just about anything else,” the Post noted. It's interesting that the author specifically mentions overseas locations - the author forgot about the military in doing so. It's worth noting that the NSA is an organization subordinate to the Department of Defense, and one its primary responsibilities is to provide signals intelligence to military. The same military which has employed quite a few Americans in hostile areas overseas, Since there are fewer than 20 million Americans serving in the military, one could use that figure to conclude that no serviceman has been killed during the past decade by anyone affiliated with a known terrorist organization. I recently visited a family member being treated at a military hospital. It was a bit shocking seeing the number of people moving past me in their wheelchairs using their 1-3 remaining limbs for propulsion and thinking to myself that these were the lucky ones. You can debate the merits of war and whether or not they should have been over there in the first place, but claiming that today Americans aren't getting killed by people working for the same organization that killed three thousand Americans back in 2001 is just wrong. But in 2011, when the surveillance program was firmly in place and the anti-terrorism laws long since passed, there were nine recorded attacks in the US deemed as terrorism. The NSA doesn't have the authority to target people on US soil. This is written in the law, rehashed at every Congressional hearing, and even confirmed by Snowden's own leaks [1]. If an international terrorist group like Al-Qaeda struck the US again, it would be fair to call out the NSA for failing to protect US citizens. You can't fault them for failing to prevent a terrorist attack hatched entirely on US soil by US persons, which is why Congress call the FBI director to answer for Boston bombings, not the NSA director. [1] http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/758651-1qcy12-violations.html http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/758651-1qcy12-violati... (see page 6 - the section on "roamers")

louischatriot 13y ago

I really dislike the line drawn between "collecting data on American people" vs non-American people. So it would be ok to spy on Europe but not the US? Come on ...

spenvo 13y ago

The NSA has reveled in the joy of invading our privacy, has undermined our ability to hold a secret (by intentionally weakening/undermining cryptography), paid its employees outrageous salaries, and is a caricature of George Orwell's "Big Brother"[1] - surpassing even the Stasi of Soviet Russia in its pervasiveness. The Patriot Act (among others) needs to be repealed. Period. But that will never happen, because bureaucracy doesn't shrink. Period. This explains my libertarian-leanings --> laws aren't written by the people, they are written by those who stand to benefit most directly from their passing. And the devil of a bill is always in its details, which laymen (sometimes even the congressman presenting the bill) can't understand/decipher. Read the Pulitzer-prize winning biography "The Powerbroker" if you want a lesson in how to abuse the public's ignorance through the cunning drafting of legislation. There is no CTRL-Z in DC. There are movements, gaining traction, to introduce state-sponsored "internets" - because this is the path we have prescribed to the world. Yet such a profound outcome was not mindfully chosen by the people, it was incidental to the law. We therefore have forfeited the greatest invention of our time through our collective lack of understanding and/or vulnerable&reactionary mindsets. I'll be spending the rest of my life ruminating on this simple fact: the internet is sick, and my government is the disease. [1] - And now that caricature-metaphor has a literal face, drawn by one of NSA's own--if you ever wanted to know what Big Brother "looked like."

snitko 13y ago
Why do you describe it as libertarian leanings? What in the libertarian philosophy still makes you uncomfortable?
- nardi 13y ago
  I can't answer for spenvo, but for myself, I would be happy to call myself "libertarian," except that extremely limited government is bad at protecting the poor from the rich, and libertarianism places a little too much emphasis on individualism to the detriment of communities.
  - TelmoMenezes 13y ago

michaelochurch 13y ago

Liberty needs a lobbyist, and that lobbyist has to be Silicon Valley. So, liberty's lobbyist is to be a bunch of out-of-touch, arrogant billionaires who collect peoples' data and sell it to advertisers, and who can't even make a small city (San Francisco is not nearly the size or complexity of New York) a decent place to live? There are (stating the obvious warning) major issues with governments, including ours, but I don't think for a second that the current SV elite would do a better or even adequately comparable job. Also, is it just me, or is it hilarious that these one-big-hit-makes-wisdom billionaires who whine about government-- except, of course, when they're exploiting tax loopholes and using NIMBY regulations to keep Bay Area real estate expensive-- and talk about how wonderful the world would be if they were running it, then go ahead and get pwn3d by that supposedly inefficient, antiquated institution? The poetic justice here is powerful.

nyan_sandwich 13y ago

Less Voice, more Exit. The solution is not more democracy; everyone'e been pretty consistently complaining about Washington's power for years and it's only gotten worse. The solution is "Google Republic".

genecavanaugh 13y ago

Eventually the data will be sold by <someone> (more likely a bunch of <someones> to support, say, addictions, etc., if we don't stop it. That will severely (and unpredictably) impact everyone's bottom line.

dreamdu5t 13y ago

Surprise! An institution created to spy on people spies on them! I'm trying to wrap my head around this discussion where people seem to both want a government that spies on people but is also mad that said government spies on people. How about this? The government and the NSA are criminal organizations that have no more of a right to trespass on my private communication than Coca-Cola. They are terrorists. That's all there really is to it. They will spy on us as long as we continue to accept the legitimacy of such an organization. They will continue to spy on us after this media circle-jerk about it is over.. that's for sure.

MakeUsersWant 13y ago

Everybody is protesting. But there must be huge business opportunities in mass surveillance. The biggest obstacle is politics, i.e. how to weasel your way to the data. Maybe an inexpensive stockpile of skill/personality/mental health profiles could make hiring/outsourcing more convenient? Better ideas, anybody?