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Furthermore, whatever safeguards they might put on the data are completely irrelevant. They shouldn't be mass collecting data without a warrant in any case. Yo

Furthermore, whatever safeguards they might put on the data are completely irrelevant. They shouldn't be mass collecting data without a warrant in any case. You were just arguing about whether their lawbreaking was competently executed or not.

growupkids 13y ago
Let's not be naive. Spying doesn't involve warrants. It's called spying because that's what it is, spying, not building a legal case to take to court. Warrants aren't ever going to figure into spying. You can bound the scope of what spy agencies spy on, but expecting them to spy and to get a warrant to spy before they do it, that's not going to happen. If you truly want warrant based searches for everyone, everywhere, then you have to ban spy agencies world wide and make this all a law enforcement function.
- sanderjd 13y ago
  There's this nice dividing line - you don't spy on your own citizens which means you need warrants to gather information on them.
  - marvin 13y ago
    Actually, warrantless surveillance goes beyond that. I'm a Norwegian citizen, and I take issue with the NSA having instant access to all the homemade porn me and my girlfriend exchange. So this concern really goes beyond the borders of the US. Saying that this would be all fine and dandy if it was restricted to the 95% of the people who are not in the US is a very good way to piss off all your allies and trading partners.
    - sanderjd 13y ago
      Interesting, are you using the word "warrantless" as a synonym for "baseless" or as meaning "without a warrant granted by a court of law"? If it's the first, I agree wholeheartedly - it's both unethical and just plain stupid for my government to spend time, money, political capital, and the ability to look itself in the mirror without cringing on being able to access the pornography of private citizens of ally countries. If it's the latter, I disagree - I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries. You should be pissed, and it pisses me off that my government is pissing you off, but that doesn't mean I think it needs to get warrants to spy on other countries.
      - mercurial 13y ago
        > I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries. I think there is a difference between committing illegal actions when they are inevitable (I can understand that, eg, the US would want to conduct targeted surveillance on known AQ members abroad). It's another thing to make it into an all-encompassing, industrial activity. And clearly, the distinction between "national" and "foreign" is rather... blurry. The US, the Europeans, the Australians, I assume Japan, Korean, Taiwan... look like they have a good working relationship, in which everybody can spy on everybody else, as long as you can pretend it's about security.
      - Silhouette 13y ago
        I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries. And where then does it stop? Should countries also not be required or require themselves to provide due process to citizens of other countries when they visit? How about not recognizing property rights, and confiscating their belongings? Why not go the whole way and just shoot the ones you don't like? The reason that international human rights treaties exist is that adopting isolationist policy in the area of human rights is a move that creates no winners. We just seem to have forgotten that in the context of the Internet, because the violations take place at home while the immediate victims are abroad. But the indirect consequences will probably come back to haunt those who don't respect citizens of other nations all too quickly, whether it is in loss of tourist trade, or loss of control of technologies like the Internet because a single nation is no longer trusted to administer that technology impartially, or more direct consequences to the bottom line if for example technology companies with cloud-based offerings are no longer trusted by foreign customers. The US seems to be particularly at risk today, because it has been a natural leader in some of these fields and has been trusted to act responsibly in that capacity. That trust is rapidly being eroded, and the US has more to lose as a consequence than most. Still, the general us-and-them attitude in today's international politics is a plague on all our houses.
        randallsquared 13y ago
    - Silhouette 13y ago
      And the same goes for the rest of us and our respective governments as well, of course. I think a big part of the problem here is the idea that not only are governments responsible for protecting their own citizens, they are also only required to respect the basic rights of their own citizens. That inevitably leads to one of two conclusions if governments then feel entitled to conduct mass surveillance of everyone else's citizens. One possibility is that those other people's own governments consider the surveillance a hostile act. Now everyone's government starts a cold war of information with everyone else's, even if they claim to be allies. The other possibility is that those other people's governments do not defend their own citizens from the mass surveillance, or even actively collaborate in it despite their apparent obligations to their own population. Now people don't just have cause to mistrust foreign governments, even supposedly allied ones, but they can't even trust their own government to protect them. Obviously neither of these outcomes is exactly taking the political or ethical high ground. But no-one seems to want to take a lead on what to me is the obvious third alternative: everyone accepting that we are all part of a global community today, and that international trade and communications and transportation are in all our best interests, and that which country's flag was flying when you were born probably has very little to do with whether you are a good person (probably) or a real danger (in which case everyone has legitimate grounds to go after you and already has processes in place to do so), and that because of that same level of international infrastructure and modern technology it should be just as possible to recognise everyone's basic rights by default and collaborate to go after legitimate surveillance targets anywhere instead of drawing artificial borders that are mostly accidents of history and creating a them-and-us culture that serves no-one. Modern politics reminds me of a Babylon 5 episode, which seemed amusing at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxIfMRZemc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxIfMRZemc
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      Think of it as a free cloud backup.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        if you don't have access to it, it's not a backup.
        marvin 13y ago
        Especially if it is only rarely acknowledged that the backup was taken in the first place.
    - exo762 13y ago
      Ubuntu + RetroShare. Both are very simple to use.
      - chris_wot 13y ago
        Ubuntu was not the first product that would have sprung to my mind...
- wcummings 13y ago
  >Let's not be naive. Spying doesn't involve warrants. It's called spying because that's what it is, spying, not building a legal case to take to court. Except sometimes when the collected information was used for exactly that [1] [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...
dllthomas 13y ago
It would seem to me that it's two orthogonal questions, where the probable harm is related to their product. They shouldn't be mass collecting data; they should be competently protecting data they collect.

growupkids 13y ago

Let's not be naive. Spying doesn't involve warrants. It's called spying because that's what it is, spying, not building a legal case to take to court. Warrants aren't ever going to figure into spying. You can bound the scope of what spy agencies spy on, but expecting them to spy and to get a warrant to spy before they do it, that's not going to happen. If you truly want warrant based searches for everyone, everywhere, then you have to ban spy agencies world wide and make this all a law enforcement function.

sanderjd 13y ago
There's this nice dividing line - you don't spy on your own citizens which means you need warrants to gather information on them.
- marvin 13y ago
  Actually, warrantless surveillance goes beyond that. I'm a Norwegian citizen, and I take issue with the NSA having instant access to all the homemade porn me and my girlfriend exchange. So this concern really goes beyond the borders of the US. Saying that this would be all fine and dandy if it was restricted to the 95% of the people who are not in the US is a very good way to piss off all your allies and trading partners.
  - sanderjd 13y ago
    Interesting, are you using the word "warrantless" as a synonym for "baseless" or as meaning "without a warrant granted by a court of law"? If it's the first, I agree wholeheartedly - it's both unethical and just plain stupid for my government to spend time, money, political capital, and the ability to look itself in the mirror without cringing on being able to access the pornography of private citizens of ally countries. If it's the latter, I disagree - I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries. You should be pissed, and it pisses me off that my government is pissing you off, but that doesn't mean I think it needs to get warrants to spy on other countries.
    - mercurial 13y ago
      > I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries. I think there is a difference between committing illegal actions when they are inevitable (I can understand that, eg, the US would want to conduct targeted surveillance on known AQ members abroad). It's another thing to make it into an all-encompassing, industrial activity. And clearly, the distinction between "national" and "foreign" is rather... blurry. The US, the Europeans, the Australians, I assume Japan, Korean, Taiwan... look like they have a good working relationship, in which everybody can spy on everybody else, as long as you can pretend it's about security.
    - Silhouette 13y ago
      I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries. And where then does it stop? Should countries also not be required or require themselves to provide due process to citizens of other countries when they visit? How about not recognizing property rights, and confiscating their belongings? Why not go the whole way and just shoot the ones you don't like? The reason that international human rights treaties exist is that adopting isolationist policy in the area of human rights is a move that creates no winners. We just seem to have forgotten that in the context of the Internet, because the violations take place at home while the immediate victims are abroad. But the indirect consequences will probably come back to haunt those who don't respect citizens of other nations all too quickly, whether it is in loss of tourist trade, or loss of control of technologies like the Internet because a single nation is no longer trusted to administer that technology impartially, or more direct consequences to the bottom line if for example technology companies with cloud-based offerings are no longer trusted by foreign customers. The US seems to be particularly at risk today, because it has been a natural leader in some of these fields and has been trusted to act responsibly in that capacity. That trust is rapidly being eroded, and the US has more to lose as a consequence than most. Still, the general us-and-them attitude in today's international politics is a plague on all our houses.
      - randallsquared 13y ago
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    And the same goes for the rest of us and our respective governments as well, of course. I think a big part of the problem here is the idea that not only are governments responsible for protecting their own citizens, they are also only required to respect the basic rights of their own citizens. That inevitably leads to one of two conclusions if governments then feel entitled to conduct mass surveillance of everyone else's citizens. One possibility is that those other people's own governments consider the surveillance a hostile act. Now everyone's government starts a cold war of information with everyone else's, even if they claim to be allies. The other possibility is that those other people's governments do not defend their own citizens from the mass surveillance, or even actively collaborate in it despite their apparent obligations to their own population. Now people don't just have cause to mistrust foreign governments, even supposedly allied ones, but they can't even trust their own government to protect them. Obviously neither of these outcomes is exactly taking the political or ethical high ground. But no-one seems to want to take a lead on what to me is the obvious third alternative: everyone accepting that we are all part of a global community today, and that international trade and communications and transportation are in all our best interests, and that which country's flag was flying when you were born probably has very little to do with whether you are a good person (probably) or a real danger (in which case everyone has legitimate grounds to go after you and already has processes in place to do so), and that because of that same level of international infrastructure and modern technology it should be just as possible to recognise everyone's basic rights by default and collaborate to go after legitimate surveillance targets anywhere instead of drawing artificial borders that are mostly accidents of history and creating a them-and-us culture that serves no-one. Modern politics reminds me of a Babylon 5 episode, which seemed amusing at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxIfMRZemc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxIfMRZemc
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Think of it as a free cloud backup.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      if you don't have access to it, it's not a backup.
      - marvin 13y ago
        Especially if it is only rarely acknowledged that the backup was taken in the first place.
  - exo762 13y ago
    Ubuntu + RetroShare. Both are very simple to use.
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      Ubuntu was not the first product that would have sprung to my mind...
wcummings 13y ago
>Let's not be naive. Spying doesn't involve warrants. It's called spying because that's what it is, spying, not building a legal case to take to court. Except sometimes when the collected information was used for exactly that [1] [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

dllthomas 13y ago

It would seem to me that it's two orthogonal questions, where the probable harm is related to their product. They shouldn't be mass collecting data; they should be competently protecting data they collect.