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Not really. He is addressing the concerns of the majority of people, not the .00001% of America that comprises HN, where the only acceptable speech would be tha

Not really. He is addressing the concerns of the majority of people, not the .00001% of America that comprises HN, where the only acceptable speech would be that the NSA is being shut down tomorrow.

rayiner 13y ago
I can't believe this got down-voted. This is absolutely true. To the extent that Americans have a problem with what the NSA is doing, it's with the fact that NSA's collection of phone records doesn't try hard enough to filter out information from Americans. Their opposition to this does not mean they embrace the leftist/globalist ideas that are so common on HN (e.g. foreigners should have the same rights as Americans!) If the reform is actually just: 1) We stop spying on prominent politicians in heavily allied countries; and 2) We shut down the mass collection of call records and implement a new system that only does mass collection of international calls and traffic; That would make the vast majority of people perfectly happy.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  The gp certainly deserved downvoting. It was more or less Nixonian "silent majority" propaganda with no substance behind it. In any given scandal that's not of truly titanic proportions, "addressing the concerns of the majority of people" inherently is papering-over any problems without addressing them - since the majority is going to be concerned with other stuff and no have that much of an opinion. And your claims of the reactionary-ness of the majority hasn't been born-out by polls. The majority may indeed be satisfiable by simple thing but the rhetoric of that is not so much democratic as demagogic.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  I think you overestimate the requirements of most Americans. Most of them just want to hear "I will fix this" and "we won't spy on YOU". Many could care less if you spy on the other guys, let alone other world leaders.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I'm not talking about the people who really don't care, I'm talking about the (broad) subset of Americans that care about the issue and oppose the NSA's current activities. My point is even within that group, the meat of the opposition is to those specific issues, not the fundamental mission of the NSA.
smokeyj 13y ago
Do you think Obama is appealing to non subject matter experts because they're reasonable, or ignorant?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- comex 13y ago
  I'd say the difference in view between subject matter experts and others has a number of causes. Some are pure ignorance: for example, most people do not know how tenuous the security of the Internet already is, and thus how harmful it is to try to actively subvert it. But those can only really be part of the story; security protocols seemingly haven't been affected all that much in practice (c.f. Dual EC's brokenness in OpenSSL), and the core question of whether it is acceptable to spy on private communications doesn't really depend on technical details (indeed, there was plenty of anger over just spying on plain-old-telephone-service records, which most of the people here don't know those details about). So I would also nominate... - More technically inclined people have more (for some, I'd say an order of magnitude more, however you want to define that) of their life online, so they (a) have more data online and thus more to lose, and (b) tend to care much more about anything which affects their activities, since it is more important to them. - Having a connection, direct or broad, with the technologies and the people responsible for securing things can make their subversion feel more violating; so can knowing that many things (email, Google's backend) could have been secured better but weren't, partially due to a false belief that the US Internet didn't need to be treated as an adversary. - Connections in the "tech community" causing a bandwagon effect in topics that spread well beyond technology itself. In the context of one forum, such as this one, this is quite clear (the political norm here is very far from the mainstream in areas that have nothing to do with tech); less so the more broadly you define the community, but I think there is some group bias to be found even if you include every programmer in the US.
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  The people he's appealing to are the majority, SME's or not.
lubujackson 13y ago
Well, that's being a little flippant. I think there's plenty that could be done to improve the situation. Mainly, we need to be able to discuss whether 50,000 contractors should have full search access to all these records that are too secret to discuss with congress. 1) Congressional oversight, even if it's a special committee. NSA can't be completely outside of elected governance. There should be NO level of access that is "too classified" for this committee. If "super access" like that needs to exist in some fashion it should NOT be under the jurisdiction of the NSA. As it stands, that excuse is a loophole that undermines the concept of oversight and the NSA is way too big of an organization to have that power. Just moving "super secret" stuff to a smaller, more concentrated organization would improve things immensely. 2) Clear and open communication over access rights. The structure of which roles have what access should not be considered a secret. If this somehow weakens our security, so be it - that's the price of democracy. 3) Better access control. From what has been leaked, it's clear the NSA is putting a lot of value in security through obscurity. As we all know, this isn't a great approach. At the same time, contractors are given access to actually get stuff done. The terms of access, tracking of usage, etc. need to be discussed in a more open way because right now that's the biggest problem of the NSA.
- mpyne 13y ago
  50,000 contractors may have clearances, but they don't all have access to those records. Remember, the whole point of Snowden going in with sysadmin access, and then stealing credentials and otherwise impersonating 20 other people, is precisely because the stuff Snowden wanted to leak was so compartmentalized. Your 1) has already happened, AFAIK. Perhaps we need to have different (i.e. more active and intrusive) Congressmen on the subcommittee so that they don't act so shocked when details come out, but that's a different issue. Another key note is that unlike almost every other subcommittee, these Congressional overseers don't get the ability for political patronage out of what they do. The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, for instance, can be greatly influential in drawing massive DoD dollars to their district, but there's not much the Intelligence committees can do in the same vein, aside from random data centers perhaps. Even then, I know there was a determination by Sen. Feinstein earlier that EO 12333 collection was not in their oversight bailiwick. That wasn't NSA refusing to discuss it, it was the subcommittee deciding it was out of their jurisdiction. There are many Federal agencies and groups that do monitor EO 12333 (though it is certainly unclear what type of oversight they are providing across the totality of programs). Beyond all that, I do agree that nothing going on within NSA should be out-of-scope for oversight (including Congressional oversight, if it comes to it). From the nuclear propulsion perspective, we had routine audits of essentially every major program, institutionalized. I don't know how the Congressional subcommittees do their business but it would be a good idea to institute the same there, and also ensure that NSA/IC staff (contractors too) can always feel comfortable coming to a staffer from that Congressional subcommittee with details of abuses. I'd give the NSA some credit on security through obscurity because you're talking about intelligence programs, not computer code or algorithms. A rule of thumb from crypto research does not necessarily directly apply to anything with the word "communications" in it. ;) In fact the only real problem I see in 3) is that (assuming you're talking about public discussion) the people who most need to care (the American public) are going to have their eyes glaze over immediately, the people who might actually be able to craft countermeasures would be intensely interested, and it wouldn't even prevent government abuse; how easy is it to craft a good system of access controls for public approval but then add workarounds as needed in practice?

Not really. He is addressing the concerns of the majority of people, not the .00001% of America that comprises HN, where the only acceptable speech would be that the NSA is being shut down tomorrow.

rayiner 13y ago

I can't believe this got down-voted. This is absolutely true. To the extent that Americans have a problem with what the NSA is doing, it's with the fact that NSA's collection of phone records doesn't try hard enough to filter out information from Americans. Their opposition to this does not mean they embrace the leftist/globalist ideas that are so common on HN (e.g. foreigners should have the same rights as Americans!) If the reform is actually just: 1) We stop spying on prominent politicians in heavily allied countries; and 2) We shut down the mass collection of call records and implement a new system that only does mass collection of international calls and traffic; That would make the vast majority of people perfectly happy.

joe_the_user 13y ago
The gp certainly deserved downvoting. It was more or less Nixonian "silent majority" propaganda with no substance behind it. In any given scandal that's not of truly titanic proportions, "addressing the concerns of the majority of people" inherently is papering-over any problems without addressing them - since the majority is going to be concerned with other stuff and no have that much of an opinion. And your claims of the reactionary-ness of the majority hasn't been born-out by polls. The majority may indeed be satisfiable by simple thing but the rhetoric of that is not so much democratic as demagogic.
Shivetya 13y ago
I think you overestimate the requirements of most Americans. Most of them just want to hear "I will fix this" and "we won't spy on YOU". Many could care less if you spy on the other guys, let alone other world leaders.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I'm not talking about the people who really don't care, I'm talking about the (broad) subset of Americans that care about the issue and oppose the NSA's current activities. My point is even within that group, the meat of the opposition is to those specific issues, not the fundamental mission of the NSA.

smokeyj 13y ago

Do you think Obama is appealing to non subject matter experts because they're reasonable, or ignorant?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
comex 13y ago
I'd say the difference in view between subject matter experts and others has a number of causes. Some are pure ignorance: for example, most people do not know how tenuous the security of the Internet already is, and thus how harmful it is to try to actively subvert it. But those can only really be part of the story; security protocols seemingly haven't been affected all that much in practice (c.f. Dual EC's brokenness in OpenSSL), and the core question of whether it is acceptable to spy on private communications doesn't really depend on technical details (indeed, there was plenty of anger over just spying on plain-old-telephone-service records, which most of the people here don't know those details about). So I would also nominate... - More technically inclined people have more (for some, I'd say an order of magnitude more, however you want to define that) of their life online, so they (a) have more data online and thus more to lose, and (b) tend to care much more about anything which affects their activities, since it is more important to them. - Having a connection, direct or broad, with the technologies and the people responsible for securing things can make their subversion feel more violating; so can knowing that many things (email, Google's backend) could have been secured better but weren't, partially due to a false belief that the US Internet didn't need to be treated as an adversary. - Connections in the "tech community" causing a bandwagon effect in topics that spread well beyond technology itself. In the context of one forum, such as this one, this is quite clear (the political norm here is very far from the mainstream in areas that have nothing to do with tech); less so the more broadly you define the community, but I think there is some group bias to be found even if you include every programmer in the US.
res0nat0r 13y ago
The people he's appealing to are the majority, SME's or not.

lubujackson 13y ago

Well, that's being a little flippant. I think there's plenty that could be done to improve the situation. Mainly, we need to be able to discuss whether 50,000 contractors should have full search access to all these records that are too secret to discuss with congress. 1) Congressional oversight, even if it's a special committee. NSA can't be completely outside of elected governance. There should be NO level of access that is "too classified" for this committee. If "super access" like that needs to exist in some fashion it should NOT be under the jurisdiction of the NSA. As it stands, that excuse is a loophole that undermines the concept of oversight and the NSA is way too big of an organization to have that power. Just moving "super secret" stuff to a smaller, more concentrated organization would improve things immensely. 2) Clear and open communication over access rights. The structure of which roles have what access should not be considered a secret. If this somehow weakens our security, so be it - that's the price of democracy. 3) Better access control. From what has been leaked, it's clear the NSA is putting a lot of value in security through obscurity. As we all know, this isn't a great approach. At the same time, contractors are given access to actually get stuff done. The terms of access, tracking of usage, etc. need to be discussed in a more open way because right now that's the biggest problem of the NSA.

mpyne 13y ago
50,000 contractors may have clearances, but they don't all have access to those records. Remember, the whole point of Snowden going in with sysadmin access, and then stealing credentials and otherwise impersonating 20 other people, is precisely because the stuff Snowden wanted to leak was so compartmentalized. Your 1) has already happened, AFAIK. Perhaps we need to have different (i.e. more active and intrusive) Congressmen on the subcommittee so that they don't act so shocked when details come out, but that's a different issue. Another key note is that unlike almost every other subcommittee, these Congressional overseers don't get the ability for political patronage out of what they do. The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, for instance, can be greatly influential in drawing massive DoD dollars to their district, but there's not much the Intelligence committees can do in the same vein, aside from random data centers perhaps. Even then, I know there was a determination by Sen. Feinstein earlier that EO 12333 collection was not in their oversight bailiwick. That wasn't NSA refusing to discuss it, it was the subcommittee deciding it was out of their jurisdiction. There are many Federal agencies and groups that do monitor EO 12333 (though it is certainly unclear what type of oversight they are providing across the totality of programs). Beyond all that, I do agree that nothing going on within NSA should be out-of-scope for oversight (including Congressional oversight, if it comes to it). From the nuclear propulsion perspective, we had routine audits of essentially every major program, institutionalized. I don't know how the Congressional subcommittees do their business but it would be a good idea to institute the same there, and also ensure that NSA/IC staff (contractors too) can always feel comfortable coming to a staffer from that Congressional subcommittee with details of abuses. I'd give the NSA some credit on security through obscurity because you're talking about intelligence programs, not computer code or algorithms. A rule of thumb from crypto research does not necessarily directly apply to anything with the word "communications" in it. ;) In fact the only real problem I see in 3) is that (assuming you're talking about public discussion) the people who most need to care (the American public) are going to have their eyes glaze over immediately, the people who might actually be able to craft countermeasures would be intensely interested, and it wouldn't even prevent government abuse; how easy is it to craft a good system of access controls for public approval but then add workarounds as needed in practice?