13 ms·

Help Shut the Government's Surveillance Backdoors

171 points by sinak 12y ago

Canada 12y ago
That's great. I'm all for political advocacy, but we still need better technical safeguards and culture that eagerly uses them.
- thomasfromcdnjs 12y ago
  https://pack.resetthenet.org https://pack.resetthenet.org does a good job at listing tools for citizens to use
praxeologist 12y ago
I don't trust that passing new laws will do anything when existing law is being broken. Show me people being thrown in jail and I will believe they are serious.
- nullc 12y ago
  This doesn't make it worthless. Making things more illegal increases the costs and the risks it makes the tools more fragile and decreases cooperation of the private sector. It doesn't replace other approaches— changing the design of the services we use to make this kind of surveillance closer to a mathematical impossibility— but its still worthwhile.
- declan 12y ago
  Quite right. When was the last time a government official was imprisoned and lost his or her pension for engaging in unconstitutional surveillance? Sure, a rank-and-file cop stalking an ex-girlfriend by looking up her whereabouts in a law enforcement database may occasionally get disciplined. I'm talking about people with "director" or "section chief" or "attorney general" somewhere in their title.
donohoe 12y ago
Done and done.
- dave809 12y ago
  I think a little bit of bragging is good, it can create a bit of social pressure for others to act. More people should publicly share what they've done So, your awesome, if I was a US citizen I would be calling right now.
cesarbs 12y ago
Does my call count if I'm not American but live in the US as a worker?
- mratzloff 12y ago
  No. If you are not a US citizen, you don't have a vote, and therefore you do not have a representative in Congress. That said… I doubt they have any capacity to actually check if callers are US citizens.
  - lisper 12y ago
    And even if you are not a U.S. citizen you can still contribute to super-PACs. Since the political system in the U.S. is rapidly devolving to one-dollar-one-vote you can acquire significant influence by writing checks. And they don't even have to be particularly big checks.
  - declan 12y ago
    If you're a permanent resident (a "green card" holder) you can do something more effective than merely filling out a web form or phoning a congresscritter's aides. You can donate money to help the pro-privacy politicos (very few) or aid challengers to the anti-privacy politicos (many, but unlikely to succeed). http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/foreign.shtml http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/foreign.shtml "An immigrant may make a [political] contribution if he or she has a 'green card' indicating his or her lawful admittance for permanent residence in the United States." The real way to do it, which I've written about occasionally for the last decade, is to identify the worst surveillance offenders of each major party. Narrow down the list to ones who are electorally vulnerable (this excludes Feinstein, for instance). You'll need to spend millions of dollars on ads reminding voters how thoroughly the incumbent disrespects the Constitution. Also encourage contributions to the incumbent's challenger. Only do this where you're likely to win. Committee chairmen would be ideal. Be thoroughly non-partisan and focused only on surveillance. Once you do that, and have a Cantor-like upset against the pro-surveillance, anti-privacy incumbent, suddenly privacy will be taken far more seriously on Capitol Hill. Politicians will respond better to this than a useless $1,000 PAC contribution.
  - 12y ago
mwsherman 12y ago
The NSA doesn’t obey laws. Or, more precisely, we don’t know if they obey laws. Or, when we think a law limits their behavior, it will be challenged, where ‘challenged’ means ignored until it is discovered, then tried in secret. Functionally, laws don’t matter here. Their existence, and their content, are not predictive of the NSA’s behavior.
- john_b 12y ago
  You are ignoring a few decades of history in which successful court challenges have curtailed some NSA excesses. It's easy to forget that, while the capabilities of the NSA have increased in the past decade, intelligence agencies today have more attention directed at them than in the past, and thus are more sensitive to any public perception that they are acting in an illegal manner.
  - declan 12y ago
    >You are ignoring a few decades of history in which successful court challenges have curtailed some NSA excesses Can you list these "successful court challenges" that have taken place in open court in the last generation? Say, 30 years? You're not talking about the Sixth Circuit decision in 2007 tossing out the attempt to challenge NSA warrantless surveillance, I take it? :) Edit: Or the 9th Circuit affirming the dismissal of another case in June 2013. Or the Supreme Court in February 2013 holding plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the NSA. Or EFF's Jewel case, which is ongoing six years later without resolution. Or the Supreme Court in November 2013 rejecting EPIC's mandamus petition in NSA lawsuit. Etc.
    - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
      They're probably referring to the findings presented by the Church Committee. What was interesting was that they were talking about how intelligence agencies had the resources to impose "total tyranny"... back in 1975. I'm not sure what actual effects did it have concerning intelligence reform, though. Evidently nothing major.
john_b 12y ago
This is great and I hope that people do call their representatives, but I wonder if it would be more effective if the pro-privacy and civil rights demographic would organize on a more permanent basis to call representatives rather than on an issue-by-issue basis. To some extent, this describes the EFF and the ACLU, but I'm thinking more of ordinary people who understand that these kinds of reforms need to happen, but aren't interested in being a member of such an organization. Each time a new bill starts making its way through Congressional committees someone spins up a new issue-specific website, which is good, but it seems like there must be a lot of overhead in organizing on an issue-specific basis and that a lot of work (collecting emails, convincing people that this issue is worth their time to call, etc) is duplicated. Maybe individual grassroots political advocacy could even be incentivized in a "gamification" kind of way if it had a more permanent organizational structure with account or email records that persisted across issues? I don't really have anything concrete though; mostly I'm just thinking out loud.
- npizzolato 12y ago
  Presumably, the people who will regularly call their representatives about privacy and civil rights issues are already members of the ACLU and/or EFF and can get updates through them. I'm not sure what group of people wouldn't want to be a part of either organization but would prefer to be a part of another organization that would send them updates on these sort of issues. The point of websites like these is to draw in other people who either don't know about the issues or wouldn't normally put in the work to keep up with news and regularly call their representatives.
- declan 12y ago
  > if it would be more effective if the pro-privacy and civil rights demographic would organize on a more permanent basis to call representatives rather than on an issue-by-issue basis. EFF, and to a lesser extent the ACLU, has been doing this for over 20 years. >more of ordinary people who understand that these kinds of reforms need to happen, but aren't interested in being a member of such an organization. You don't need to be a member of EFF to sign up for their alerts.
cik 12y ago
The problem is that this fight is only about a small, very small part of the equation. It's the entire Black Budget we need to see shut down. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...
- grkvlt 12y ago
  You aren't seriously suggesting that all secret funding be cancelled, or made public? What about the huge number of legitimately secret projects that must be funded covertly to prevent adversaries discovering and exploiting defence and national security capabilities. I think this debate has caused a lot of people to wrongly equate 'secret' with 'evil' or 'immoral' and 'unethical, which is not the case. Look at the specifics, don't make unjustified sweeping generalisations...
  - dublinben 12y ago
    At the risk of asking an unanswerable question, what kind of "legitimately secret projects" do you think must remain funded by a covert budget?
    - YokoZar 12y ago
      XCOM
    - logfromblammo 12y ago
      The kind that are completely incompatible with an open, democratic society, obviously. The fundamental problem is that any secrecy sufficient to hide weakness from an adversary can also hide corruption from the beneficiary. We literally cannot tell the difference between the cost of running a legitimate defense operation and the cost of all the director's cronies buying beach cocktails all morning, country club fees all afternoon, and hookers and blow all night. If you look hard enough at just the publicly reported budget items, you can see worse! Corruption does not become less prevalent under a thicker layer of obfuscation! And, obviously, if you write down on your budget that you need tax money to intentionally give Southern black men syphilis and then leave it untreated just so that you can see what happens to them, some people might have a problem with that. But then again, you might ask for tax money to kidnap and imprison people with Japanese ancestry until the war with Japan ends, and people would be too busy to notice it. If giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenaged boys, adding secrecy is like putting a teenaged girl in the mix. Any rational parent would, quite sensibly, attempt to ensure that the boy only had access to, at most, one of those three things at any given time, because any two in combination inevitably results in utter disaster.
zmanian 12y ago
I got a confirmed yes from Anne Eshoo. Anyone else have a report?
austincheney 12y ago
Instead of laws and wishful thinking why don't people take action toward an alternative technology: http://mailmarkup.org/value.xhtml http://mailmarkup.org/value.xhtml You can tell the people who really care about this subject from those who just need something to whine about by looking at the contributions they make.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  There isn't really an either-or here. Do both.
lazydev99 12y ago
There is certainly a lot of things that NSA may do, but the website references FISA 702, but doesn't understand it: http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/topics/section-702 http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/topics/section-702 This is not a back door but an order given to a US company AND the person CANNOT be in the US, regardless if the person is a US person or not.
- mpyne 12y ago
  > but the website references FISA 702, but doesn't understand it: One of the very first Snowden leaks was a complete misunderstanding of the leaked program (PRISM), so why should it be shocking that FISA 702 is misunderstood here?
dfc 12y ago
It is unthinkably strange that this "call to action" does not include a link to the full text of the ammendment. Why do the organizers think that it would not be useful for people to read the ammendment that they are urging support of? Is it too complex for my feeble mind to comprehend? Or am I assumed to be so sheeplike that I will blindly support something merely because the page casts the ammendment as "anti-NSA"? From what I can tell the page is urging support for: http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/LOFGRE_055519141339143914.pdf http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/LOFGRE_05551914... Ms. Lofgren also has ammendment regarding mandated backdoors in chips, firmware and tech standards: http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/LOFGRE_056519141329382938.pdf http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/LOFGRE_05651914...
- sinak 12y ago
  That's a good call, we'll add a link to the amendment now. The amendment was only made public this morning so we didn't have it when we were making the site last night. The whole site was made in about 16 hours, so apologies it's not more fully-baked. Edit: Link added. Edit: Just re-reading your comment. We definitely don't think you're sheep-like or feeble-minded. In fact, quite the opposite. It was simply an accidental omission.
  - dfc 12y ago
    I appreciate your candor and response and I apologize if it seems like I am picking on you. The truth is that this omission seems to be the norm, so these comments should not be read as directed at you but at online activists in general.[^1] In my opinion there seems to be a problem of priorities and perspective. The goal is not "making a site" instead it should be "creating an awareness /advocacy campaign." When viewed from this perspective collecting materials for citizen education is the first step, or "1. Register domain, 2. Collect materials for education" and at the very least "X. Collect materials, X+1. Launch site." [^1]: The most recent that I can remember: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7841903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7841903
brightsize 12y ago
I just called Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, my rep from eastern WA. The woman who answered was quite pleasant, but didn't know anything about this amendment. She said that I was the first person to call about it, and that they needed more people like me who "pay attention". Since my rep is a far-right Republican, I'm hoping that she has enough libertarian in her to vote the right way.
shutupalready 12y ago
> The amendment would block the NSA from using any of its funding... Why is the legislation is written to cut off funding as opposed to making the act itself illegal? In fact, why not do both, i.e., deny the use of funds and make the action (warrantless searches and backdoors) illegal?

171 points by sinak 12y ago

That's great. I'm all for political advocacy, but we still need better technical safeguards and culture that eagerly uses them.

thomasfromcdnjs 12y ago
https://pack.resetthenet.org https://pack.resetthenet.org does a good job at listing tools for citizens to use

praxeologist 12y ago

I don't trust that passing new laws will do anything when existing law is being broken. Show me people being thrown in jail and I will believe they are serious.

nullc 12y ago
This doesn't make it worthless. Making things more illegal increases the costs and the risks it makes the tools more fragile and decreases cooperation of the private sector. It doesn't replace other approaches— changing the design of the services we use to make this kind of surveillance closer to a mathematical impossibility— but its still worthwhile.
declan 12y ago
Quite right. When was the last time a government official was imprisoned and lost his or her pension for engaging in unconstitutional surveillance? Sure, a rank-and-file cop stalking an ex-girlfriend by looking up her whereabouts in a law enforcement database may occasionally get disciplined. I'm talking about people with "director" or "section chief" or "attorney general" somewhere in their title.

donohoe 12y ago

Done and done.

dave809 12y ago
I think a little bit of bragging is good, it can create a bit of social pressure for others to act. More people should publicly share what they've done So, your awesome, if I was a US citizen I would be calling right now.

cesarbs 12y ago

Does my call count if I'm not American but live in the US as a worker?

mratzloff 12y ago
No. If you are not a US citizen, you don't have a vote, and therefore you do not have a representative in Congress. That said… I doubt they have any capacity to actually check if callers are US citizens.
- lisper 12y ago
  And even if you are not a U.S. citizen you can still contribute to super-PACs. Since the political system in the U.S. is rapidly devolving to one-dollar-one-vote you can acquire significant influence by writing checks. And they don't even have to be particularly big checks.
- declan 12y ago
  If you're a permanent resident (a "green card" holder) you can do something more effective than merely filling out a web form or phoning a congresscritter's aides. You can donate money to help the pro-privacy politicos (very few) or aid challengers to the anti-privacy politicos (many, but unlikely to succeed). http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/foreign.shtml http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/foreign.shtml "An immigrant may make a [political] contribution if he or she has a 'green card' indicating his or her lawful admittance for permanent residence in the United States." The real way to do it, which I've written about occasionally for the last decade, is to identify the worst surveillance offenders of each major party. Narrow down the list to ones who are electorally vulnerable (this excludes Feinstein, for instance). You'll need to spend millions of dollars on ads reminding voters how thoroughly the incumbent disrespects the Constitution. Also encourage contributions to the incumbent's challenger. Only do this where you're likely to win. Committee chairmen would be ideal. Be thoroughly non-partisan and focused only on surveillance. Once you do that, and have a Cantor-like upset against the pro-surveillance, anti-privacy incumbent, suddenly privacy will be taken far more seriously on Capitol Hill. Politicians will respond better to this than a useless $1,000 PAC contribution.
- 12y ago

mwsherman 12y ago

The NSA doesn’t obey laws. Or, more precisely, we don’t know if they obey laws. Or, when we think a law limits their behavior, it will be challenged, where ‘challenged’ means ignored until it is discovered, then tried in secret. Functionally, laws don’t matter here. Their existence, and their content, are not predictive of the NSA’s behavior.

john_b 12y ago
You are ignoring a few decades of history in which successful court challenges have curtailed some NSA excesses. It's easy to forget that, while the capabilities of the NSA have increased in the past decade, intelligence agencies today have more attention directed at them than in the past, and thus are more sensitive to any public perception that they are acting in an illegal manner.
- declan 12y ago
  >You are ignoring a few decades of history in which successful court challenges have curtailed some NSA excesses Can you list these "successful court challenges" that have taken place in open court in the last generation? Say, 30 years? You're not talking about the Sixth Circuit decision in 2007 tossing out the attempt to challenge NSA warrantless surveillance, I take it? :) Edit: Or the 9th Circuit affirming the dismissal of another case in June 2013. Or the Supreme Court in February 2013 holding plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the NSA. Or EFF's Jewel case, which is ongoing six years later without resolution. Or the Supreme Court in November 2013 rejecting EPIC's mandamus petition in NSA lawsuit. Etc.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    They're probably referring to the findings presented by the Church Committee. What was interesting was that they were talking about how intelligence agencies had the resources to impose "total tyranny"... back in 1975. I'm not sure what actual effects did it have concerning intelligence reform, though. Evidently nothing major.

john_b 12y ago

This is great and I hope that people do call their representatives, but I wonder if it would be more effective if the pro-privacy and civil rights demographic would organize on a more permanent basis to call representatives rather than on an issue-by-issue basis. To some extent, this describes the EFF and the ACLU, but I'm thinking more of ordinary people who understand that these kinds of reforms need to happen, but aren't interested in being a member of such an organization. Each time a new bill starts making its way through Congressional committees someone spins up a new issue-specific website, which is good, but it seems like there must be a lot of overhead in organizing on an issue-specific basis and that a lot of work (collecting emails, convincing people that this issue is worth their time to call, etc) is duplicated. Maybe individual grassroots political advocacy could even be incentivized in a "gamification" kind of way if it had a more permanent organizational structure with account or email records that persisted across issues? I don't really have anything concrete though; mostly I'm just thinking out loud.

npizzolato 12y ago
Presumably, the people who will regularly call their representatives about privacy and civil rights issues are already members of the ACLU and/or EFF and can get updates through them. I'm not sure what group of people wouldn't want to be a part of either organization but would prefer to be a part of another organization that would send them updates on these sort of issues. The point of websites like these is to draw in other people who either don't know about the issues or wouldn't normally put in the work to keep up with news and regularly call their representatives.
declan 12y ago
> if it would be more effective if the pro-privacy and civil rights demographic would organize on a more permanent basis to call representatives rather than on an issue-by-issue basis. EFF, and to a lesser extent the ACLU, has been doing this for over 20 years. >more of ordinary people who understand that these kinds of reforms need to happen, but aren't interested in being a member of such an organization. You don't need to be a member of EFF to sign up for their alerts.

cik 12y ago

The problem is that this fight is only about a small, very small part of the equation. It's the entire Black Budget we need to see shut down. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...

grkvlt 12y ago
You aren't seriously suggesting that all secret funding be cancelled, or made public? What about the huge number of legitimately secret projects that must be funded covertly to prevent adversaries discovering and exploiting defence and national security capabilities. I think this debate has caused a lot of people to wrongly equate 'secret' with 'evil' or 'immoral' and 'unethical, which is not the case. Look at the specifics, don't make unjustified sweeping generalisations...
- dublinben 12y ago
  At the risk of asking an unanswerable question, what kind of "legitimately secret projects" do you think must remain funded by a covert budget?
  - YokoZar 12y ago
    XCOM
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    The kind that are completely incompatible with an open, democratic society, obviously. The fundamental problem is that any secrecy sufficient to hide weakness from an adversary can also hide corruption from the beneficiary. We literally cannot tell the difference between the cost of running a legitimate defense operation and the cost of all the director's cronies buying beach cocktails all morning, country club fees all afternoon, and hookers and blow all night. If you look hard enough at just the publicly reported budget items, you can see worse! Corruption does not become less prevalent under a thicker layer of obfuscation! And, obviously, if you write down on your budget that you need tax money to intentionally give Southern black men syphilis and then leave it untreated just so that you can see what happens to them, some people might have a problem with that. But then again, you might ask for tax money to kidnap and imprison people with Japanese ancestry until the war with Japan ends, and people would be too busy to notice it. If giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenaged boys, adding secrecy is like putting a teenaged girl in the mix. Any rational parent would, quite sensibly, attempt to ensure that the boy only had access to, at most, one of those three things at any given time, because any two in combination inevitably results in utter disaster.

zmanian 12y ago

I got a confirmed yes from Anne Eshoo. Anyone else have a report?

austincheney 12y ago

Instead of laws and wishful thinking why don't people take action toward an alternative technology: http://mailmarkup.org/value.xhtml http://mailmarkup.org/value.xhtml You can tell the people who really care about this subject from those who just need something to whine about by looking at the contributions they make.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago
There isn't really an either-or here. Do both.

lazydev99 12y ago

There is certainly a lot of things that NSA may do, but the website references FISA 702, but doesn't understand it: http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/topics/section-702 http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/topics/section-702 This is not a back door but an order given to a US company AND the person CANNOT be in the US, regardless if the person is a US person or not.

mpyne 12y ago
> but the website references FISA 702, but doesn't understand it: One of the very first Snowden leaks was a complete misunderstanding of the leaked program (PRISM), so why should it be shocking that FISA 702 is misunderstood here?

dfc 12y ago

It is unthinkably strange that this "call to action" does not include a link to the full text of the ammendment. Why do the organizers think that it would not be useful for people to read the ammendment that they are urging support of? Is it too complex for my feeble mind to comprehend? Or am I assumed to be so sheeplike that I will blindly support something merely because the page casts the ammendment as "anti-NSA"? From what I can tell the page is urging support for: http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/LOFGRE_055519141339143914.pdf http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/LOFGRE_05551914... Ms. Lofgren also has ammendment regarding mandated backdoors in chips, firmware and tech standards: http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/LOFGRE_056519141329382938.pdf http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/LOFGRE_05651914...

sinak 12y ago
That's a good call, we'll add a link to the amendment now. The amendment was only made public this morning so we didn't have it when we were making the site last night. The whole site was made in about 16 hours, so apologies it's not more fully-baked. Edit: Link added. Edit: Just re-reading your comment. We definitely don't think you're sheep-like or feeble-minded. In fact, quite the opposite. It was simply an accidental omission.
- dfc 12y ago
  I appreciate your candor and response and I apologize if it seems like I am picking on you. The truth is that this omission seems to be the norm, so these comments should not be read as directed at you but at online activists in general.[^1] In my opinion there seems to be a problem of priorities and perspective. The goal is not "making a site" instead it should be "creating an awareness /advocacy campaign." When viewed from this perspective collecting materials for citizen education is the first step, or "1. Register domain, 2. Collect materials for education" and at the very least "X. Collect materials, X+1. Launch site." [^1]: The most recent that I can remember: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7841903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7841903

brightsize 12y ago

I just called Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, my rep from eastern WA. The woman who answered was quite pleasant, but didn't know anything about this amendment. She said that I was the first person to call about it, and that they needed more people like me who "pay attention". Since my rep is a far-right Republican, I'm hoping that she has enough libertarian in her to vote the right way.

shutupalready 12y ago

> The amendment would block the NSA from using any of its funding... Why is the legislation is written to cut off funding as opposed to making the act itself illegal? In fact, why not do both, i.e., deny the use of funds and make the action (warrantless searches and backdoors) illegal?