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Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveillance
- Stefanrio 12y agoI love how people still make noise about NSA, while gladly using facebook.
- imgabe 12y agoFacebook does not have the power to imprison you or mark you as a suspected terrorist and put you on a no-fly list and freeze your bank accounts.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y agoBut it has the power to completely undermine public discourse and thus democratic decisionmaking.
- pessimizer 12y agoThe NSA can (and does) use Facebook to mark you as a suspected terrorist and put you on a no-fly list. The NSA doesn't have the power to imprison you or seize your bank accounts without the help of a judge.
- imgabe 12y agoThat is a reason to oppose the NSA, not Facebook.
- avn2109 12y agoHowever, the balance of power in our society has now shifted to the point where the NSA is trivially capable of securing the judges' cooperation. So the "help of the judge" will be granted anytime the NSA asks for it, and in a practical sense they can still do all sorts of unpleasant things to you at will. Also, if a judge starts being uncooperative, the NSA has a lengthy dossier on his adultery, homosexuality, communist tendencies, suspected terrorist links, etc. It would be a real shame for that dossier to find its way to the public, wouldn't it...?
- opendais 12y agoI don't use Facebook.
- Linear-b 12y agoIt doesn't matter, they are still building a profile on you and selling it. These are called "shadow profiles".
- opendais 12y agoGood luck with that. Even the credit reporting companies get confused and can't figure out who I am accurately. And I actively help them since I like having credit cards and the ability to get mortgage loans.
- Linear-b 12y agoFacebook has built a platform that's much more accurate and comprehensive than anything experian has, because experian isn't in the business of selling your political beliefs and sexual orientation and a hundred other demographics to marketers. You can file a FOIA request with Facebook to see what they have on you. Other people have, and have gotten their dossiers. Have you had a phone number or mailing address in the past 10 years? If so, they've gotcha covered.
- tzs 12y agoIt still massively affects you (assuming you are in the US), because of the 4th Amendment. That's the one that prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. A key factor in whether a search or seizure is unreasonable is whether or not you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The standard for what is a reasonable expectation of privacy is what society considers to be reasonable, not what you individually consider to be reasonable. So even though you are not on Facebook, all those people who ARE on it and are sharing publicly the most intimate details of their lives are moving the 4th Amendment boundary between searches and seizures that require a warrant and those that do not.
- watwut 12y agoFacebooks ability to use my kids and cat pictures is not comparable to government ability to read political activists or journalists emails. Random person ability to know what school I did go to is not as dangerous to justice as governments ability to read communication of defense in high profile case. By your logic, everyone who make noise about NSA should go underground to keep the right to complain.
- sp332 12y agoEvery level of government, right down to the municipal level, can ask Facebook to hand all that data over at any time. They don't even need a court order if they claim it's an emergency or involves a child. https://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines/ https://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines/ Facebook admits to turning over data on tens of thousands of people in the USA. https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/2013-H2/ https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/20...
- vezzy-fnord 12y agoIt's not just that, though. All of the casual information that you post on Facebook, including timestamps and whatnot, can all be used to infer and create a detailed portfolio as to your personality, location, political views, sexual orientation, interests, commonly visited places, employer, etc. EXIF data from photographs alone is a goldmine. There was actually a practical example of a man FOIAing his documents from Facebook, which revealed that they had over a thousand pages specifically devoted to him alone on every facet of his life. Even though he was only a "casual" user (one wall update a week, or so). You can see it in the documentary film Terms and Conditions May Apply. As for me personally, I've never had a Facebook account. Although virtually no one is impervious, reducing social media presence is still always useful to get rid of the blatantly incriminating things. Unfortunately, the biggest threat is perhaps, what other people are saying about you. I have no idea about what's going on there...
- marincounty 12y agoI sometimes wonder about using any site--including HN. Facebook would be easy to give up(It actually makes me more depressed, and the people I want on there left, or never joined.) HN is hard to give up.
- BankingAnon 12y agoHN tends to punish people using Tor or other methods to obfuscate their tracks. On the four or five other accounts I've abandoned, this is then first that allows me more than 3 minutes on the site without invalidating my token due to inactivity. I suspect because it's been a valid IP every time (or so they think). You should not expect privacy on computer systems you do not own. HN included.
- Linear-b 12y ago"On computer systems" has a hollower ring now than it did a decade ago. Everything is on a computer system now. Even face to face interactions leave a plethora of metadata behind. The nature of privacy has always been a function of social norms and technology, but given the directions we're headed in these days I think it's easy to make a case that the average citizen has given up a lot more privacy, then they have gained in convenience. My life was easier when it took me an hour to download a megabyte and I spent more time outside... and I say that as a web developer.
- tertia 12y agofacebook won't declare me an enemy combatant and murder me if I say something they don't like.
- junto 12y agoWhile that is very true, should you state your grievances on Facebook, then it makes you easier to target. All those anti-Israel comments on FB at the moment - bingo, you've been tagged as probably anti-Semitic, potentially a Muslim terrorism supporter and worth putting on a watch list. Now if you happen to go to a humanitarian demo that is judged to be pro-Palestine then you are highly liked to be filmed (especially in the UK). The contents of those police cameras are later downloaded and processed. Face recognition software cross-references you with Facebook and other public people databases. Searching....ping....found target... - Name: <Tertia>... - Anthropology: Caucasian - Source: Facebook NSA hook - Threat score: 1.3 - Upgrading threat score: + 2.5 Auto triggers: - Flag Homeland Security - Tag passport - Watch social security number - Track internet usage (log level: all) It is probably an exaggeration as of today, but this is the system that the NSA is aiming for.
- Zigurd 12y agoWhy do you wonder? Unless you have no public-facing products or publications you are personally directly involved in, it's perfectly rational to use social media for things that would be out in public and subject to whatever scrutiny anyone cares to apply to them, AND, at the same time, "make noises" as you so dismissively put it.
- jahewson 12y agoThe difference is that they choose to use Facebook.
- diafygi 12y ago> Economic losses to US businesses due to lost sales and declining customer trust. Whenever I have a discussion with friends on this topic, this is what I focus on. For many people, safety has a higher political priority than privacy. However, when you start saying that mass surveillance kills jobs, it gets much more attention because economic issues are usually on par or above safety concerns. This is why I don't understand Google's and Facebook's (and IBM's and Cisco's and RSA's, for that matter) response to this thing. If they really wanted to stop these programs, they would make a SuperPAC and run ads everywhere saying "NSA" and "job killers" in the same sentence as many times as possible.
- opendais 12y agoIt is because the people with MBAs and the people on the Board don't really care that much. They'll protest and engage in a little bit of legal action but they don't want to go all out to fight it.
- happyscrappy 12y agoGoogle and Facebook just posted record profits, why are the MBAs supposed to care?
- opendais 12y agoI never said they were supposed to care. :P
- vonmoltke 12y ago> For many people, safety has a higher political priority than privacy. However, when you start saying that mass surveillance kills jobs, it gets much more attention because economic issues are usually on par or above safety concerns. Then there are people like my wife, who thinks disclosure hurt the US politically and economically, thus rationalizing that it is Snowden's fault for revealing all these surveillance programs, not the NSA's for having them in the first place. I think that attitude, combined with "safety > privacy" and "I have nothing to hide" are very common amongst more politically-aware people. I, unfortunately, can't come up with many good, non-tinfoil rebuttals.
- smoothgrips 12y agoI've often wondered if the NSA is constitutional. Not what they're doing, but the organization itself. The constitution, from my understanding, grants the federal government power to do certain things. Therefore, if the constitution doesn't specifically grant the federal government the power/ability to run, say the NSA (or other federal department), does that not warrant the entire thing unconstitutional?
- w4 12y agoNot really; the Constitution establishes the Federal government as responsible for national defense. Assuming you can construe the NSA as necessary for national defense then the NSA is constitutional (though not necessarily its activities).
- triangleman 12y agoTechnically speaking, you are correct. Practically and legally, everything Congress does is jammed through Article I Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants it the authority to "regulate" interstate commerce. Also, what w4 said. But again if you want to get technical, the Constitution restricts Congress's authority to provide for the common defense to having an army or a navy, but not an Air Force, and not a National Security Agency.
- tertia 12y agoand boy, does this need an amendment: when a farmer can be sued and forced to not grow food for his own family, and the suit is found valid because of Article I Section 8 we have a huge problem.
- angersock 12y agoEh? What's this?
- fizgig 12y agoThere's a structure in the US and its states that regulate what (subsidized?) farmers can grow. I don't know if it's solely the USDA. Anyway, if a farmer is supposed to be growing soybeans, they cannot grow (for example) potatoes. There have been cases of farmers having crops meant for family consumption that have been sued (or raided? -- something way over the top for the violation, anyway). IIRC, the big gun that it used is the interstate commerce clause. So if a spud farmer in Idaho wants a few bushels of wheat for his family, his growing it would (supposedly) impact market value on wheat prices. There's some scary stuff in the farming regulation. There was a law in the works called NAIS (national animal ID system)that severely intrudes on people's right to raise their own livestock. It was stirring up a storm of controversy in homesteaders' circles a decade ago, though I don't know the current state of that is.
- aragot 12y agoThe article uses few facts, or the facts aren't detailed. I admit doing that when I comment sometimes, but it's wrong and I expect a journalist to prove his point (and help us convince other people in turn). Example: > The deterioration of internet security as a result of the NSA stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities Not quantified. It would be an awesome figure to reuse. > Brazil reportedly scuttled a $4.5 billion fighter jet contract with Boeing It's been criticized on HN: Most people believed blaming it on the NSA was a PR move [4], whereas the real underlying reasons where certainly more complex and not related. > The CEO of the European firm reported that within a month after the first revelations of NSA spying went public, his company’s business jumped 45 percent Totally irrelevant if the company is small. > The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has estimated that repercussions from the spying could cost the U.S. cloud computing industry some $22 to $35 billion over the next few years in lost business. That's the best fact of the article. However I'm not sure Americans are impressed with it. In fact the country [1] doesn't mind spending $6 trillion for a war in Afghanistan [2], so they count those $35b as just another defense cost. Besides, the NSA itself was reported by Snowden with a budget of $14b in 2013 [3]. [1] I'm aware that's not what most US citizen like, but as a country, US did spend this money. [2] http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-wars-in-afghanistan-iraq-to-cost-6-trillion/5350789 http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-wars-in-afghanistan-iraq-to-... [3] http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4672414/leaked-snowden-documents-reveal-details-of-surveillance-budget http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4672414/leaked-snowden-doc... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6931035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6931035
- coldpie 12y agoThe article is summarizing the report by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. The linked PDF contains some of the figures you ask for, such as: > The CEO of Artmotion, one of Switzerland’s largest offshore hosting providers, reported in July 2013 that his company had seen a 45 percent jump in revenue. This tells us the company is large within the country, and Switzerland isn't exactly small potatoes. I think what you are looking for is the PDF itself, not the summary of the PDF that is this article :)