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I have zero confidence in the LEO/domestic intelligence services caring whether protest-plans.ppt break federal law. And I don't want Google to have to implemen

by morsch 12y ago

I have zero confidence in the LEO/domestic intelligence services caring whether protest-plans.ppt break federal law. And I don't want Google to have to implement some completely opaque "rough verification process" to determine whether the government requested trigger is valid in one case but not in another.

tptacek 12y ago
I always do a sort of mental double-take when I see comments like this. If you have zero confidence in law enforcement caring about the law, then what does any of this matter? What's to discuss? The government is going to do whatever it wants, and there are no policy implications to Google's detection of child pornography. There's nowhere to go from that rhetorical position, so why even bother picking specific things in opposing comments to respond to?
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  This is nonsense. It's perfectly consistent to think that law enforcement is willing to cheat when they can get away with it, but that other domestic forces are capable of holding them accountable for that. Further, it strawmans the position: they do think that law enforcement cares about the law, just not so much as catching lawbreakers who aren't part of the political or policing class, and is willing to cheat the law in order to "fulfill the deeper mission", or some ascribed view like that. A natural reply to thinking that law enforcement will cheat if it can is to think that other large, entrenched players must force law-enforcement to disclose its actions for review before lending their power to law enforcement goals - which is exactly the stance in insisting that Google not respond to hashed lists, and instead demand to see the files that they're supposed to be blocking. It increases the number of players necessary to cheat successfully, and hence removes some of the incentive of law enforcement to cheat.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Your comment would be stronger without the first sentence, but glass houses, stones, &c. Since the rest of it was a good-faith response to my question: I'm not sure I understand how it's consistent to believe that law enforcement (to be precise: "LEOs and domestic intelligence") are inclined to ignore the law entirely, and believe that there's accountability. If there was accountability, they could not easily incline towards ignoring the law, because doing that would have consequences. Belief in the former condition seems to equate to disbelief of the latter. I don't think I responded to a straw man argument. I think you rehabilitated a broken argument and then supposed that I was responding to that better argument instead of the one that was actually posed.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  I have pretty good confidence in law enforcement caring about the law in general. I have quite low confidence in intelligence agencies using a law for its intended purpose. I expect them to stretch and distort what they are allowed to do, and to abuse mass filtering mechanisms. So they should for the most part not be allowed to have mass filtering mechanisms. To put it more simply: I do not expect the details of these laws to be followed, and 'type of content blocked' is a detail. But at a macro scale the law will be followed.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Sure. I think I agree with this. However: what's being described here is not a system that can be directly abused by the CIA or NSA to trawl for documents. It is coupled in at least two specific ways with the search for child pornography: (1) it only works for images (from a known corpus), and (2) the corpus is managed not by the USG writ large but by a cooperative effort specific to child pornography. I see the slope, but the traction on it is pretty solid.
  - meowface 12y ago
    Well, I agree with that to some extent. I have a bit of faith in companies like Google and Microsoft though. If suddenly their feed of illicit image hashes began to contain content related to politics or protecting government secrets, I think they'd raise hell. I also don't think the FBI would be dumb enough to start pushing that sort of stuff and harming the relationship they have with tech companies. Now, I can very much see NSA doing that kind of content inspection without the companies knowing about it. And that's not just because we already know it's been happening for years. But law enforcement != intelligence, or at least it shouldn't. The FBI does still have a corps of good old fashioned cops, even if they're now getting more and more into the intelligence side of things.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      You'll probably feel marginally better to know that the corpus of hashes is managed not by the FBI, but by NCMEC, an NGO.
- morsch 12y ago
  A bit late for a reply, but for the record: That's a double straw man. I always do a mental double-take when that happens because now suddenly I feel like I have to defend a position that's twice removed from my own. I did not say "LEO doesn't care about the law", I said I have no confidence that LEO and domestic intelligence agencies will care whether the documents they scan for are against the law. It doesn't take much imagination that they can easily justify watching for protest-plans.ppt because of terrrism, both towards themselves and against outside supervision, if there is any. Of course they're not going to charge you for protest-plans.ppt, but it sure is a useful document to have and might even come in handy as character evidence. Furthermore, even if I had said they don't care about the law preventing them from monitoring communication in this way[0] it's unreasonable to assume that I also think they don't care about any law at all and hence "the government is going to do whatever it wants". [0] in fact, if LEO is monitoring all mail in this manner, I would hope that they are breaking the law (domestic intelligence can probably do whatever the hell they want); but again, that was not what I had in mind

by morsch 12y ago

tptacek 12y ago

I always do a sort of mental double-take when I see comments like this. If you have zero confidence in law enforcement caring about the law, then what does any of this matter? What's to discuss? The government is going to do whatever it wants, and there are no policy implications to Google's detection of child pornography. There's nowhere to go from that rhetorical position, so why even bother picking specific things in opposing comments to respond to?

ObviousScience 12y ago
This is nonsense. It's perfectly consistent to think that law enforcement is willing to cheat when they can get away with it, but that other domestic forces are capable of holding them accountable for that. Further, it strawmans the position: they do think that law enforcement cares about the law, just not so much as catching lawbreakers who aren't part of the political or policing class, and is willing to cheat the law in order to "fulfill the deeper mission", or some ascribed view like that. A natural reply to thinking that law enforcement will cheat if it can is to think that other large, entrenched players must force law-enforcement to disclose its actions for review before lending their power to law enforcement goals - which is exactly the stance in insisting that Google not respond to hashed lists, and instead demand to see the files that they're supposed to be blocking. It increases the number of players necessary to cheat successfully, and hence removes some of the incentive of law enforcement to cheat.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Your comment would be stronger without the first sentence, but glass houses, stones, &c. Since the rest of it was a good-faith response to my question: I'm not sure I understand how it's consistent to believe that law enforcement (to be precise: "LEOs and domestic intelligence") are inclined to ignore the law entirely, and believe that there's accountability. If there was accountability, they could not easily incline towards ignoring the law, because doing that would have consequences. Belief in the former condition seems to equate to disbelief of the latter. I don't think I responded to a straw man argument. I think you rehabilitated a broken argument and then supposed that I was responding to that better argument instead of the one that was actually posed.
Dylan16807 12y ago
I have pretty good confidence in law enforcement caring about the law in general. I have quite low confidence in intelligence agencies using a law for its intended purpose. I expect them to stretch and distort what they are allowed to do, and to abuse mass filtering mechanisms. So they should for the most part not be allowed to have mass filtering mechanisms. To put it more simply: I do not expect the details of these laws to be followed, and 'type of content blocked' is a detail. But at a macro scale the law will be followed.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Sure. I think I agree with this. However: what's being described here is not a system that can be directly abused by the CIA or NSA to trawl for documents. It is coupled in at least two specific ways with the search for child pornography: (1) it only works for images (from a known corpus), and (2) the corpus is managed not by the USG writ large but by a cooperative effort specific to child pornography. I see the slope, but the traction on it is pretty solid.
- meowface 12y ago
  Well, I agree with that to some extent. I have a bit of faith in companies like Google and Microsoft though. If suddenly their feed of illicit image hashes began to contain content related to politics or protecting government secrets, I think they'd raise hell. I also don't think the FBI would be dumb enough to start pushing that sort of stuff and harming the relationship they have with tech companies. Now, I can very much see NSA doing that kind of content inspection without the companies knowing about it. And that's not just because we already know it's been happening for years. But law enforcement != intelligence, or at least it shouldn't. The FBI does still have a corps of good old fashioned cops, even if they're now getting more and more into the intelligence side of things.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    You'll probably feel marginally better to know that the corpus of hashes is managed not by the FBI, but by NCMEC, an NGO.
morsch 12y ago
A bit late for a reply, but for the record: That's a double straw man. I always do a mental double-take when that happens because now suddenly I feel like I have to defend a position that's twice removed from my own. I did not say "LEO doesn't care about the law", I said I have no confidence that LEO and domestic intelligence agencies will care whether the documents they scan for are against the law. It doesn't take much imagination that they can easily justify watching for protest-plans.ppt because of terrrism, both towards themselves and against outside supervision, if there is any. Of course they're not going to charge you for protest-plans.ppt, but it sure is a useful document to have and might even come in handy as character evidence. Furthermore, even if I had said they don't care about the law preventing them from monitoring communication in this way[0] it's unreasonable to assume that I also think they don't care about any law at all and hence "the government is going to do whatever it wants". [0] in fact, if LEO is monitoring all mail in this manner, I would hope that they are breaking the law (domestic intelligence can probably do whatever the hell they want); but again, that was not what I had in mind