6 ms·

"permit authorities to target "lone wolf" suspects with no connection to specific terrorist groups, and make it easier to seize personal and business records of

by dm2 11y ago

"permit authorities to target "lone wolf" suspects with no connection to specific terrorist groups, and make it easier to seize personal and business records of suspects and their associates" If I search lots of technology and military related topics, or do any system-admin work, or use any privacy-enabling services (VPN / TOR), then my friends/family/associates and myself would likely fall under those categories. My concern is there should be a data-retention policy due to constantly changing laws. If 20 years from now I want to run for president, then all it would take is to search for records in one of the many caches of NSA collected data that other agency, state, local, and even foreign law-enforcement have collected over the years. That would allow a large number of people to have the power to easily find something that would distract me enough to pull me out of the race, such as inappropriate text-messages/emails that a cheating spouse sent in the past.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pvg 11y ago
Even when the president was an outright crook and used some of the machinery of state (and some other outright crooks) to dig for dirt on his opponents, he wasn't able to accomplish this through the national security services. Oh and he got caught and forced to resign. There are many good reasons to be concerned about surveillance, privacy, data gathering, etc. Your future presidential campaign is almost certainly not among them.
- hackinthebochs 11y ago
  You're kidding right? Are you actually implying the scale of information gathered in the Nixon era is anywhere comparable to what is possible now?
  - pvg 11y ago
    Are you actually implying that information gathered by security services has been used to derail someone's presidential campaign, even in the era of the worst of such abuses? Because that's what the OP is worried about, ostensibly. And it's silly.
    - dm2 11y ago
      Replace "president" with any political position, even ones outside of the US. I'm not actually worried about MY presidential campaign. But if there is a close race, there is always the "we have the candidates ebay/amazon browsing history from 2009" or "those text messages he/she sent to their secretary" option that could dramatically change history. The potential for abuse is too great to not have limits on data-retention.
      - psykovsky 11y ago
        If a sperm tainted dress stored on a closet for a couple years can do a lot of damage, imagine a full-take database stored for a couple decades or maybe even a couple centuries.
    - danenania 11y ago
      How would anyone know if they had done so? The point is they CAN exercise this kind of power, and they can do so in ways that can't be traced back to them. So who knows if they've done it? Who knows if they will? The fact that they could is the problem. Even that shadowy hypothetical threat gives them enormous (anti-democratic) power.
      - vidarh 11y ago
        In fact, the very possibility will presumably weight upon anyone considering a political career, and as such these powers will likely have an effect whether or not they are actually used.
    - hackinthebochs 11y ago
      These sorts of comments absolutely infuriate me. Just because we can't point to an instance where we know someone's presidential campaign has been thwarted doesn't mean we should ignore the possibility. If you wait for proof of malfeasance before taking a stand you are by definition always playing catch-up and praying for the next Snowden to bring you up to speed. The only way to prevent tragic abuses of power is to be proactive. We cannot wait for abuses to occur, we must be constantly vigilant in recognizing potential abuses and stopping them before they occur (just imagine how effective network security would be if it were entirely reactive instead of proactive). The world got a wake-up call with the Snowden revelations. But anyone with some technical know-how and foresight knew much of what he revealed was happening already (although I'm sure even the most forward thinking technologist was surprised at some of the revelations). I would hope the era of "but where's the proof" would be over when it comes to protecting ourselves from oppressive surveillance powers. The only way to secure this country from domestic enemies in perpetuity is to make sure such detrimental abuses cannot occur, ever. Waiting until proof is revealed is far too late. And absolutely never trust anyone with unchecked power. Your argument is also brain-dead in that the amount of information available was minuscule compared to now (thus avenues for abuse and relevant information was proportionately minuscule). The fact that it didn't happen in the era of the largest (known) abuses says absolutely nothing about the likelihood of it happening going forward.
- mapt 11y ago
  Deliberately missing the issue. Forget his future presidential campaign. How about every future presidential candidate? The existence of a panopticon corpus of information on them which is only accessible to a certain group, grants power over them to that group. In the Internet age, the NSA's policy of tracking everyone is functionally vetting and accumulating blackmail material not just on presidential candidates (where our scrutiny veers towards the ridiculous), but on anyone who ever wants to enter into any position of power. No human being, much less human organizations, could remain uncorrupted by that level of influence over power for any duration of time. If these policies are not changed, eventually it takes almost negligible amounts of misuse before the NSA or parties within the NSA are quite literally running the country & the world. It takes perhaps a solitary bad actor in the organization with this level of information to merely tip the balance in favor of bureaucratic survival, shift one election or pop an adultery scandal in the way of one board member on one telco. It would require a fanatical level of self-scrutiny and belief in the norms of liberal democracy to self-police against these durable incentives, and obviously that doesn't exist. Maybe having access to everyone's Instagram account and Google search history doesn't immediately sway the balance of power in 2001, but every year that our country doesn't cut out this brain tumor, it gains more power over us; Our odds of retaining some semblance of control over this organization drop. Quite soon, there won't be any technology-phobic individuals left in our positions of leadership. That day, control over this corpus of information will become a fulcrum that can move mountains. In writing _1984_, contra to many interpretations, Orwell wasn't afraid of the concept of tyranny. We have had many tyrannical governments before, and documented their rise and fall. He was terrified of the singular notion that the novel power of technology and panopticon surveillance, might create a powerbase which was functionally immortal, a tyranny that could never fall to dissenting calls for change; That maybe technology had made the power of 'dissent' obsolete. If that comes true, we lose the power of self-determination forever.
  - pvg 11y ago
    Calling the issue misinformed, ahistorical and overwrought is not missing the issue, it's just calling it that. Instead of reading and citing Orwell, read Bamford. You'll find a history of US security and law-enforcement agencies engaging in things far more illegal than anything that's come to light in Snowden's disclosures. You'd be hard-pressed to find among them illegal activity directed at suppressing mainstream political opposition. That would be the kiss of death for any such service. It isn't that these things are not terrible or worthy of scrutiny, opprobrium, or if you prefer, outrage. Suggesting that Western liberal democracy is somehow in unique peril because of them or 'because internet' is, and I'll say it again, silly. Western liberal democracy has easily survived a lot worse.
- cm2187 11y ago
  What about J.E. Hoover? Outside the US, the examples of these abuse are numerous. Probably the most spectacular was Francois Mitterrand in France, who was wire tapping his political opponents and some other "persons of interest" (famous actress). And by using anti-terrorist powers by the way! And having this power is not only open for abuse from the President. Lots of people in the chain of command will probably abuse it. It will also be open for abuse by law. You don't know what is OK today but will be inappropriate or illegal in 20 years. All of this has nothing to do with the US but with human nature. The reality of any large society is that you have a portion of the population who are crooks, bullies, rapists, egomaniacs, corrupt, etc. Designing a system that relies on everyone now and forever to be honest is bound to fail. This is why the US constitution introduced so many checks and balances. And one fundamental check and balance is to limit the power of the state. And the state having so much information on its citizens, on everything anyone says to anyone, on where anyone is at any given time, on who talks to who, on who reads what is way way too much power.
  - pvg 11y ago
    We're talking about the US, right? And what, specifically, about J.E. Hoover? We're probably not going to argue that he was a bad guy. Whose presidential nomination or campaign did J.E. Hoover derail? And again, let's stipulate that this was a terrible, autocratic person who abused his decades-long position in office.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      Not a presidential campaign, but Hoover was really not keen on MLK and spent a lot of effort attacking the civil rights campaign: http://time.com/3582004/fbi-letter-hoover-mlk/ http://time.com/3582004/fbi-letter-hoover-mlk/
    - cm2187 11y ago
      He was also known for having files on every politicians and blackmailing them if we believe his biopics!
sparaker 11y ago
Keeping a log for 20 years for each and every person is practically impossible at the moment, regardless of how advanced you think to seem technology is. Storage is not free and i think its stupid to keep tracking everything without a reason. If you keep logging on everything in the hopes that you may find a connection or something of that sort in the future, you'll need a lot more people to go through that sort of stuff to begin with.
- tdicola 11y ago
  Don't underestimate how deep the pockets are of government defense funds. The NSA has a gigantic datacenter in Utah that's estimated to be storing data on the exabyte order of magnitude (thousands of petabytes). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center edit: Even if they only have 1 exabyte of storage, that's enough to keep 3.3 gigabytes of data for every single person in America (~300 million). I would wager that's more than enough to store the text from everyone's email for many years.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    In fact, 3.3GB is also enough to store about 4 hours worth of speech recordings per day for a year for every single person using the best available compression. Double that since you don't need both sides of the call, and consider that the average amount of time spent on the phone is substantially less than 8h, and they can already store full voice for all US calls for many years in an exabyte. Given that the 1 exabyte is a low order estimate given the size of the Utah data centre, you have to wonder just exactly what they are actually storing or planning to store there. If someone had access to it (and I'm not saying I think the NSA do), the site is physically big enough that you could fit sufficient storage to keep years worth of voice recordings of the total global phone call volume.
    - filoeleven 11y ago
      It is also known that NSA uses speech-recognition software, making voice recordings easily searchable. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-rec...

by dm2 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pvg 11y ago

Even when the president was an outright crook and used some of the machinery of state (and some other outright crooks) to dig for dirt on his opponents, he wasn't able to accomplish this through the national security services. Oh and he got caught and forced to resign. There are many good reasons to be concerned about surveillance, privacy, data gathering, etc. Your future presidential campaign is almost certainly not among them.

hackinthebochs 11y ago
You're kidding right? Are you actually implying the scale of information gathered in the Nixon era is anywhere comparable to what is possible now?
- pvg 11y ago
  Are you actually implying that information gathered by security services has been used to derail someone's presidential campaign, even in the era of the worst of such abuses? Because that's what the OP is worried about, ostensibly. And it's silly.
  - dm2 11y ago
    Replace "president" with any political position, even ones outside of the US. I'm not actually worried about MY presidential campaign. But if there is a close race, there is always the "we have the candidates ebay/amazon browsing history from 2009" or "those text messages he/she sent to their secretary" option that could dramatically change history. The potential for abuse is too great to not have limits on data-retention.
    - psykovsky 11y ago
      If a sperm tainted dress stored on a closet for a couple years can do a lot of damage, imagine a full-take database stored for a couple decades or maybe even a couple centuries.
  - danenania 11y ago
    How would anyone know if they had done so? The point is they CAN exercise this kind of power, and they can do so in ways that can't be traced back to them. So who knows if they've done it? Who knows if they will? The fact that they could is the problem. Even that shadowy hypothetical threat gives them enormous (anti-democratic) power.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      In fact, the very possibility will presumably weight upon anyone considering a political career, and as such these powers will likely have an effect whether or not they are actually used.
  - hackinthebochs 11y ago
    These sorts of comments absolutely infuriate me. Just because we can't point to an instance where we know someone's presidential campaign has been thwarted doesn't mean we should ignore the possibility. If you wait for proof of malfeasance before taking a stand you are by definition always playing catch-up and praying for the next Snowden to bring you up to speed. The only way to prevent tragic abuses of power is to be proactive. We cannot wait for abuses to occur, we must be constantly vigilant in recognizing potential abuses and stopping them before they occur (just imagine how effective network security would be if it were entirely reactive instead of proactive). The world got a wake-up call with the Snowden revelations. But anyone with some technical know-how and foresight knew much of what he revealed was happening already (although I'm sure even the most forward thinking technologist was surprised at some of the revelations). I would hope the era of "but where's the proof" would be over when it comes to protecting ourselves from oppressive surveillance powers. The only way to secure this country from domestic enemies in perpetuity is to make sure such detrimental abuses cannot occur, ever. Waiting until proof is revealed is far too late. And absolutely never trust anyone with unchecked power. Your argument is also brain-dead in that the amount of information available was minuscule compared to now (thus avenues for abuse and relevant information was proportionately minuscule). The fact that it didn't happen in the era of the largest (known) abuses says absolutely nothing about the likelihood of it happening going forward.
mapt 11y ago
Deliberately missing the issue. Forget his future presidential campaign. How about every future presidential candidate? The existence of a panopticon corpus of information on them which is only accessible to a certain group, grants power over them to that group. In the Internet age, the NSA's policy of tracking everyone is functionally vetting and accumulating blackmail material not just on presidential candidates (where our scrutiny veers towards the ridiculous), but on anyone who ever wants to enter into any position of power. No human being, much less human organizations, could remain uncorrupted by that level of influence over power for any duration of time. If these policies are not changed, eventually it takes almost negligible amounts of misuse before the NSA or parties within the NSA are quite literally running the country & the world. It takes perhaps a solitary bad actor in the organization with this level of information to merely tip the balance in favor of bureaucratic survival, shift one election or pop an adultery scandal in the way of one board member on one telco. It would require a fanatical level of self-scrutiny and belief in the norms of liberal democracy to self-police against these durable incentives, and obviously that doesn't exist. Maybe having access to everyone's Instagram account and Google search history doesn't immediately sway the balance of power in 2001, but every year that our country doesn't cut out this brain tumor, it gains more power over us; Our odds of retaining some semblance of control over this organization drop. Quite soon, there won't be any technology-phobic individuals left in our positions of leadership. That day, control over this corpus of information will become a fulcrum that can move mountains. In writing _1984_, contra to many interpretations, Orwell wasn't afraid of the concept of tyranny. We have had many tyrannical governments before, and documented their rise and fall. He was terrified of the singular notion that the novel power of technology and panopticon surveillance, might create a powerbase which was functionally immortal, a tyranny that could never fall to dissenting calls for change; That maybe technology had made the power of 'dissent' obsolete. If that comes true, we lose the power of self-determination forever.
- pvg 11y ago
  Calling the issue misinformed, ahistorical and overwrought is not missing the issue, it's just calling it that. Instead of reading and citing Orwell, read Bamford. You'll find a history of US security and law-enforcement agencies engaging in things far more illegal than anything that's come to light in Snowden's disclosures. You'd be hard-pressed to find among them illegal activity directed at suppressing mainstream political opposition. That would be the kiss of death for any such service. It isn't that these things are not terrible or worthy of scrutiny, opprobrium, or if you prefer, outrage. Suggesting that Western liberal democracy is somehow in unique peril because of them or 'because internet' is, and I'll say it again, silly. Western liberal democracy has easily survived a lot worse.
cm2187 11y ago
What about J.E. Hoover? Outside the US, the examples of these abuse are numerous. Probably the most spectacular was Francois Mitterrand in France, who was wire tapping his political opponents and some other "persons of interest" (famous actress). And by using anti-terrorist powers by the way! And having this power is not only open for abuse from the President. Lots of people in the chain of command will probably abuse it. It will also be open for abuse by law. You don't know what is OK today but will be inappropriate or illegal in 20 years. All of this has nothing to do with the US but with human nature. The reality of any large society is that you have a portion of the population who are crooks, bullies, rapists, egomaniacs, corrupt, etc. Designing a system that relies on everyone now and forever to be honest is bound to fail. This is why the US constitution introduced so many checks and balances. And one fundamental check and balance is to limit the power of the state. And the state having so much information on its citizens, on everything anyone says to anyone, on where anyone is at any given time, on who talks to who, on who reads what is way way too much power.
- pvg 11y ago
  We're talking about the US, right? And what, specifically, about J.E. Hoover? We're probably not going to argue that he was a bad guy. Whose presidential nomination or campaign did J.E. Hoover derail? And again, let's stipulate that this was a terrible, autocratic person who abused his decades-long position in office.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Not a presidential campaign, but Hoover was really not keen on MLK and spent a lot of effort attacking the civil rights campaign: http://time.com/3582004/fbi-letter-hoover-mlk/ http://time.com/3582004/fbi-letter-hoover-mlk/
  - cm2187 11y ago
    He was also known for having files on every politicians and blackmailing them if we believe his biopics!

sparaker 11y ago

Keeping a log for 20 years for each and every person is practically impossible at the moment, regardless of how advanced you think to seem technology is. Storage is not free and i think its stupid to keep tracking everything without a reason. If you keep logging on everything in the hopes that you may find a connection or something of that sort in the future, you'll need a lot more people to go through that sort of stuff to begin with.

tdicola 11y ago
Don't underestimate how deep the pockets are of government defense funds. The NSA has a gigantic datacenter in Utah that's estimated to be storing data on the exabyte order of magnitude (thousands of petabytes). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center edit: Even if they only have 1 exabyte of storage, that's enough to keep 3.3 gigabytes of data for every single person in America (~300 million). I would wager that's more than enough to store the text from everyone's email for many years.
- vidarh 11y ago
  In fact, 3.3GB is also enough to store about 4 hours worth of speech recordings per day for a year for every single person using the best available compression. Double that since you don't need both sides of the call, and consider that the average amount of time spent on the phone is substantially less than 8h, and they can already store full voice for all US calls for many years in an exabyte. Given that the 1 exabyte is a low order estimate given the size of the Utah data centre, you have to wonder just exactly what they are actually storing or planning to store there. If someone had access to it (and I'm not saying I think the NSA do), the site is physically big enough that you could fit sufficient storage to keep years worth of voice recordings of the total global phone call volume.
  - filoeleven 11y ago
    It is also known that NSA uses speech-recognition software, making voice recordings easily searchable. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-rec...