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If you have a proper Data Protection Act(s) passed, it should be illegal for people in a country to obtain or use data stolen against the country's laws elsewhe

If you have a proper Data Protection Act(s) passed, it should be illegal for people in a country to obtain or use data stolen against the country's laws elsewhere. Not ideal, but it would make illegal the circle of spying you describe. (not that the authorities, particularly here in the UK, give a flying F about whether they're breaking existing laws...)

DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I hate playing devil's advocate on this topic, but here goes. There are _real_ terrorists out there, and also agents of other states. These folks need observation for a free country to be able to do the various things it has to do. (Or, if they don't, it remains to be shown how such a setup would effectively work). I am completely against maintaining files on your own citizens which can then be "mined" to find illegalities or improprieties later on. However -- that doesn't mean that some folks shouldn't be watched. Heck, in a country with 250M people, the odds are that there are a heckuva lot of borderline crazy people who should be monitored. I seriously hope the local constable has a good idea of the top people in his area that he should keep an eye on. I think we make a mistake when we focus on the NSA exclusively and talk as if all data collection is wrong. We need a principle that allows for nuanced collection -- not one-size-fits-all slogans. So sure, I hope the other agencies are collecting info on folks in my country, and I hope they share that information with my own country's security services -- under the right circumstances and with the right protections in place. What I don't want to see happen is the creation of a data pool where crimes can be "discovered" that normally wouldn't matter. (Really hated writing that, but somebody had to do it)
- Nursie 11y ago
  It was never the case that all collection was wrong. However it is still wrong to just collect all the data you can on everyone, even if everyone now doesn't include your own citizens. >> So sure, I hope the other agencies are collecting info on folks in my country, and I hope they share that information with my own country's security services -- under the right circumstances and with the right protections in place. This is no different from having your own guys do it. Possibly it's worse.
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    I think, perhaps, the way out of this is a universal moratorium on the commercial collection and retention of data, along with safeguards for data mining by government agencies for criminal (not intelligence) purposes. We must remember that as far as I can tell, governments have always wanted to collect whatever they could about anybody -- citizen or not. I do not agree with this, but the tendency is not limited to one government or another. What's new in the equation is the vast numbers of commercial applications/services that also want to track your every move online in order to keep you as a customer. It's this collection/retention of data that governments are now tapping into. If nobody had kept anything past 2 or 3 days, there wouldn't be much to mine.
    - mike_hearn 11y ago
      The distinction you are looking for does not exist. The primary justification for what the NSA is doing is crime: namely terrorism. The entire purpose of the NSA is to find criminals, which is a problem, because the definition of criminal can be anything the people in power want it to be. For instance in the UK they're busy trying to crack down on "extremism". The Prime Minister has given a speech about extremism where he actually said words to the effect of "For too long we have been a passively tolerant society where if you follow the law, we leave you alone". GCHQ is absolutely being mandated to find extremists. It's merely the next chunk of the slippery slope that started the moment the law changed to try and fight terrorists.
      - ptaipale 11y ago
        >The primary justification for what the NSA is doing is crime: namely terrorism. The entire purpose of the NSA is to find criminals Is it? My understanding is that NSA was founded for intelligence and counter-intelligence purposes. Cold war. SIGINT. And that is what it still does, although the capabilities of international terrorist/criminal organisations have become comparable to the capabilities of many nation states. CIA is also an intelligence agency, but human intelligence (HUMINT), not signals intelligence. FBI, on the other hand, has a primary justification of fighting crime. DEA is quite similar but focuses on drug crime, and ATF on alcohol, tobacco and firearms. CSI conducts mass campaigns against people with some intelligence in all countries, with sub-offices in CSI (NY) and CSI (Miami). (I'm not American, but have learned this much about the American three-letter things, mostly from popular fiction.)
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  I don't know anyone who is claiming that having a police force is bad, or that all investigations should be illegal. That's a strawman. Unless you can point us to people saying that? The debate has always been about (a) the effective destruction of the warrant system and (b) the pathological levels of lying that have accompanied it. Luckily, there exists a design for a system that allows for nuanced collection, as you put it: warrants authorised by skeptical judges who filter out fishing expeditions, combined with punishments for law enforcement workers who try and game the system. It's actually just the old system we thought we had and was fairly uncontroversial. However the intelligence agencies are not in the business of doing such work. If the old system was rigorously enforced then we'd be left only with the question of foreign spying. Arguably that should just be scrapped in the modern world: the most valuable commercial secrets are all in the 5 Eyes countries to start with anyway, spying on allies makes them less likely to be allies in future, and if you subtract out the foreign wars started by the west you're left with things that seem to produce little real world impact (watching North Korea for instance: what are we gonna do about it, exactly?).
- revelation 11y ago
  You are proposing a secret police. That's an insult in the face of history.
- furyg3 11y ago
  I don't think that the issue is that people are opposed to a police force to gather and use using data effectively to protect it's own citizens. It's when they use a foreign agency to make and end-run around their own laws that is at issue. There are some fundamental differences between domestic and foreign surveillance. Domestic intelligence has to comply with the country's own laws, ultimately created and supervised by a democracy (ideally). If the populace wants to error on the side of less safe and less surveillance, that's their decision. Foreign intelligence is pretty much by definition 'criminal' in nature. As a theoretical example... a CIA agent using fake identities in foreign countries tapping phone lines is a criminal in the place where he is acting. Even when intercepting German <-> German communications on his own soil where it is technically 'legal' goes against the spirit of due process in Germany and may be illegal there. Should they be prosecuted? Can they? The answer is interesting but certainly tough to answer. Ideally friendly governments would understand this problem and try to protect their own citizens from spying by other 'friendly' governments through treaties... don't spy on my citizens and I won't spy on yours. Unfortunately they do the exact opposite and transfer 'foreign intelligence' gathered by one country on a foreign citizen to the 'domestic intelligence' services where that citizen lives. This is a dance around the due process rules. You can't just contract out your law breaking to some foreign government or company.
- DominikR 11y ago
  The problem is that most terror organisations have been sponsored or are still secretly supported by the US government or its allies with approval from the US.
- nokcha 11y ago
  > We need a principle that allows for nuanced collection In fact, that's exactly what the Fourth Amendment demands. If the government has probable cause to suspect someone of wrongdoing, they can a search warrant particularized to that one person. Authority to spy on everybody's communications is exactly the type of 'general warrant' that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.
- TheCondor 11y ago
  You know they interpret this to be nuanced collection, don't you? They capture all the data and then when there is a lead, they inspect it and they consider it collection at that time. The bulk capturing of the data is to make nuanced collection available, otherwise the data might no longer exist. The myth is that it has anything to do with terrorists, the definition they are using (and its hyper political, the president won't just say something is terrorism) pretty much excludes Americans. Now if they expanded it to include the Sandy Hook shooter, the Batman shooter, Fort Hood, etc... Then at the very least you could make a case that they are collecting the right data when they capture American data.
- jellicle 11y ago
  > These folks need observation for a free country to be able to do the various things it has to do. Do you have any evidence for that? I would argue the exact opposite: in order for a free country to exist, the amount of spying done by the country on its citizens and even outsiders must be pretty small at most. Each unit of "watching" applied to the public reduces "freedom" by the exact same amount. It isn't clear whether there's any increase in security at all. The watching may be 100% destructive, with no benefits whatsoever.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  No, nobody had to do it. "We" don't need anything. In this matter, you do not speak for me. And that is all that truly needs to be said. Having expressed your opinion that surveillance is permissible based solely on one's mental state differing from the modal pattern, you have implicitly permitted the state to use medical diagnosis as a weapon against dissent, and thereby discouraged any such borderline cases from admitting their weaknesses to seek treatment voluntarily. Congratulations. You have increased the number of crazies out there, many of whom are now taking steps to conceal their condition, which necessarily includes avoiding doctors and therapists that keep records. Furthermore, you resort to such weasel words as "right circumstances" and "right protections". The right circumstances are fabricated for the sake of appearances. The right protections are bypassed for the sake of expediency. Surely, you are not so naive as to not realize this would occur? The local constable can keep an eye on those people who have outstanding warrants, those who are on parole or probation, and those under investigation pursuant to actual complaints and accusations, rather than statistical profiles. Everyone else should be left alone. If this practice makes it more difficult to intervene in certain types of crime, that is an irreparable structural weakness in all free societies. You cannot close that gap without making your society much less free, and I might add that the attempt does not appear to be making the formerly free societies any less dangerous.
- tobylane 11y ago
  What justification is there for nuanced collection? Relevant people said (something along the lines of) nothing was only known via NSA, either it wasn't known or the other agencies found out.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

I hate playing devil's advocate on this topic, but here goes. There are _real_ terrorists out there, and also agents of other states. These folks need observation for a free country to be able to do the various things it has to do. (Or, if they don't, it remains to be shown how such a setup would effectively work). I am completely against maintaining files on your own citizens which can then be "mined" to find illegalities or improprieties later on. However -- that doesn't mean that some folks shouldn't be watched. Heck, in a country with 250M people, the odds are that there are a heckuva lot of borderline crazy people who should be monitored. I seriously hope the local constable has a good idea of the top people in his area that he should keep an eye on. I think we make a mistake when we focus on the NSA exclusively and talk as if all data collection is wrong. We need a principle that allows for nuanced collection -- not one-size-fits-all slogans. So sure, I hope the other agencies are collecting info on folks in my country, and I hope they share that information with my own country's security services -- under the right circumstances and with the right protections in place. What I don't want to see happen is the creation of a data pool where crimes can be "discovered" that normally wouldn't matter. (Really hated writing that, but somebody had to do it)

Nursie 11y ago
It was never the case that all collection was wrong. However it is still wrong to just collect all the data you can on everyone, even if everyone now doesn't include your own citizens. >> So sure, I hope the other agencies are collecting info on folks in my country, and I hope they share that information with my own country's security services -- under the right circumstances and with the right protections in place. This is no different from having your own guys do it. Possibly it's worse.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  I think, perhaps, the way out of this is a universal moratorium on the commercial collection and retention of data, along with safeguards for data mining by government agencies for criminal (not intelligence) purposes. We must remember that as far as I can tell, governments have always wanted to collect whatever they could about anybody -- citizen or not. I do not agree with this, but the tendency is not limited to one government or another. What's new in the equation is the vast numbers of commercial applications/services that also want to track your every move online in order to keep you as a customer. It's this collection/retention of data that governments are now tapping into. If nobody had kept anything past 2 or 3 days, there wouldn't be much to mine.
  - mike_hearn 11y ago
    The distinction you are looking for does not exist. The primary justification for what the NSA is doing is crime: namely terrorism. The entire purpose of the NSA is to find criminals, which is a problem, because the definition of criminal can be anything the people in power want it to be. For instance in the UK they're busy trying to crack down on "extremism". The Prime Minister has given a speech about extremism where he actually said words to the effect of "For too long we have been a passively tolerant society where if you follow the law, we leave you alone". GCHQ is absolutely being mandated to find extremists. It's merely the next chunk of the slippery slope that started the moment the law changed to try and fight terrorists.
    - ptaipale 11y ago
      >The primary justification for what the NSA is doing is crime: namely terrorism. The entire purpose of the NSA is to find criminals Is it? My understanding is that NSA was founded for intelligence and counter-intelligence purposes. Cold war. SIGINT. And that is what it still does, although the capabilities of international terrorist/criminal organisations have become comparable to the capabilities of many nation states. CIA is also an intelligence agency, but human intelligence (HUMINT), not signals intelligence. FBI, on the other hand, has a primary justification of fighting crime. DEA is quite similar but focuses on drug crime, and ATF on alcohol, tobacco and firearms. CSI conducts mass campaigns against people with some intelligence in all countries, with sub-offices in CSI (NY) and CSI (Miami). (I'm not American, but have learned this much about the American three-letter things, mostly from popular fiction.)
mike_hearn 11y ago
I don't know anyone who is claiming that having a police force is bad, or that all investigations should be illegal. That's a strawman. Unless you can point us to people saying that? The debate has always been about (a) the effective destruction of the warrant system and (b) the pathological levels of lying that have accompanied it. Luckily, there exists a design for a system that allows for nuanced collection, as you put it: warrants authorised by skeptical judges who filter out fishing expeditions, combined with punishments for law enforcement workers who try and game the system. It's actually just the old system we thought we had and was fairly uncontroversial. However the intelligence agencies are not in the business of doing such work. If the old system was rigorously enforced then we'd be left only with the question of foreign spying. Arguably that should just be scrapped in the modern world: the most valuable commercial secrets are all in the 5 Eyes countries to start with anyway, spying on allies makes them less likely to be allies in future, and if you subtract out the foreign wars started by the west you're left with things that seem to produce little real world impact (watching North Korea for instance: what are we gonna do about it, exactly?).
revelation 11y ago
You are proposing a secret police. That's an insult in the face of history.
furyg3 11y ago
I don't think that the issue is that people are opposed to a police force to gather and use using data effectively to protect it's own citizens. It's when they use a foreign agency to make and end-run around their own laws that is at issue. There are some fundamental differences between domestic and foreign surveillance. Domestic intelligence has to comply with the country's own laws, ultimately created and supervised by a democracy (ideally). If the populace wants to error on the side of less safe and less surveillance, that's their decision. Foreign intelligence is pretty much by definition 'criminal' in nature. As a theoretical example... a CIA agent using fake identities in foreign countries tapping phone lines is a criminal in the place where he is acting. Even when intercepting German <-> German communications on his own soil where it is technically 'legal' goes against the spirit of due process in Germany and may be illegal there. Should they be prosecuted? Can they? The answer is interesting but certainly tough to answer. Ideally friendly governments would understand this problem and try to protect their own citizens from spying by other 'friendly' governments through treaties... don't spy on my citizens and I won't spy on yours. Unfortunately they do the exact opposite and transfer 'foreign intelligence' gathered by one country on a foreign citizen to the 'domestic intelligence' services where that citizen lives. This is a dance around the due process rules. You can't just contract out your law breaking to some foreign government or company.
DominikR 11y ago
The problem is that most terror organisations have been sponsored or are still secretly supported by the US government or its allies with approval from the US.
nokcha 11y ago
> We need a principle that allows for nuanced collection In fact, that's exactly what the Fourth Amendment demands. If the government has probable cause to suspect someone of wrongdoing, they can a search warrant particularized to that one person. Authority to spy on everybody's communications is exactly the type of 'general warrant' that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.
TheCondor 11y ago
You know they interpret this to be nuanced collection, don't you? They capture all the data and then when there is a lead, they inspect it and they consider it collection at that time. The bulk capturing of the data is to make nuanced collection available, otherwise the data might no longer exist. The myth is that it has anything to do with terrorists, the definition they are using (and its hyper political, the president won't just say something is terrorism) pretty much excludes Americans. Now if they expanded it to include the Sandy Hook shooter, the Batman shooter, Fort Hood, etc... Then at the very least you could make a case that they are collecting the right data when they capture American data.
jellicle 11y ago
> These folks need observation for a free country to be able to do the various things it has to do. Do you have any evidence for that? I would argue the exact opposite: in order for a free country to exist, the amount of spying done by the country on its citizens and even outsiders must be pretty small at most. Each unit of "watching" applied to the public reduces "freedom" by the exact same amount. It isn't clear whether there's any increase in security at all. The watching may be 100% destructive, with no benefits whatsoever.
logfromblammo 11y ago
No, nobody had to do it. "We" don't need anything. In this matter, you do not speak for me. And that is all that truly needs to be said. Having expressed your opinion that surveillance is permissible based solely on one's mental state differing from the modal pattern, you have implicitly permitted the state to use medical diagnosis as a weapon against dissent, and thereby discouraged any such borderline cases from admitting their weaknesses to seek treatment voluntarily. Congratulations. You have increased the number of crazies out there, many of whom are now taking steps to conceal their condition, which necessarily includes avoiding doctors and therapists that keep records. Furthermore, you resort to such weasel words as "right circumstances" and "right protections". The right circumstances are fabricated for the sake of appearances. The right protections are bypassed for the sake of expediency. Surely, you are not so naive as to not realize this would occur? The local constable can keep an eye on those people who have outstanding warrants, those who are on parole or probation, and those under investigation pursuant to actual complaints and accusations, rather than statistical profiles. Everyone else should be left alone. If this practice makes it more difficult to intervene in certain types of crime, that is an irreparable structural weakness in all free societies. You cannot close that gap without making your society much less free, and I might add that the attempt does not appear to be making the formerly free societies any less dangerous.
tobylane 11y ago
What justification is there for nuanced collection? Relevant people said (something along the lines of) nothing was only known via NSA, either it wasn't known or the other agencies found out.