On the topic of "there's no hardware available to process that much information": there very well might be. Take a crapton of processing power to crack common encryption standards, toss in a dash of one of the best analysis machines in the world (or something like it), and you have a serious amount of capability sitting right there.
Yes, yes, they will certainly just "crack common encryption standards"
Because that is really easy
Well, when you have a few hundred examples of the use of someone's public key(statistical analysis rather than brute force approaches), and lots and lots of horsepower, it actually becomes doable for selected keys. Not "easy" but when they find something worth investing the resources in it is generally possible, on an extremely limited basis. Like, with what they are building, and with the brightest minds in the world, it is meaningfully within the realm of possibility.
Stuff like very involved modeling of metadata, voice and speech recognition, simple keyword analysis and basically anything else you can think of is a hell of a lot easier.
I'm not saying easy, I'm saying with a facility of that size it becomes a task that is capable of being accomplished.
Additionally, the specter of these agencies obtaining prime number lists and other relevant information used by RSA could vastly improve the efficiency of this task.
What prime number lists are you talking about? If you're referring to the RSA Factoring Challenge numbers, those are just arbitrary semiprimes generated for the purposes of testing how difficult integer factorization (the problem forming the basis of the RSA algorithm) actually is. Simply knowing what those numbers are would have no effect on the security of RSA.
No, I'm talking about the algorithm itself wherein primes are used for key generation. A similar area of concern is RSA's SecurID products, for which they have a list of seed values; RSA Security (the company) has been targeted previously in attempts to steal these.
The primes used to create the public and private keys for RSA encryption (or any other encryption algorithm I'm aware of based on integer factorization) are generated on the user's computer and then discarded once the values of the two keys are calculated, so there's no aggregate list of primes to be obtained.
SecurID and similar two-factor authentication services do have a centralized list of seeds, and the compromise of those lists would indeed be a problem, but two-factor authentication is for authentication rather than data encryption and thus not relevant to the topic.
Also, I don't really think it's OK that the FBI conducted warrantless surveillance of the Klan. Klansmen had committed enough actual crimes to justify a real criminal investigation using conventional police work -- and ultimately many Klan convictions were secured through exactly those means, particularly the use of informants.
So you're saying that because people in a millions strong organization had committed some crimes that its OK to investigate the organization?
In which case investigating MLK and the broader civil rights organizations was totally OK too because the Black Panthers were a part of the movement and they had committed violent acts.
Note, King was wiretapped, his mail was read, etc. If the level of surveillance levied against him in the 1960s amounted to just tracking who he was writing letters to and receiving letters from, that whole section of history wouldn't be nearly as much of a black eye for the FBI.
PRISM includes the content of communications as well as their metadata. My problem with PRISM isn't that the government can read your emails if they have probable cause -- this has always been the case and is right and proper. The problem with PRISM, and the NSA's approach to surveillance in general, is that the checks and balances in the system are totally opaque. We don't know anything about the court's deliberations in the authorization process; we don't even know what legal standards they are applying. We have no idea how stringent they are being. We don't know if there are scrupulous judges going through NSA requests line by line and asking tough questions or if they are just putting a rubber stamp on large batches of requests without even reading them. The congresspeople responsible for overseeing these questions either also do not know or are not allowed to talk about it. Everything about the process amounts to a "trust me." How can that not make you wary?
It's fairly well known that the FISA "court" judges are rubber-stamping requests; the sheer volume more than outweighs their ability to give each warrant its due consideration.
The in-house oversight stuff in the NSA is also known to be understaffed and overburdened.
0
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
The state really doesn't have any business knowing the detail's anyone's personal life except when necessary to investigate or prevent a specific crime.
Is social stability a goal of the USG? Should it be?
I am not so sure that the answer is "no" as you say.
As to whether or not the USG should be discrediting people with the information again doesn't that depend on whether or not they're really destabilizing?
Think of it this way. If you don't collect information on MLK jr every citizen. Then how do you determine whether or not he is an internal threat to society a subversive element that threatens the government? A better question would be "after investigating him, why did they think he was?"
Man what.
MLK was obviously a threat to society, but it turns out the society at the time had some shit wrong with it and needed to be threatened.
1) No one is collecting data on every citizen.
2) Sure but how do you determine what is and isn't wrong with society and needed to be threatened? How do we say that its OK for the FBI to have come down on the KKK but not for them to have investigated King?
Here's clue #1: The KKK has a history of actually murdering lots of citizens and threatening the lives of lots of others. They have proved themselves in the past to be a terrorist organization and make perfectly clear their intention to commit more crimes. Whereas MLK was a preacher who spoke about passively resisting government injustice while not harming anybody.
So you, the government, should be investigating people who threaten to harm the citizens, and ignoring people who are advocating for social changes.
Unless you feel like government is inherently justified in making itself ever more authoritarian with the intent of preventing possible future changes to the social order! Which it sort of seems like you do agree with...
So uhh we didn't actually know that the KKK "had a history of actually murdering lots of citizens" until we investigated them. The KKK publicly claimed it was just a social organization. It had a lot of members, some were obviously violent.
The KKK publicly claimed this, but it was a transparent lie. Anyone living in the deep south, black or white, knew exactly what the Klan was up to. The same could not be said for King's SCLC, which was scrupulously nonviolent.
Seems to indicate that it was the FBI's surveillance of the KKK which helped identify and prosecute the perpetrators.
Most importantly the investigation of the KKK contradicts the supposed nefariousness of the investigation of MLK. If the FBI was really invested in "keeping the social order" they wouldn't have investigated the KKK. But you know, they did, because they weren't interested in the social order they were interested in stopping potential violence.
Hoover investigated MLK because he was an obsessive racist who personally hated King. He reluctantly expanded the scope of COINTELPRO to include the KKK because the White House wanted him do. Surveillance of the KKK amounted to roughly 15% of COINTELPRO activity. While this inappropriate surveillance no doubt helped in securing convictions, it's difficult to overstate my skepticism that illegal surveillance was the only means by which those convictions could have been secured. Unlike the Civil Rights movement, the KKK had a real body count for the FBI to investigate.
0
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Nixon totally would have rifled through the porn stash of his political enemies. And we know for sure that John F. Kennedy got a real kick out of what J. Edgar Hoover dug up about Lyndon Johnson's sex life.
There's a reason everything you're referencing here takes place before this.
It's funny that you and I can both look at the Church Committee hearings and come to such divergent conclusions.
I read about the Church Committee investigations and I think, "Well this proves that we need to be extremely skeptical of the government's claimed needs for surveillance, because we know that the government has routinely abused this power in the past."
You seem to look at this history and think, "Well I'm glad we solved that problem." Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here.
Nixon totally would have rifled through the porn stash of his political enemies. And we know for sure that John F. Kennedy got a real kick out of what J. Edgar Hoover dug up about Lyndon Johnson's sex life.
There's a reason everything you're referencing here takes place before this.
It's funny that you and I can both look at the Church Committee hearings and come to such divergent conclusions.
I read about the Church Committee investigations and I think, "Well this proves that we need to be extremely skeptical of the government's claimed needs for surveillance, because we know that the government has routinely abused this power in the past."
You seem to look at this history and think, "Well I'm glad we solved that problem." Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here.
Unless you have actual evidence of the same things happening now that were happening before, I consider the situation vastly improved, yes.
Do you have evidence of Obama demanding people's e-mail contents be read?
0
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Nixon totally would have rifled through the porn stash of his political enemies. And we know for sure that John F. Kennedy got a real kick out of what J. Edgar Hoover dug up about Lyndon Johnson's sex life.
There's a reason everything you're referencing here takes place before this.
It's funny that you and I can both look at the Church Committee hearings and come to such divergent conclusions.
I read about the Church Committee investigations and I think, "Well this proves that we need to be extremely skeptical of the government's claimed needs for surveillance, because we know that the government has routinely abused this power in the past."
You seem to look at this history and think, "Well I'm glad we solved that problem." Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here.
Unless you have actual evidence of the same things happening now that were happening before, I consider the situation vastly improved, yes.
Do you have evidence of Obama demanding people's e-mail contents be read?
Are you even reading my posts?
It is currently a legal impossibility for anyone to obtain such evidence, even in principle, because every aspect of the authorization process is secret. That alone is sufficient cause for reform. There is no public accountability.
A hunch alone does not justify surveillance. It's not enough that the FBI thought King might be a problem; if they wanted to tap his phones, which they did, they should have established probable cause and gotten a warrant through ordinary channels.
Sure, which is why the program we are talking about requires warrants. Maybe a better question. Do you believe that during the civil rights movement the FBI should have had people go to public meetings and investigate the SCLC as well as other potentially radical organizations? Do you think that the FBI should have signed people up to these organizations even if they weren't "Public" so as to understand what was going on in them?
Because that is what metadata amounts to (except well, not nearly as intrusive as actually sending people to meetings) and PRISM amounts to warrants
It is currently a legal impossibility for anyone to obtain such evidence, even in principle, because every aspect of the authorization process is secret. That alone is sufficient cause for reform. There is no public accountability.
So no. Despite the fact that you'd think something like that would create a much, much larger sensation and change if it were to be leaked.
Color me less than concerned.
0
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Also, I don't really think it's OK that the FBI conducted warrantless surveillance of the Klan. Klansmen had committed enough actual crimes to justify a real criminal investigation using conventional police work -- and ultimately many Klan convictions were secured through exactly those means, particularly the use of informants.
So you're saying that because people in a millions strong organization had committed some crimes that its OK to investigate the organization?
In which case investigating MLK and the broader civil rights organizations was totally OK too because the Black Panthers were a part of the movement and they had committed violent acts.
I'm saying it would have been OK to conduct investigations of specific individuals and KKK cells if these investigations were linked to actual crimes.
The Black Panthers were not the same organization as SCLC. Not even close. They were both black and unhappy; similarities end there.
0
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
A hunch alone does not justify surveillance. It's not enough that the FBI thought King might be a problem; if they wanted to tap his phones, which they did, they should have established probable cause and gotten a warrant through ordinary channels.
Sure, which is why the program we are talking about requires warrants. Maybe a better question. Do you believe that during the civil rights movement the FBI should have had people go to public meetings and investigate the SCLC as well as other potentially radical organizations? Do you think that the FBI should have signed people up to these organizations even if they weren't "Public" so as to understand what was going on in them?
Because that is what metadata amounts to (except well, not nearly as intrusive as actually sending people to meetings) and PRISM amounts to warrants
I don't think that was a great use of the FBI's time but it's not illegal.
And I've expressed many times in this thread why I think the due process involved in PRISM is deficient.
jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
ok, throwing my hat into the crazypants ring here...
I do not understand a few concerns people seem to have:
1. Why is it surprising that surveillance is happening in 2013? Did people seriously expect that the government has no idea what goes on (at a high level at the very least?)
2. It seems awfully tin-foil-hatty to assume that this (or any) level of surveillance will lead to either the creation of a tyrannical nation state in the USA or that it will lead to random imprisonments of "dissidents" (for lack of a better word) who have committed no crimes. And if your concern is that your prior activities etc. may limit your ability to pass a background check? Boo fucking hoo. That's why it's a background check. I feel like i'm taking crazy pills here.
3. NO information is private anymore. The expectation that you have privacy is a naïve remnant of the 19th and 20th centuries. Everywhere we go we are photographed, recorded, etc. I would wager 99% of the posters on this board carry a device daily with greater surveillance power than any government held in the 1960's (and lets be honest, 70's and 80's in all likelihood). Your cell phone not only has the ability to track your movement and communication, it routinely impinges on the privacy of strangers. At least the privacy that would have been expected 20+ years ago.
4. This is the US Government here. The single largest, wealthiest, most powerful entity in the entire history of humanity. Seriously, if "they" wanted your information, they would have it already.
All I hear is a lot of crying over spilled milk on this, and many other boards. WE granted this authority to our government (over, and over, and over again). So suck it up and accept that sometimes you get what you pay for.
Don't like it? Go vote. Don't have a rep who agrees with you? Run for office, or join the campaign of someone who does. This is how movements start. Not bitching on an internet forum dedicated to video game comics.
+1
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
It is currently a legal impossibility for anyone to obtain such evidence, even in principle, because every aspect of the authorization process is secret. That alone is sufficient cause for reform. There is no public accountability.
So no. Despite the fact that you'd think something like that would create a much, much larger sensation and change if it were to be leaked.
Color me less than concerned.
My problem is not that Obama is snooping through my emails. It's that he could if he wanted to. That's alone justifies concern! Maybe the president and his administration are doing all good things with this power. That's cool and all, but it's not enough; there has to be a process in place to stop him from doing bad things if he wanted to. There is no such process. The FISA court is a joke.
The government might not be Big Brother right now, but everything they need to be Big Brother in the future is in place. Why shouldn't we demand reform now before abuses happen, rather than sit on her hands and wait for evidence of abuse to come forward? (Evidence that may never come forward because the design of the system prevents the public from ever learning about wrongdoing -- which, again, is the essence of the problem).
Also, I don't really think it's OK that the FBI conducted warrantless surveillance of the Klan. Klansmen had committed enough actual crimes to justify a real criminal investigation using conventional police work -- and ultimately many Klan convictions were secured through exactly those means, particularly the use of informants.
So you're saying that because people in a millions strong organization had committed some crimes that its OK to investigate the organization?
In which case investigating MLK and the broader civil rights organizations was totally OK too because the Black Panthers were a part of the movement and they had committed violent acts.
I'm saying it would have been OK to conduct investigations of specific individuals and KKK cells if these investigations were linked to actual crimes.
The Black Panthers were not the same organization as SCLC. Not even close. They were both black and unhappy; similarities end there.
But specific KKK cells were not linked to actual crimes until after broadly investigating the organization. Yes the FBI should not have been wiretapping King, but you generally don't know who you should be wiretapping without doing a broad investigation. And this thing we are talking about is not just "wiretapping everyone" its a broad investigation from which we can make connections to known problematic organizations.
To argue that we should not have this program is tantamount to arguing that it should not be possible for the USG to know who belongs or associates with which organizations which it believes to be terrorist and/or that some communication is beyond the scope of warranted investigation [I.E. the FBI can go to your house and look at your computer but they can't look at your emails without going to your house]
Complaining about the inadequacies of the court is another issue, but not exactly something that is new and nor is it related to the powers that the government should have.
---
No, the BPP was not the same organization as SCLC but they certainly had overlapping members and overlapping goals.
Would you have balked at the FBI investigating the "totally not affiliated with the KKK but still definitely wanting to create a white utopia but like totally non-violently trust us" organization?
Nixon totally would have rifled through the porn stash of his political enemies. And we know for sure that John F. Kennedy got a real kick out of what J. Edgar Hoover dug up about Lyndon Johnson's sex life.
There's a reason everything you're referencing here takes place before this.
It's funny that you and I can both look at the Church Committee hearings and come to such divergent conclusions.
I read about the Church Committee investigations and I think, "Well this proves that we need to be extremely skeptical of the government's claimed needs for surveillance, because we know that the government has routinely abused this power in the past."
You seem to look at this history and think, "Well I'm glad we solved that problem." Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here.
Unless you have actual evidence of the same things happening now that were happening before, I consider the situation vastly improved, yes.
Do you have evidence of Obama demanding people's e-mail contents be read?
Are you even reading my posts?
It is currently a legal impossibility for anyone to obtain such evidence, even in principle, because every aspect of the authorization process is secret. That alone is sufficient cause for reform. There is no public accountability.
The Senators and Representatives we send to Washington represent 'the public' or 'the people'. Thus, even when they are behind closed doors, there is 'public accountability'.
That's the whole basis of representative democracy - we elect people who represent our interests in Washington.
Now, the SPECIFICS of the spying / oversight may not have been clear, but anyone who acts like they had no idea this was going on until the leaks were published last week is being disingenuous. We've known about this shit for twelve years now. The FISA courts aren't new. The exact processes and scope may change a bit, but these programs are in line with decades of established government activity. Public confirmation of these particular programs doesn't materially change anything about the programs.
Regardless of the secrecy of these programs, the American people, if we wished, could have elected representatives who would enact legislation specifically prohibiting this type of data collection. Even if we didn't know about the programs themselves, we could act to prevent this IF we thought it was a big deal. We haven't and don't - collectively anyway.
For an example, we didn't need to know the details of the US Army's chemical and biological weapons programs (at the time) for the American people to overwhelmingly oppose them. The concepts are public even if the details of the actions aren't.
There are some people who are rightfully concerned, some people who are misinformed about the scope of what is known, a lot of people saying 'Obummer', and a lot of people happy their pet issue or issues tangental to their pet issues are making headlines.
the dream of public accountability died with the atomic bomb
e: I've pointed out (I think to SKFM?) before that American presidential powers keep expanding over time in a predictable fashion, always expanding beyond contemporary constitutional interpretations in the face of an emergency, and then having interpretation move forward and powers move backward to sync later on. But the hope of limiting secrecy in particular died with the Bomb.
ronya on
0
Options
AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Nixon totally would have rifled through the porn stash of his political enemies. And we know for sure that John F. Kennedy got a real kick out of what J. Edgar Hoover dug up about Lyndon Johnson's sex life.
There's a reason everything you're referencing here takes place before this.
It's funny that you and I can both look at the Church Committee hearings and come to such divergent conclusions.
I read about the Church Committee investigations and I think, "Well this proves that we need to be extremely skeptical of the government's claimed needs for surveillance, because we know that the government has routinely abused this power in the past."
You seem to look at this history and think, "Well I'm glad we solved that problem." Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here.
Unless you have actual evidence of the same things happening now that were happening before, I consider the situation vastly improved, yes.
Do you have evidence of Obama demanding people's e-mail contents be read?
Are you even reading my posts?
It is currently a legal impossibility for anyone to obtain such evidence, even in principle, because every aspect of the authorization process is secret. That alone is sufficient cause for reform. There is no public accountability.
The Senators and Representatives we send to Washington represent 'the public' or 'the people'. Thus, even when they are behind closed doors, there is 'public accountability'.
That's the whole basis of representative democracy - we elect people who represent our interests in Washington.
Now, the SPECIFICS of the spying / oversight may not have been clear, but anyone who acts like they had no idea this was going on until the leaks were published last week is being disingenuous. We've known about this shit for twelve years now. The FISA courts aren't new. The exact processes and scope may change a bit, but these programs are in line with decades of established government activity. Public confirmation of these particular programs doesn't materially change anything about the programs.
Regardless of the secrecy of these programs, the American people, if we wished, could have elected representatives who would enact legislation specifically prohibiting this type of data collection. Even if we didn't know about the programs themselves, we could act to prevent this IF we thought it was a big deal. We haven't and don't - collectively anyway.
For an example, we didn't need to know the details of the US Army's chemical and biological weapons programs (at the time) for the American people to overwhelmingly oppose them. The concepts are public even if the details of the actions aren't.
There are some people who are rightfully concerned, some people who are misinformed about the scope of what is known, a lot of people saying 'Obummer', and a lot of people happy their pet issue or issues tangental to their pet issues are making headlines.
If the FBI wants to go to your house and look through your computer they will need a warrant that was granted based on probable cause. PRISM does not require probable cause in order to gather information on US citizens, only that they are incidentally in contact with a foreign entity (or at least that they are 51% sure is foreign) that the NSA finds interesting.
lazegamer on
I would download a car.
0
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Nixon totally would have rifled through the porn stash of his political enemies. And we know for sure that John F. Kennedy got a real kick out of what J. Edgar Hoover dug up about Lyndon Johnson's sex life.
There's a reason everything you're referencing here takes place before this.
It's funny that you and I can both look at the Church Committee hearings and come to such divergent conclusions.
I read about the Church Committee investigations and I think, "Well this proves that we need to be extremely skeptical of the government's claimed needs for surveillance, because we know that the government has routinely abused this power in the past."
You seem to look at this history and think, "Well I'm glad we solved that problem." Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here.
Unless you have actual evidence of the same things happening now that were happening before, I consider the situation vastly improved, yes.
Do you have evidence of Obama demanding people's e-mail contents be read?
Are you even reading my posts?
It is currently a legal impossibility for anyone to obtain such evidence, even in principle, because every aspect of the authorization process is secret. That alone is sufficient cause for reform. There is no public accountability.
The Senators and Representatives we send to Washington represent 'the public' or 'the people'. Thus, even when they are behind closed doors, there is 'public accountability'.
That's the whole basis of representative democracy - we elect people who represent our interests in Washington.
Now, the SPECIFICS of the spying / oversight may not have been clear, but anyone who acts like they had no idea this was going on until the leaks were published last week is being disingenuous. We've known about this shit for twelve years now. The FISA courts aren't new. The exact processes and scope may change a bit, but these programs are in line with decades of established government activity. Public confirmation of these particular programs doesn't materially change anything about the programs.
Regardless of the secrecy of these programs, the American people, if we wished, could have elected representatives who would enact legislation specifically prohibiting this type of data collection. Even if we didn't know about the programs themselves, we could act to prevent this IF we thought it was a big deal. We haven't and don't - collectively anyway.
For an example, we didn't need to know the details of the US Army's chemical and biological weapons programs (at the time) for the American people to overwhelmingly oppose them. The concepts are public even if the details of the actions aren't.
There are some people who are rightfully concerned, some people who are misinformed about the scope of what is known, a lot of people saying 'Obummer', and a lot of people happy their pet issue or issues tangental to their pet issues are making headlines.
Where is this "surprise" idea coming from? I'm not surprised by this. Like you said, I've known about this stuff for a decade. I was pissed about it when it started under Bush and I'm still pissed. No activist who cares about this issue was surprised by the leak, so can we retire the entire notion of surprise from the debate? Its only purpose is to paint privacy and civil liberties activists as rubes for taking this occasion to speak out.
What you describe in this post about electing representatives who will put legislative limits on surveillance is exactly what I want. The first step in legislative change is public outcry. That is why people are using media attention about this leak as an opportunity to make noise.
Hachface on
0
Options
spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
They aren't reading all your emails. This is a metadata tool. It's more like tracking who gets mail and where it comes from than the contents of it, right?
I'm sorry. Are you actually believing that they only do what they tell you they do?
That's hilarious. You should go on stage with that act.
I trust the government, more or less. At the least
It is currently a legal impossibility for anyone to obtain such evidence, even in principle, because every aspect of the authorization process is secret. That alone is sufficient cause for reform. There is no public accountability.
So no. Despite the fact that you'd think something like that would create a much, much larger sensation and change if it were to be leaked.
Color me less than concerned.
My problem is not that Obama is snooping through my emails. It's that he could if he wanted to. That's alone justifies concern! Maybe the president and his administration are doing all good things with this power. That's cool and all, but it's not enough; there has to be a process in place to stop him from doing bad things if he wanted to. There is no such process. The FISA court is a joke.
The government might not be Big Brother right now, but everything they need to be Big Brother in the future is in place. Why shouldn't we demand reform now before abuses happen, rather than sit on her hands and wait for evidence of abuse to come forward? (Evidence that may never come forward because the design of the system prevents the public from ever learning about wrongdoing -- which, again, is the essence of the problem).
But they ALWAYS could. In the 1960's email didn't exist to snoop through. But if they wanted they could wiretap you, or read your mail, or break into your house and go through your personal effects. I mean, it was illegal and yet they still did it. In the 1850's they could eavesdrop on you with actual people and in the 1950's they only had to use a machine.
Oh noes! Police State!
Yea well no. The fact is that the mere ability to do something does not mean that it will be used, nor does it indicate that the possibility of doing it is an abuse.
Basically you haven't answered the question: "Why should your emails be beyond a warrant?" because the answer is that they shouldn't. And if they shouldn't then a system to look through emails makes a lot of sense because if you're getting warrants on terrorists and reading their emails (like you just said we should have the power to do) then a system to make that work is almost a necessity.
Everything the government has needed to be big brother has always been in effect forever. Tyranny is not something new to the internet age. There have always been trails by which to trace dissidents. Indeed with the dawn of the internet the only thing that has changed is that the risk of putting out dissident information is now lower than it has ever been [Connect to an open wireless connection with tor] whereas prior to today the only way to get dissident information out there was to physically go to meetings, or send mail to physical addresses... Today i can take the information i want to store securely and put it on a flash drive which finding physically would be like a needle in a haystack. 100 years ago to store that amount of dissident information you would have needed a library.
The idea that we are somehow less private today than we were earlier is false, its just that our potential lack of privacy is now obvious to see whereas previously it was an illusion.
That's one of those arguments that's just kind of general purpose. You could use it to argue against virtually any government activityy. Could you make it more specific to this particular issue?
I mean, I get skepticism towards government power as a baseline security measure, but prohibition of abuse and oversight mechanisms are how I prefer to deal with them, rather than prophylactic crippling of government capabilities. Because we do also need the government to do things, and one of those things is electronic and signals intelligence gathering.
What I was trying for with the nuclear proliferation example was that there are cases where a large number of people argue that oversight is inherently insufficient. The results of abuse are so great that taking the risk of having the capability is itself too large a risk to take.
i.e. its not that I think oversight and prohibition are totally useless, but they are limited in their effectiveness. Claiming that a modern day Stasi archive could be rebuilt (and no, not saying anyone is currently doing this in the West) with the proper oversight and that everything would then be unicorns and rainbows because oversight is about as realistic as saying that the non-proliferation treaty that stopped Syria from getting nukes was a bad idea because who would want to use nuclear weapons under MAD?
So maybe seven years ago, it would've been when I was still working in game development, my company was doing work with an ex-military contractor. He'd previously been our contact for military training sims, and later civilian RTS games based on those sims, before he entered the private sector as the head of a small games publishing firm.
The first project he had us work on was a first-person shooter. The premise of this game was that the government had implemented a covert surveillance program in coordination with the NSA and Homeland Security which could wirelessly hack all digital communications throughout the nation - email, phones, video, everything. Everything went into a database that the government used to facilitate its counter-terrorism operations. The name of this covert surveillance program, and the name of the game we were developing, was PRISM.
I'm sort of wondering, now, how much of that is coincidence.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I'm struggling to imagine an issue where thinking about 1984 could be more appropriate. Like, do you think it's a bad book that we shouldn't ever talk about?
The mere fact that you can dissent against the government makes this day and age nothing like 1984. The fact that everyone in this thread hasn't been vanished and made an unperson makes it nothing like 1984. The fact that we can even still learn about programs like PRISM makes it nothing like 1984.
Don't cheapen 1984 by comparing it to this nonsense.
The mere fact that you can dissent against the government makes this day and age nothing like 1984. The fact that everyone in this thread hasn't been vanished and made an unperson makes it nothing like 1984. The fact that we can even still learn about programs like PRISM makes it nothing like 1984.
Don't cheapen 1984 by comparing it to this nonsense.
So we shouldn't think about Orwell's vision of totalitarian society until that society has already emerged?
Don't you think we should be far-sighted about this?
1984 as a meditation about the nature of political power that is perpetually relevant. Even a hippy-dippy non-hierarchical hippy commune in rural Vermont can benefit from reflecting on it. It's a great work that should always be on our minds.
Trite but I still say fair point about governmental power, particularly surveillance power:
Would you want power X in the hands of Richard Nixon or Dick Cheney, to name a couple notorious assholes we've elected in the last 50 years? Hell, I wouldn't trust LBJ with it, personally.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
The mere fact that you can dissent against the government makes this day and age nothing like 1984. The fact that everyone in this thread hasn't been vanished and made an unperson makes it nothing like 1984. The fact that we can even still learn about programs like PRISM makes it nothing like 1984.
Don't cheapen 1984 by comparing it to this nonsense.
Situations like this are exactly why Orwell wrote 1984.
Trite but I still say fair point about governmental power, particularly surveillance power:
Would you want power X in the hands of Richard Nixon or Dick Cheney, to name a couple notorious assholes we've elected in the last 50 years? Hell, I wouldn't trust LBJ with it, personally.
Except that's true of every power the government has.
0
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
That's one of those arguments that's just kind of general purpose. You could use it to argue against virtually any government activity. Could you make it more specific to this particular issue?
I mean, I get skepticism towards government power as a baseline security measure, but prohibition of abuse and oversight mechanisms are how I prefer to deal with them, rather than prophylactic crippling of government capabilities. Because we do also need the government to do things, and one of those things is electronic and signals intelligence gathering.
What I was trying for with the nuclear proliferation example was that there are cases where a large number of people argue that oversight is inherently insufficient. The results of abuse are so great that taking the risk of having the capability is itself too large a risk to take.
i.e. its not that I think oversight and prohibition are totally useless, but they are limited in their effectiveness. Claiming that a modern day Stasi archive could be rebuilt (and no, not saying anyone is currently doing this in the West) with the proper oversight and that everything would then be unicorns and rainbows because oversight is about as realistic as saying that the non-proliferation treaty that stopped Syria from getting nukes was a bad idea because who would want to use nuclear weapons under MAD?
The situation is not analogous. For one thing mutually assured destruction isn't an oversight mechanism, it's a strategy. The NPT isn't an oversight mechanism, it's a diplomatic agreement.
Even the "Stasi archive" thing isn't analogous; the Stasi did its work by undermining the personal connections between individuals by cultivating a society of informers and eroding social trust. The method by which they gathered information was part of the oppressive nature of the East German regime; it was in certain respects more important than the information they gathered. The second problem was all that information was put to the use of the East German regime's political power, and only rarely (and often ineffectively) towards law enforcement or legitimate security matters.
Information is a tool. How that tool is created, how it is used and why is, in my view, vastly more important than its availability. Denying tools to the government just because they might be misused can be an excuse to not deal with problems via collective action at all.
EDIT: I should reiterate that I agree warrants are necessary prerequisites to extracting the content of electronic correspondence. I'm merely unconcerned with the gathering of metadata by the government. Note that the government needs a warrant to read your e-mail; the spying program does not change that. The main legitimate concern is over...
A. The secrecy regarding how the warrants are granted, the process involved and the oversight mechanism.
and
B. The possibility this is being bypassed in some fashion.
In other words, we don't know the rules and we don't know if they're following the rules we don't know.
Surveillance is indeed nothing new. This does not mean we should not continue to oppose it.
Email should require a warrant for police (or whomever) to read because it is private correspondence. The concept of limiting police powers, including when it comes to collecting information, is enshrined as a basic tenant of democracy. For this post I'll take it to be axiomatic. Physical letters are not allowed to be opened without a warrant. These laws were extended to phone conversations as technology advanced. Should it apply to email as well? Absolutely. Technical realities of sending information over often unsecured or corporate owned servers, or political realities of phone surveillance already being commonplace should not make us unconcerned. The fact that "hard drives" or "email inbox" were not listed along with "papers and effects" in the 4th amendment does not make them less deserving of privacy.
The fact that abuses of privacy have not led to concentration camps doesn't mean nothing should be done about it. Yes, surveillance has been around a long time- it has been around long enough, in fact, that provisions against it were placed in the constitution. It was a problem then, and its a problem now. Just because the long-standing problem has not resulted in pains for you and me does not mean we should ignore the problem.
If we agree with the axiom that police powers should be limited, then we should oppose secret expansion of police power, or at least be highly skeptical of it.
Oh, no police state? Well, eye of the beholder and all that. I imagine surveillance programs just like this one were used as justification to rendition people to secret CIA prisons, or to ship them to places like Syria to be tortured, or to lock them up in Gitmo with no trial. Of course they weren't US citizens, so I guess we don't need to worry about that.
Trite but I still say fair point about governmental power, particularly surveillance power:
Would you want power X in the hands of Richard Nixon or Dick Cheney, to name a couple notorious assholes we've elected in the last 50 years? Hell, I wouldn't trust LBJ with it, personally.
I'm honestly more worried about the long-term use of this data that has been collected.
Sure, it's a lot to index / search today, but let's fast-forward 20 years. Where are all those exabytes of data going?
Look at how J. Edgar Hoover used his files to blackmail / influence his way to the top. Imagine how much potential blackmail material there is in there...Mr. Senator-candidate, if you don't support us in this vote, people will find out about your 'Men for Men' post from 2015 on Craigslist Casual Encounters. Or the leaked e-mails between a random advisor on climate policy and his therapist during a particularly dark time. Or the Harry Potter / Professor Snape fan-fic someone wrote when they were twelve.
It's bad enough with the information that you can collect with a little bit of dedicated surveillance. Imagine begin able to trawl everyone's history - and not just their public history (which is bad enough) but also their private stuff.
We talk about how in twenty years nobody is going to care about those Facebook party pictures, but is that really true? Like there will ever be a point where people don't care about the president's dick or tit pics getting out.
And like you said, even if you don't think Obama is going to be the problem, what about a hundred nameless wanna-be J Edgar's who are working on rising through the ranks? What about the next Nixon or Cheney?
Posts
SecurID and similar two-factor authentication services do have a centralized list of seeds, and the compromise of those lists would indeed be a problem, but two-factor authentication is for authentication rather than data encryption and thus not relevant to the topic.
So you're saying that because people in a millions strong organization had committed some crimes that its OK to investigate the organization?
In which case investigating MLK and the broader civil rights organizations was totally OK too because the Black Panthers were a part of the movement and they had committed violent acts.
It's fairly well known that the FISA "court" judges are rubber-stamping requests; the sheer volume more than outweighs their ability to give each warrant its due consideration.
The in-house oversight stuff in the NSA is also known to be understaffed and overburdened.
The KKK publicly claimed this, but it was a transparent lie. Anyone living in the deep south, black or white, knew exactly what the Klan was up to. The same could not be said for King's SCLC, which was scrupulously nonviolent.
Hoover investigated MLK because he was an obsessive racist who personally hated King. He reluctantly expanded the scope of COINTELPRO to include the KKK because the White House wanted him do. Surveillance of the KKK amounted to roughly 15% of COINTELPRO activity. While this inappropriate surveillance no doubt helped in securing convictions, it's difficult to overstate my skepticism that illegal surveillance was the only means by which those convictions could have been secured. Unlike the Civil Rights movement, the KKK had a real body count for the FBI to investigate.
It's funny that you and I can both look at the Church Committee hearings and come to such divergent conclusions.
I read about the Church Committee investigations and I think, "Well this proves that we need to be extremely skeptical of the government's claimed needs for surveillance, because we know that the government has routinely abused this power in the past."
You seem to look at this history and think, "Well I'm glad we solved that problem." Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here.
Unless you have actual evidence of the same things happening now that were happening before, I consider the situation vastly improved, yes.
Do you have evidence of Obama demanding people's e-mail contents be read?
Are you even reading my posts?
It is currently a legal impossibility for anyone to obtain such evidence, even in principle, because every aspect of the authorization process is secret. That alone is sufficient cause for reform. There is no public accountability.
Sure, which is why the program we are talking about requires warrants. Maybe a better question. Do you believe that during the civil rights movement the FBI should have had people go to public meetings and investigate the SCLC as well as other potentially radical organizations? Do you think that the FBI should have signed people up to these organizations even if they weren't "Public" so as to understand what was going on in them?
Because that is what metadata amounts to (except well, not nearly as intrusive as actually sending people to meetings) and PRISM amounts to warrants
So no. Despite the fact that you'd think something like that would create a much, much larger sensation and change if it were to be leaked.
Color me less than concerned.
I'm saying it would have been OK to conduct investigations of specific individuals and KKK cells if these investigations were linked to actual crimes.
The Black Panthers were not the same organization as SCLC. Not even close. They were both black and unhappy; similarities end there.
I don't think that was a great use of the FBI's time but it's not illegal.
And I've expressed many times in this thread why I think the due process involved in PRISM is deficient.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-united-stasi-america
I do not understand a few concerns people seem to have:
1. Why is it surprising that surveillance is happening in 2013? Did people seriously expect that the government has no idea what goes on (at a high level at the very least?)
2. It seems awfully tin-foil-hatty to assume that this (or any) level of surveillance will lead to either the creation of a tyrannical nation state in the USA or that it will lead to random imprisonments of "dissidents" (for lack of a better word) who have committed no crimes. And if your concern is that your prior activities etc. may limit your ability to pass a background check? Boo fucking hoo. That's why it's a background check. I feel like i'm taking crazy pills here.
3. NO information is private anymore. The expectation that you have privacy is a naïve remnant of the 19th and 20th centuries. Everywhere we go we are photographed, recorded, etc. I would wager 99% of the posters on this board carry a device daily with greater surveillance power than any government held in the 1960's (and lets be honest, 70's and 80's in all likelihood). Your cell phone not only has the ability to track your movement and communication, it routinely impinges on the privacy of strangers. At least the privacy that would have been expected 20+ years ago.
4. This is the US Government here. The single largest, wealthiest, most powerful entity in the entire history of humanity. Seriously, if "they" wanted your information, they would have it already.
All I hear is a lot of crying over spilled milk on this, and many other boards. WE granted this authority to our government (over, and over, and over again). So suck it up and accept that sometimes you get what you pay for.
Don't like it? Go vote. Don't have a rep who agrees with you? Run for office, or join the campaign of someone who does. This is how movements start. Not bitching on an internet forum dedicated to video game comics.
My problem is not that Obama is snooping through my emails. It's that he could if he wanted to. That's alone justifies concern! Maybe the president and his administration are doing all good things with this power. That's cool and all, but it's not enough; there has to be a process in place to stop him from doing bad things if he wanted to. There is no such process. The FISA court is a joke.
The government might not be Big Brother right now, but everything they need to be Big Brother in the future is in place. Why shouldn't we demand reform now before abuses happen, rather than sit on her hands and wait for evidence of abuse to come forward? (Evidence that may never come forward because the design of the system prevents the public from ever learning about wrongdoing -- which, again, is the essence of the problem).
But specific KKK cells were not linked to actual crimes until after broadly investigating the organization. Yes the FBI should not have been wiretapping King, but you generally don't know who you should be wiretapping without doing a broad investigation. And this thing we are talking about is not just "wiretapping everyone" its a broad investigation from which we can make connections to known problematic organizations.
To argue that we should not have this program is tantamount to arguing that it should not be possible for the USG to know who belongs or associates with which organizations which it believes to be terrorist and/or that some communication is beyond the scope of warranted investigation [I.E. the FBI can go to your house and look at your computer but they can't look at your emails without going to your house]
Complaining about the inadequacies of the court is another issue, but not exactly something that is new and nor is it related to the powers that the government should have.
---
No, the BPP was not the same organization as SCLC but they certainly had overlapping members and overlapping goals.
Would you have balked at the FBI investigating the "totally not affiliated with the KKK but still definitely wanting to create a white utopia but like totally non-violently trust us" organization?
The Senators and Representatives we send to Washington represent 'the public' or 'the people'. Thus, even when they are behind closed doors, there is 'public accountability'.
That's the whole basis of representative democracy - we elect people who represent our interests in Washington.
Now, the SPECIFICS of the spying / oversight may not have been clear, but anyone who acts like they had no idea this was going on until the leaks were published last week is being disingenuous. We've known about this shit for twelve years now. The FISA courts aren't new. The exact processes and scope may change a bit, but these programs are in line with decades of established government activity. Public confirmation of these particular programs doesn't materially change anything about the programs.
Regardless of the secrecy of these programs, the American people, if we wished, could have elected representatives who would enact legislation specifically prohibiting this type of data collection. Even if we didn't know about the programs themselves, we could act to prevent this IF we thought it was a big deal. We haven't and don't - collectively anyway.
For an example, we didn't need to know the details of the US Army's chemical and biological weapons programs (at the time) for the American people to overwhelmingly oppose them. The concepts are public even if the details of the actions aren't.
There are some people who are rightfully concerned, some people who are misinformed about the scope of what is known, a lot of people saying 'Obummer', and a lot of people happy their pet issue or issues tangental to their pet issues are making headlines.
e: I've pointed out (I think to SKFM?) before that American presidential powers keep expanding over time in a predictable fashion, always expanding beyond contemporary constitutional interpretations in the face of an emergency, and then having interpretation move forward and powers move backward to sync later on. But the hope of limiting secrecy in particular died with the Bomb.
Bingo Dingo.
Where is this "surprise" idea coming from? I'm not surprised by this. Like you said, I've known about this stuff for a decade. I was pissed about it when it started under Bush and I'm still pissed. No activist who cares about this issue was surprised by the leak, so can we retire the entire notion of surprise from the debate? Its only purpose is to paint privacy and civil liberties activists as rubes for taking this occasion to speak out.
What you describe in this post about electing representatives who will put legislative limits on surveillance is exactly what I want. The first step in legislative change is public outcry. That is why people are using media attention about this leak as an opportunity to make noise.
I trust the government, more or less. At the least
But they ALWAYS could. In the 1960's email didn't exist to snoop through. But if they wanted they could wiretap you, or read your mail, or break into your house and go through your personal effects. I mean, it was illegal and yet they still did it. In the 1850's they could eavesdrop on you with actual people and in the 1950's they only had to use a machine.
Oh noes! Police State!
Yea well no. The fact is that the mere ability to do something does not mean that it will be used, nor does it indicate that the possibility of doing it is an abuse.
Basically you haven't answered the question: "Why should your emails be beyond a warrant?" because the answer is that they shouldn't. And if they shouldn't then a system to look through emails makes a lot of sense because if you're getting warrants on terrorists and reading their emails (like you just said we should have the power to do) then a system to make that work is almost a necessity.
Everything the government has needed to be big brother has always been in effect forever. Tyranny is not something new to the internet age. There have always been trails by which to trace dissidents. Indeed with the dawn of the internet the only thing that has changed is that the risk of putting out dissident information is now lower than it has ever been [Connect to an open wireless connection with tor] whereas prior to today the only way to get dissident information out there was to physically go to meetings, or send mail to physical addresses... Today i can take the information i want to store securely and put it on a flash drive which finding physically would be like a needle in a haystack. 100 years ago to store that amount of dissident information you would have needed a library.
The idea that we are somehow less private today than we were earlier is false, its just that our potential lack of privacy is now obvious to see whereas previously it was an illusion.
i.e. its not that I think oversight and prohibition are totally useless, but they are limited in their effectiveness. Claiming that a modern day Stasi archive could be rebuilt (and no, not saying anyone is currently doing this in the West) with the proper oversight and that everything would then be unicorns and rainbows because oversight is about as realistic as saying that the non-proliferation treaty that stopped Syria from getting nukes was a bad idea because who would want to use nuclear weapons under MAD?
The first project he had us work on was a first-person shooter. The premise of this game was that the government had implemented a covert surveillance program in coordination with the NSA and Homeland Security which could wirelessly hack all digital communications throughout the nation - email, phones, video, everything. Everything went into a database that the government used to facilitate its counter-terrorism operations. The name of this covert surveillance program, and the name of the game we were developing, was PRISM.
I'm sort of wondering, now, how much of that is coincidence.
Please?
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
I'm struggling to imagine an issue where thinking about 1984 could be more appropriate. Like, do you think it's a bad book that we shouldn't ever talk about?
The mere fact that you can dissent against the government makes this day and age nothing like 1984. The fact that everyone in this thread hasn't been vanished and made an unperson makes it nothing like 1984. The fact that we can even still learn about programs like PRISM makes it nothing like 1984.
Don't cheapen 1984 by comparing it to this nonsense.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
So we shouldn't think about Orwell's vision of totalitarian society until that society has already emerged?
Don't you think we should be far-sighted about this?
1984 as a meditation about the nature of political power that is perpetually relevant. Even a hippy-dippy non-hierarchical hippy commune in rural Vermont can benefit from reflecting on it. It's a great work that should always be on our minds.
Would you want power X in the hands of Richard Nixon or Dick Cheney, to name a couple notorious assholes we've elected in the last 50 years? Hell, I wouldn't trust LBJ with it, personally.
Its like me saying we are doomed to Farenheit 451 as a future because people buy tablets and Ebooks.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
Situations like this are exactly why Orwell wrote 1984.
Except that's true of every power the government has.
To be clear, I do not believe that we are currently living in an Orwellian totalitarian state. I would like it to stay that way!
Only if 'compare' means that they're the same thing, and not just a comparison of where the two things are similar.
The situation is not analogous. For one thing mutually assured destruction isn't an oversight mechanism, it's a strategy. The NPT isn't an oversight mechanism, it's a diplomatic agreement.
Even the "Stasi archive" thing isn't analogous; the Stasi did its work by undermining the personal connections between individuals by cultivating a society of informers and eroding social trust. The method by which they gathered information was part of the oppressive nature of the East German regime; it was in certain respects more important than the information they gathered. The second problem was all that information was put to the use of the East German regime's political power, and only rarely (and often ineffectively) towards law enforcement or legitimate security matters.
Information is a tool. How that tool is created, how it is used and why is, in my view, vastly more important than its availability. Denying tools to the government just because they might be misused can be an excuse to not deal with problems via collective action at all.
EDIT: I should reiterate that I agree warrants are necessary prerequisites to extracting the content of electronic correspondence. I'm merely unconcerned with the gathering of metadata by the government. Note that the government needs a warrant to read your e-mail; the spying program does not change that. The main legitimate concern is over...
A. The secrecy regarding how the warrants are granted, the process involved and the oversight mechanism.
and
B. The possibility this is being bypassed in some fashion.
In other words, we don't know the rules and we don't know if they're following the rules we don't know.
Email should require a warrant for police (or whomever) to read because it is private correspondence. The concept of limiting police powers, including when it comes to collecting information, is enshrined as a basic tenant of democracy. For this post I'll take it to be axiomatic. Physical letters are not allowed to be opened without a warrant. These laws were extended to phone conversations as technology advanced. Should it apply to email as well? Absolutely. Technical realities of sending information over often unsecured or corporate owned servers, or political realities of phone surveillance already being commonplace should not make us unconcerned. The fact that "hard drives" or "email inbox" were not listed along with "papers and effects" in the 4th amendment does not make them less deserving of privacy.
The fact that abuses of privacy have not led to concentration camps doesn't mean nothing should be done about it. Yes, surveillance has been around a long time- it has been around long enough, in fact, that provisions against it were placed in the constitution. It was a problem then, and its a problem now. Just because the long-standing problem has not resulted in pains for you and me does not mean we should ignore the problem.
If we agree with the axiom that police powers should be limited, then we should oppose secret expansion of police power, or at least be highly skeptical of it.
http://change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda/
8->
Oh, no police state? Well, eye of the beholder and all that. I imagine surveillance programs just like this one were used as justification to rendition people to secret CIA prisons, or to ship them to places like Syria to be tortured, or to lock them up in Gitmo with no trial. Of course they weren't US citizens, so I guess we don't need to worry about that.
I'm honestly more worried about the long-term use of this data that has been collected.
Sure, it's a lot to index / search today, but let's fast-forward 20 years. Where are all those exabytes of data going?
Look at how J. Edgar Hoover used his files to blackmail / influence his way to the top. Imagine how much potential blackmail material there is in there...Mr. Senator-candidate, if you don't support us in this vote, people will find out about your 'Men for Men' post from 2015 on Craigslist Casual Encounters. Or the leaked e-mails between a random advisor on climate policy and his therapist during a particularly dark time. Or the Harry Potter / Professor Snape fan-fic someone wrote when they were twelve.
It's bad enough with the information that you can collect with a little bit of dedicated surveillance. Imagine begin able to trawl everyone's history - and not just their public history (which is bad enough) but also their private stuff.
We talk about how in twenty years nobody is going to care about those Facebook party pictures, but is that really true? Like there will ever be a point where people don't care about the president's dick or tit pics getting out.
And like you said, even if you don't think Obama is going to be the problem, what about a hundred nameless wanna-be J Edgar's who are working on rising through the ranks? What about the next Nixon or Cheney?