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We became a [Surveillance State] and the world cried out "So What?"
Fuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm seeing surveillance topics rise up in multiple threads today so I'm making a general thread here for discussion of NSA, PRISM, Boundless Informant, and Snowden. Anything else pertinent can be discussed as well.
Topical Links Ahoy:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining?guni=Network front:network-front full-width-1 bento-box:Bento box:Position1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/us-china-summit-barack-obama-xi-jinping?guni=Network front:network-front main-3 Main trailblock:Network front - main trailblock:Position1
Topical Links Ahoy:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining?guni=Network front:network-front full-width-1 bento-box:Bento box:Position1
The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why
Snowden wrote:"You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realise that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrong-doing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process.
"A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/us-china-summit-barack-obama-xi-jinping?guni=Network front:network-front main-3 Main trailblock:Network front - main trailblock:Position1
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/prism-gchq-william-hague-statement
In NZ there has been a long slow scandal relating to the NZ equivalent, GCSB, being involved in illegal domestic surveillance over Kim Dot Com's arrest and an unrelated terrorism trial. At the time it was illegal for GCSB assist in surveillance of residents or citizens, but it seems like the agency and the NZ Police service were both a bit confused on that point. Emergency legislation was passed recently to actually make this legal. Part of the scandal involved a leak into the official enquiry on the topic, which has now lead to a Government minister resigning, which could result in criminal charges (as it is alleged he leaked the report). This Minister and another are also at risk as part of the wider scandal and it could possibly end up in a snap/early election, if things get any worse
http://www.scoop.co.nz/sections/nzpolitics.html
At the end of the day people will be hard-pressed to actually realize any harm from the possibility that someone at the NSA might've downloaded their cat pictures from their Gmail.
And, frankly, this has been an obvious danger since "the cloud" became a thing. It seems oddly hypocritical to be totally ok with Google parsing literally all your data in some cases, but then freaking out when the government does it for national security, in a world where that seems like something that's quite a good idea to do.
Last I checked, Google doesn't have the ability to imprison you based on what they might find in your data. Not that it isn't a problem there as well, as has been discussed in the privacy/Glass thread.
The governments definition of "national security" has a history of being flawed. And there's an equally nasty history of that information being abused.
Colour me unworried.
Which the government can, hypothetically do for no reason at all if they want to as well! Surveillance is not the problem.
The fact Bradley Manning has been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment is. The fact Guantanamo is still open, with people being held without trial or prosecuted with "secret evidence" is.
If someone were actually doing something illegal using these services, like say, coordinating a plot to bomb an airliner, it seems like a pretty good idea that the authorities be able to efficiently subpoena their information.
Edit: For all the swelling of our surveillance ranks, there are nowhere near enough people to handle this load of information in an intelligent way.
the source is revealed.
he is residing in hong kong, which I guess is a pretty smart move. just that I don't know what the chinese would do to get their hands on what he knows that he DIDN'T leak
Well that sure seems to disagree with the public statements of what PRISM is all about, which is an efficient subpoena method for data from the accounts of major social media/cloud providers for individuals and their contacts. You know, the type of stuff you would call in when you find a person of interest and want to vet them quickly.
Sure they could in theory, but the sort of government that spies on it's citizens is far more likely to do so in practice than one that does not.
I'm simply not willing to trade privacy for the illusion of safety.
Why? What is the correlation here? Like, please explain how one of these things leads to to sudden tyranny. Did the NSA dissolve the courts system?
That's sort of what technology is for. You don't pile in on people, you store it in a data warehouse and then pull information and even knowledge from it. This is kinda a huge field in computer science where a lot of work is being done in both the public and private sectors.
It's sort of witchcraft, but there's a lot of people that believe in it, and it is advancing and gaining influence because it creates quantifiably valuable results.
How would they go about that? Maybe by deciding that they don't need Probable Cause or a warrant (given by the courts) to deny 4th Amendment Rights?
Interesting.
These denials don't jive with what I saw in my work, what the whistleblower is describing does. There's more to it than a means of requesting targeted data from various companies, I assure you. Not that anybody sees .0001% of what's collected, but it gets collected, and collected in huge swaths. There are strict provisions as to accessing anything that isn't at least partially international, but as many of the articles on this have mentioned, those provisions have been largely swept away as communications have become more broad.
Almost all of the policy is outdated stuff grounded in a world where telephones were the primary means of communication. As that evolved, so did our ability to grab data from new sources, but the laws restricting what and when and why we can peek at things hasn't kept up.
It seems to me like a big part of all this automated data collection is to remove the court system from the process on a case-by-case basis.
I'm aware of that, but at the end of the day it's human beings interpreting the results, and there is too much information. Even incredibly small scale operations are overwhelmed with data input right now, post filtering.
And this isn't even addressing how much of the actual content isn't in English. Our language people are pretty awful as well, and machines aren't doing the translator job any better, especially in a real life scenario.
This doesn't get fixed until us millennials start taking, and I mean taking, the reigns away from boomers. Until then the law is going to continue to lag behind technology.
What I am getting at is everyone says surveillance --> tyranny as if this is some type of obvious correlation we should take as a given.
Why should we take it as a given? You have to act on the information you gather. Is the NSA rounding up average Americans because they post on a forum about this? Are they blackmailing people by threatening to reveal their sexual fetishes to the world if they don't vote <partyline>?
I mean we've got "governments which surveil their citizens are more likely to lock them up". I mean really? Iran can't do this at all, they just grab people they see on the Daily Show apparently, in far greater quantity. Been to Zimbabwe? They cut you up pretty much if they just feel like it.
So where exactly is the imminent threat from effectively non-intrusive surveillance coming from, compared to say, a public which cheers and declares we should start removing rights everytime a "terrorist" is arrested?
Oh, God. I suddenly care. No one must know about my erotic tugboat chat logs.
I don't know how long it will be until we get to a point where a computer program can do the two middle steps. Ideally, we should have something in place to make it really hard to abuse such a system.
Also I give zero fucks if the government is taking things available to the public and make backups. I care more about what information they are getting hold of, where someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy. I give zero shits if the NSA has a file of all my posts of this board, if I didn't want certain people to see them ever, I wouldn't be posting on a board open to the public. Now my e-mail, that's another matter.
Ultimately, assuming people stop getting suckered in by the "we must have a security state to prevent the terrorists from winning" bullshit. I'm hopeful, that people will keep electing enough people to make it impossible for the government to get away with too much of this kind of shit. I'm finding I'm in agreement with AMFE, I'm more worried about corporations having access to this capability. I just see them having less checks on this kind of power and the obsession with maximizing the bottom line tends to be a very toxic and corrupting element.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Which again: corporations already do. That's kind of the point of PRISM. It's access to your data you freely escrowed unencrypted to corporations, with which they can actually pretty much do as they please within various limits.
So is the problem that the government has that information instead of just a corporation?
Is the problem that a corporation has it?
Is the problem what they do with that information?
Is the problem that it just sounds bad?
It seems so much of this is based on unexplained and unexamined axioms about things that are "bad" with no explanation as to what those things are and why they are bad, beyond vague handwaving.
What would the Government want with metadata?
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
They could be measuring communication rate so they can chart the growth pattern and any atypical spikes.
I mean, I would much rather that nobody had a massive database of everything I have done. First and foremost let me get that out of the way. I don't do much Social networking, I don't use gmail for my personal communications (and my business google apps account is purely business, and never gets used to discuss things I would be embarrassed to come out), and I use youtube to upload videos of me singing karaoke. So I preface this by saying that I am opposed to willfully giving my personal information and secrets to anyone.
But why I should trust google over the government? Or only be mad that such a database exists now that the government has it when google, Microsoft, Apple et al have been doing it for years or decades... that kind of reeks of libertarianism, where the free market is allowed and the government is inherently evil.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I'd rather be at the mercy of a king than a company. You can cut off the head of a king.
?
Still not sure how that's going to help (specifically in the sphere of national security)
Edit: And I'm not being intentionally difficult here.
I honestly can't think of a reason why metadata could be useful in preventing a terrorist attack.
I can see it being useful in more social and political spheres though, but I don't think the NSA is involved with those?
Having the incumbent party have access to that sort of data during an election could be interesting.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
The problem is that they are taking data which people (perhaps naively) believe to be private. Whether they are doing anything with it currently is entirely beside the point. They now have it, it is now able to be abused. A situation exists where abuse could happen. A situation for abuse exists inside a group of agencies with all the transparency of a brick wall.
Do you trust everyone who might have access to that data? How could you, you don't even know who has access. But even if you did, what about the people with access after the next election? A decade from now? The next time an unscrupulous bastard like Nixon has office?
All of this in the name of making us "safe".
As an example, you monitor communications to get an idea of what the baseline is and then look for large divergences from that baseline and then see if those divergences match a pattern that would indicate some sort of security problem.
ie - "Why is there a huge spike in calls between this number in New York and Yemen this month?"
I don't either, I was just throwing out the first thought that came to mind. It depends on how narrow track that data.
At any rate SKFM said it best.
First just to be clear, do you know what metadata is?
I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything but it's something a lot of people don't know anything about.
Copy/Paste for "Google", "Microsoft" etc.
How do you know who has access to start with?
But they aren't taking it. That data already exists and is most definitely not private. It belongs to a corporation.
So, again, what's the problem? That the government took it from a corporation? That a corporation has it? What?
Your point ignores everything I actually wrote and falls into exactly the kind of vague argument I'm talking about.
Good question.
My understanding is it's the summary (not the best word, but I'm at a loss for a better one) of a collection of data.
So it's data of the data if you want to phrase it that way.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
For everybody saying "pssh, so what?", yeah, I have a lot of heavy-duty doubt about something like this being used right now to target individuals (at least as a general practice), but if the potential is there, it will be used. It's human nature to try and take control, and something like this makes it as simple as government personnel pulling up a file on a prominent dissenting figure. And as has already been pointed out, Google can't send a SWAT team to kick in your front door because you said a naughty thing about their company, so yeah, there's a pretty damn huge difference between letting a corporation hold information for you and the government taking that information under the auspices of "protecting" you.
Sure, this isn't an immediate matter of the government trying to force what they think is best on everybody and stepping on all dissenters, but this is a really solid step in a direction to allow that. That educated individuals could so casually dismiss the topic is outright chilling.