1. Each time something increasingly worse about the NSA surveillance gets revealed, or confirmed, Sens. Wyden and Udall release a statement saying something like: "This is only the tip of the iceberg: if Americans only knew how bad it was, they'd be very angry." They're on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and so are in a position to know at least more than their colleagues, and much more than their employers (the American people). This is extremely disconcerting. What we know and now see confirmed officially about the surveillance is pretty stunning. Exactly how bad is this? Is all of congress tapped? All the governors? Snowden hinted at this. What the fuck is going on in my country?
2. So, if it's so bad, why won't the honorable Sens. Udall and Wyden take a stand and reveal the wrongdoings on the Senate floor? As I understand the law, they cannot be charged for anything revealed on the Senate floor. And even if there were a way to charge them, I'd like to think it would be political suicide for any president to try.
These two gentleman swore an oath to the U.S. constitution. Why won't they uphold it? They are in a unique position to do so. The fact that they keep making these ominous statements is starting to seem more like a cover-your-ass strategy than an honest attempt to stop the illegal activities.
I'm going to assume the worst, which would be that the NSA is used as a tool of blackmail by nefarious parties whom the NSA relies on. Key House and Senate members put in a good word for the NSA and then they get some "free" information on their opponents, at which point they convince their opponents to "trade" wins with the opposing party's leadership.
Those in on the game get to continue their political career because the party leaderships are coordinating wins between each-other through bipartisan-orchestrated gerrymandering, and "suicide" elections where elected officials intentionally lose their elections in order to boost the profile of their friendly opponents.
Those whom are bucking the chain of command are ostracised and relegated to the fringes (eg: the Pauls).
The blackmail information doesn't need to be passed to a third party. It can be brought directly to bear on problematic government officials by the NSA.
All they would need to do is make the senator understand that a record of all correspondence and browsing history exists.
Considering about 5% of the population has some pedophilic tendency, and estimates are around 10% of people have an incest fetish, 10% of people are estimated to be gay yet only Tammy Baldwin is out in the senate, lots of successful people do drugs, and everyone else has tons of relatives who may or may not have those problems, you can not underestimate the power wielded by someone with access to all our communications.
It's too great a power to comprehend. And someone wouldn't even have to be consciously doing ill to exploit it. I imagine that anyone in the position would believe they're protecting the USA from terrorism, and righteously punishing the deviants by leveraging their 'sins' while unconsciously building the infrastructure for future tyranny.
Furthermore, I've only listed the problems I think could be discovered through software. We aren't getting into conspiracy theory stuff like what would happen if you put a secret team of 10 analysts and 20 lawyers to work for a year looking to find laws broken by the members of the legislative branch. I mean, Hoover has been dead for a while, right?
This hasn't gotten enough attention:
US targets lie-detector coaches following Edward Snowden affair
http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1297622/us-targets-li...
What we need is an independent congressional commission with the power to unilaterally declassify information that is not directly related to ongoing operations ( i.e. anything naming specific operatives or live intelligence about events now in the field would be exempt. But descriptions of scope, and summary reports of the outcomes of programs would be allowed. ) so that the American public can get an idea of what is being done in it's name.
This commission to include in it's scope psychological warfare operations and propaganda directed at American audiences. And a full investigation of any information sharing regarding American citizens with other agencies of the Executive branch.
We need this now. These stains on our nations honor can only be cleaned by sunlight.
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."
What we need right now is to know the full extent of the damage. And they swore an oath to protect the constitution. Any fool can see what an existential threat this is to our constitution and country.
The short answer is that it isn't your country anymore.
In the 80's it wasn't the country for gays. In the 50's it wasn't the country for non-whites. In the 1900's it wasn't the country for women. Before the 1900's it was only old white land owners.
The ruling class has just expanded to not be exclusively old white men. And the oppressed class has expanded in the same way.
I am not an American and have no idea how politics work in the US but Obama is basically a political Zombie by now. He can do whatever he wants now right?
If only we'd have politicians with the courage to take on such a crusade.
The NSA has created a large market for services like Silent Circle and this means that a larger number of wiretaps and the like are likely to "go dark" as a result of encryption. We need fully open source and federated versions of things like Silent Circle has and those will come about.
But this will lead to new battles about encryption and government access to encryption. As the people start realizing that everything is tapped by default, they will start protecting themselves.
Wiretaps were tolerated when we could trust in processes that would guarantee that they would not be abused. Now that we know that this trust has been broken there is no way to go back.
We will see two battles in the near future. The first will be a battle over the size and scope of the surveillance state. I fear the NSA will win that one hands down.
But the second is over government access to encryption backdoors. We have more reason to be optimistic here.
Things are shaping up to create a huge showdown. I, for one, am relatively afraid of the consequences even if we win the second battle.
Did Obama denied PRISM too or did he just let others deny it? If the former, isn't this a reason for impeachment?
Out of curiosity, what is a good argument against this perspective that Average Joe can grok?
Obviously a very small failure rate is impressive in the abstract. We're not talking about the abstract here, we're talking about foundational concerns about whether there can be an expectation of privacy in any online communication.
Prior to the American Revolution, British Magistrates were giving the police "general warrants" that let them search whatever they wanted and this lead to all kinds of abuses of power. This is why we require that search warrants are reasonably scoped.
We have come full circle (ironically our most recent "President George" was the third President named George, so I like to affectionately call him President George III) back to a time of general warrants. We can expect that the same kinds of abuses of power will occur.
This means, effectively that the government can decide that someone is an annoyance to them and then look back at all of their communications for evidence of a crime, and then try the individual for very vague crimes in court. Checked face book at work? Are you guilty of using your work computer in excess of what your employer authorized? Worse is it wire fraud?
In the end we end up in a world dominated by government officials who can and will adopt the same mentality of Stalin's chief of police, Beria, who was purportedly quoted as saying "show me the man and I'll find you the crime."
How are we supposed to challenge a secret program that even the overseers say they are overreaching, and yet wont acknowledge it exists, or that anyone has any right to sue because they cant prove the secret program targeted them.
Its a complete farce as far as I can tell, and the dog and pony show will eventually calm and then we will basically be in the same position as we ever were.
I will definitely be voting against those that support this buffoonery, but I don't know that most will.
They were abused for a long time and we did nothing. The difference was you had to physically tap the line while the call was taking place, and then physically listen to the entire call.This placed enormous limitations. Now you can automatically store everyone's calls (translated to text), and search the entire database with a keyword search.
But this is one of those things that, sadly, few people outside of places like HN have the slightest understanding of.
But what has happened since is that particularized search warrants have been replaced by 1772-style general warrants. People now know that this trust has been broken on a tremendous scale and we can't go back. That's the difference.
In other words the key change is in perception more than in substance.
In the 1700s, the only way for the government to read your papers was to take them away from you--harming your use of them.
Today they can extract the entire contents without disturbing your use at all. Reading and restriction have been separated.
It's a new situation and there will be big fights as the law catches up. This is not historically unprecedented though; technology has frequently caused disruptions in the law. That's how copyright came about, for instance--the printing press meant that original content was no longer protected by the need to hire 100 monks to make a copy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_for_the_Ad...
This from Wikipedia - Freedom of Speech:
"Freedom of information is an extension of freedom of speech where the medium of expression is the Internet. Freedom of information may also refer to the right to privacy in the context of the Internet and information technology. As with the right to freedom of expression, the right to privacy is a recognised human right and freedom of information acts as an extension to this right."
Personally I think it's appalling that they're still regarded as "lie detectors."
"Nothing like this has been done before," John Schwartz, a US Customs and Border Protection official, said of the legal approach. "Most certainly our nation's security will be enhanced. There are a lot of bad people out there. This will help us remove some of those pests from society."
Regardless of how anyone may feel about 'lie-detector' tests, this is chilling.
There is something to be said about anonymity (or lack thereof) and free speech, but I believe anonymous free speech was never a guaranteed right -- the courts always tried to balance the right to anonymous free expression with other rights, such as the rights of those who might be harmed by that expression (e.g. in cases of defamation, fraud, etc.)
Also, the various federal executive agencies (Justice Department, State Department, et al) may very well be tapping into NSA data as much as possible for exactly what you're describing, especially since the recent DEA (Justice) and IRS (Treasury) revelations have shed some light on this.
The NSA's dam for controlling information dissemination has cracks in it, and I'm betting it'll be wedged wide open for the federal executive agencies to use at their convenience.
Everyone operating at that kind of level has an interest in political allegiances (lowercase p). It's just part of the job. To not have such an interest means you'll simply be out-gamed and replaced by someone who does.
I'm not advocating that what's happening is ok. I'm talking about the physical act of speech, not the cultural or psychological aspects. I agree with you on those.
It's just that in the 1700s, if you were working on a newsletter or pamphlet (like, say, a Federalist Paper), your draft would be on paper in your home. If the government wanted to read it, they had to come to your home and seize it, in which case you don't have it anymore. Your speech is directly prevented in a physical way.
Today, your draft might be stored a server that is owned and operated by a 3rd party. The government does not need to come to your home to read it. In fact you would have no clue that it was accessed at all. You could go on with your life and publish as though the access never happened.
Am I saying this is OK or right? No. It just is.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
The scary thing though is that this means that people the NSA doesn't like can find themselves at the center of whatever scrutiny they think is most appropriate.
We aren't even close to that. So far the NSA hasn't done anything like beat someone and leave them to die in the road.
I'm totally on board with the idea that pervasive surveillance smothers society if for no other reason than its presence causes self-censorship like the groklaw situation. But until it comes out that the NSA has been maiming and killing innocents we aren't on the level of what those minorities have had to suffer.
Hi Mr Agent, how awesome is it being a plant and getting paid to browse tech sites?
But! Taking these numbers at face value, the low error rate tells us that, yes, we can have privacy with pretty high probability. As with all things in life, it is not guaranteed, but these are much better chances than what we can expect in other aspects of life. I mean, tens of thousands erroneously picked up over many months out of the billions of emails exchanged daily? Why, you're more likely to die in a terrorist attack than be snooped on [1]!
[1] No, I haven't run the numbers, just saying so for dramatic effect :-P
You'll never convince me that any jihadist has the capacity to inflict harm on society more than a government with unchecked power to know all secrets. Knowledge is power, and complete knowledge corrupts completely.
You'll never be convinced because you are, presumptively, ensconced in the safe, protective shell of a (western?) country that does not experience terrorist attacks on a regular basis. The terrorist threat is real. People die everyday in terror attacks. The "power-mad" government scenario? Lets just say in all this noise I've seen very few instances of actual abuse of power, if any.
http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/James-5-12/
I'm nonreligious, but agree with this position, as the alternative would imply that lying should be expected in all cases where no oath is sworn. Here's one small, specific, interesting piece of the history of offering an alternative: http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/161/entry
I still think the oath to the constitution is far more important to the integrity of our country, but I was wrong that they swore no other oath.
I don't care what the percentage is. The right to snoop arbitrarily is too much power, and if we accept it will be abused, it will get worse, and it will be very hard to undo. Safety is not worth the permanent eradication of human dignity and liberty. I'd rather die than live like a chickenshit.
BTW, the government and the courts agree that warrantless snooping is dangerous, which is why there are checks and balances in place. The recent leaks raised doubts that those were not effective. But if the numbers in the declassified documents are accurate, it's nowhere nearly as bad as people here are imagining.
Put simply, databases change the equation. Never in human history has it been possible to store and mine such a massive quantity of data in perpetuity. If the infrastructure exists to capture and process that much data, included via algorithm rather than by human, that represents such a radical shift in power that its abuse is inevitable, regardless of whatever restraints may or may not exist today. What happens if the next Snowden is a profiteer? What happens if China finds a backdoor, and can suddenly tap all data on every American citizen.
Capturing and storing all data is really really fucking dangerous, no matter who's doing it or why. (I'm not thrilled about Google or Facebook either, but at least it's voluntary, and they never throw anyone into a cage.)
> People die everyday in car accidents and safety is an illusion, so let's stop wearing seatbelts.
I think a better analogy would be a seatbelt that you can't take off, "for your own good". And if you're trapped by your seatbelt in a crashed and burning car, well, too bad, we meant well!
As a country, we have already made clear that the majority are okay with roughly anything that is justified on the alter of terrorism.
Do you really think there is something they can reveal that will change this?
If so, what is it? IE What do you think is the galvanizing thing they could ever reveal that would make the tradeoff you suggest worth it.
If this had all been released at once, it would have been much easier to sweep under the rug, and those who generally reflexively defend their political parties might not have had to really confront the issue. They could be proceeding this way secure a better chance of victory.
The way I read it so far (please do correct me if I'm wrong) is that Greenwald received a very large dump of information from Snowden and that Greenwald is dictating the pace and selection of the releases.
How do you know they aren't playing Lincoln to your Thaddeus Stevens?
I just hope that Snowden thought to take a copy of Clapper's (any anyone else responsible's) internet browsing history, or at least is creative enough to forge some terrible blackmail material and leak it, just to do to them what they're doing to us.
I do appreciate the strategic thinking behind your suggestion that Snowden or Greenwald may eventually reveal what they are obliquely referring to. My personal opinion is that Greenwald led with his strongest story -- I don't think they have much more. But I have nothing to back that up. But clearly Wyden and Udall have a whole lot more.
In the end, I'm the type of person who believes that their oath to the constitution supercedes any strategic concerns.
"In the end, I'm the type of person who believes that their oath to the constitution supercedes any strategic concerns."
What if they think the best way to defend the Constitution is to behave strategically and marshall their power for the best possible outcome. That seems reasonable to me.