U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance(allthingsd.com) |
U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance(allthingsd.com) |
The US intelligence community has a long history of going right to the communication source and obtaining raw data from public companies. In the 1920's Herbert Yardley's "American Black Chamber" worked with Western Union and other cable companies who turned over interesting cablegrams and radiograms.
In 1940 [before the US entered the second world war], the military assigned Lt Earl F. Cook to read and copy cable messages that passed through RCA's office with the consent of RCA's president, David Sarnoff.
After the war, there was of course project Shamrock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_O._Yardley#The_American...
The big question is how this will affect the intelligence community long-term, who are becoming simultaneously more important, and simultaneously more threatened by technology and the openness of the internet.
Will they be forced to become more transparent or succeed in their fight to keep growing in power/secrecy?
Having an extremely large and powerful government, now even more obsessed with aggressive enforcement of law, is almost always going to be continually at odds with the peoples trends towards social liberalism.
The internet seems to have accelerated liberalization and terrorism seems to have accelerated state totalitarianism. So it seem's we're witnessing an acceleration in the battle between the two (especially if you live in the HN bubble).
The counter argument of course could be, and often is, dismissed by those who see the state as a representation of the people and total secrecy in the intelligence community as necessary for a healthy country/national security.
Two hundred years ago, intercepting signals was extremely difficult. They were sent by courier in envelopes. Couriers are crafty and the backwoods perimeter long.
150 years ago, they could be sent by wire and this meant both an explosion of signals, but also a corresponding ease of identifying the route by which they would be passed.
In the early 20th century, radio increased the volume of signals, but again interception became easier to the point that there were many so many locations from which an antenna could be used that the development of encryption and decryption methods became the most important task in signals intelligence.
Today, anything could be important. And the NSA, being charged with national security assumes that you and I may very well be up to no good. There job is to be paranoid, and they are good at it.
Building a massive security apparatus, so far as I am aware, has never led to a more liberal political regime. While anecdote is not evidence, I don't see how one can make a strong case that the current state of affairs is the result of increasing liberalization.
The worst part is that the argument brought against transparency actually makes sense on the surface level, but as usual completely ignores the factor of bad actors within the system, which need to be kept in check as much as any hypothetical group of terrorists.
1. The government lied and pretends not to engage in domestic espionage.
2. To support that lie, the government didn't do much bad stuff with the results of its domestic spying.
3. Thus, the domestic spying wasn't a big deal.
I think we're past that point now.
That's just what we've heard about.
As for the rest -- it's hard to prove what secret sources the government used to motivate which actions. But as one example:
Being on the No-Fly List is pretty bad, and a lot of people are on it.
If the U.S. decided to take down every one of those companies or indite their CEOs/Boards the would have an uproar from the populous that would likely be comparable to the 60's (or worse).
Essentially, the populous would be more loyal to a company who's honest than a government which is dishonest.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-p...
While they may not share information with say - China - they will share it with one of the other eyes, who could also lend a helping hand in domestic spying.
Plausible deniability and so forth.
1. Most people probably are not huge fans of this, but don't consider it a big enough deal to go to jail over it. I'm in that category (double disclaimer: not speaking in any official capacity for my company).
2. Even if someone DID think it a big enough deal, it's not easy to be a martyr. If it were, then presumably you would have already found yourself a job at one of these companies then spilled the beans. Considering you're commenting on HN, not languishing in prison, I can only guess that you find the prospect of such martyrdom much less appealing than your comment seems to indicate.
Oddly enough, this time it's the tech companies arguing the opposite (that disclosing specific metadata only is OK and not hazardous).
Weird world we live in, sometimes...
Tech lacks representation though, particularly compared with how much lobbying much less affluent industries manage to do.
You can't fight things like that in court, it's as hopeless as Khodorkovsky's attempts to defend himself. Only things that work for businesses is moving out, for people - using strong encryption on personal level.
I don't say that legal way should not be taken, it is still good but just to show how far the government is willing to go to defend it's violations of human rights - which should make things clear to those who are still in doubt.
Sure, individual employees might leak the information, but they would being taking a great personal risk by doing so. Ed Snowden was not the only person who was aware of these programs and had a problem with them; yet he was the only one ready to give up his livelihood to leak the information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveillan...
If these companies were serious about protecting their customers, they'd band together and block government mandated mass surveillance entirely, from A to Z. Given their size of the market, the government can't and wouldn't shut them down.
I always thought it was the NSA telling local cops "go bark up that tree", and they make a series of "lucky guesses" that lead to an otherwise legitimate arrest and prosectution.
How do you figure? I weakly dispute that totalitarianism is accelerating (there are some worrying trends at various stages of development in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, but accelerating is a strong word - we may just be more aware of power abuses because of the internet), but I strongly dispute that, if true, "terrorism" is the cause. There has always been terrorism. There will always be terrorism. Terrorism is merely the enemy du jour. The idea that terrorism represents a new and uniquely dangerous threat is pure propaganda. Indeed, when you look at some the shit that went down in the latter half of the 20th century, we are living in a comparatively terrorist-free time. Possibly governing politicians are more afraid of terrorism after 9/11 (not because of its lethality as such but because of the unpredictable political aftershocks), but equally (more likely?) they may be consciously aware of its utility at pushing through power grabs. Either way, it's not right to call it a cause.
Have a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
It's rather interesting how much longer the 2000s section is - rather misleadingly, as each entry is 2-3 lines of text while the earlier entries are generally a single line. Also, there's a lot of fluff in the 2000s entries. Search for where the word "bomb" appears and you'll see what I mean. I wonder if this is the result of terrorism hype, or one of those instances of subtle Wiki bias we've all been hearing about?
Terrorists attacks probably aren't accelerating (domestically). But politically in the last decade, it has been the source of the accelerated militarization of police [1], extreme border policies such as the TSA follies and the elimination of judicial check on executive power [1].
All signs of increased totalitarianism and all directly connected to terrorism.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Secrets_Privilege#Elimin...
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Far be it from me to understand the finer points - but to my mind, youtube isn't a whole lot different from megaupload - but you can bet Google has top class lobbyists and lawyers, whereas megaupload did not.
That is not actually the case. Youtube has a concept of both private and unlisted videos. Unlisted videos work similarly to how you describe Megaupload:
"Unlisted videos
Making a video unlisted means that only people who have the link to the video can view it. To share an unlisted video, just share the link with the people who you’d like to have access to it, and they’ll then be able to see it. Unlike private videos, the people you share the video with do not need to have a Google account to see the video, and they can share with more people simply by forwarding the link to them.
Unlisted videos won’t appear in any of YouTube's public spaces, like your channel page or search results."
No comment re: anything after "It's the sort of thing . . ." I don't know the company's employment policies in this area and wouldn't talk about them even if I did.
>"No, I'd not disclose anything that jeopardizes my chances to be that whistleblower. I'd just disclose the main thing that jeopardizes my chances to be that whistleblower."
>It just seems like you've constructed a scenario where you will never be called upon to do what you seem to think is such an obviously good choice...
It seems the nail has met the head. Now, I don't know if you are indeed a software engineer for Google or not --and perhaps I'm torpedoing my own opportunity to join the ranks a year or so from now-- but Hacker News does seem to have quite a number of folks online that are genuinely involved in the thick of the industry. Of course, I understand that you cannot, will not, confirm or deny, comment or speculate. But you've brought about the very point I'm raising: Why on earth would asserting that I would behave ethically, affirming that I would blow the whistle if the protocols in place to address such issues failed, constitute "[disclosing] the main thing that jeopardizes my chances to be that whistleblower"? Why would such a statement constitute "[constructing] a scenario where [I] will never be called upon to do" the right thing? What is it about stating "my loyalty is to the company up until I'm expected to behave immorally, unethically, or illegally" that makes every last employer want to run for the hills?
>...and therefore I have trouble seeing how you came to the conclusion that the choice is easy or obvious.
I didn't come to either conclusion. Whistleblowing is neither easy nor the obvious answer. But when it becomes clear that it is the only viable answer, when every other avenue of objection is exhausted, it most certainly does become the right thing to do. Everyone has their own excuse for staying silent. They can be perfectly valid excuses. I wouldn't expect someone to blow the whistle if their dependents would be ruined by it. I wouldn't expect them to blow the whistle if they genuinely felt that it would make absolutely no difference and leave them forever destitute. But that doesn't make it right. Just excusable. And in the tech industry, a knowledge industry dominated by single, unattached, 20 somethings, I find it hard to believe that every last soul could have a valid excuse.
Let me construct a parallel scenario that might make it obvious to you. Let's suppose you're hiring a nanny to care for your children while you are away at work (not that you or I could necessarily afford such a thing). You tell the candidates your requirements for how the children should be treated while you are away, including what food they may eat, what shows they may watch, the ways, if any, they might be disciplined etc.
One of the candidates, upon hearing these requirements, declares that he will follow them up to the point he feels they violate his ethics or morals.
Do you hire this candidate? If no, why not?
I wasn't sure how youtube's private videos worked but jlgreco has explained above - further blurring the lines in my view between megaupload et al and youtube.
I think the litigation you mention is evidence of Google's lawyering and lobbying prowess.
(1) They sought to rate-limit DMCA takedown requests
(2) They operated the service with red-flag knowledge of copyrighted content, such as when a user complained that the video quality of the Showtime show "Dexter" was poor, and Kim Schmitz mailed his team to work on improving the quality of that content.
(3) They themselves used the service to exchange copyright-encumbered material, such as the movie "Taken".
(4) They operated a paid incentive program to get users to upload copyrighted content, and in their itemized performance reports for the program acknowledged repeatedly that the content they were paying for was copyrighted.
The reality of course is that every candidate will follow your orders up until he or she feels they violate his or her ethics/morals. Whether they're open about it or not is irrelevant. If you ordered them to abuse your own children (of course you wouldn't, but we're both being good-heartedly facetious here) you could reasonably expect them to turn you in, whether they were up front about it during an interview or not. Playing coy about the matter during an interview is a recipe for disaster on both ends.
Also, don't worry about what you say to me. I'm nowhere near important enough for that to matter.
Not to incriminate myself or anything, but I have been given copyrighted documents with Google Drive. (Though I've ingested many orders of magnitude more copyrighted documents through youtube...)
2) 3) and 4) I think youtube staff were just as bad if not worse. From Google/Viacom - you can see email transcripts on page 7 onwards (numbers being at the bottom of the page)
(PDF warning) http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/...
4) further to above - I do think youtube channels make money - and copyright material can be a source of that (though it should not be by their rules). Youtube now have detectors in place - that wasn't always the case. Megaupload could have done similar.
I think what really swung it for Google was catching Viacom uploading their own material, and yet suing for it, but again I'm not 100%
Also youtube weren't dealing with an FBI sting and it went through the courts. (I think that is where the lobbying aspect comes in - wild speculation, sure, but there is a marked difference in treatment)
There is no such conflict in the Mega emails. Kim Schmitz is show repeatedly to be concerned solely with maximizing the value of the content Mega stores to users. The operators of Megaupload are repeatedly shown to be aware of specific infringing content --- sometimes because they themselves used it, sometimes because their users pointed it out, and in some cases because they paid to have it put there.
Could there have been a criminal infringement charge leveled against Youtube? Based on this evidence, it looks like "maybe". But would DOJ have won the case? Almost certainly not. Read the judgements in the Viacom case. The founders are repeatedly found not to have had awareness of specific infringements. The DOJ doesn't bring cases it doesn't think it can win.
Agree with everything you wrote except the above. Basically the disagreement is on the source materials - one is a naive Viacom and the other is an indictment. So I think the indictment is cherrypicked "better" than Viacom managed.
If e.g. the FBI/DOJ were going after youtube I think they would have quoted more selectively than Viacom did.
Unless the full text of Mega's emails are out there - I can't be sure there's no conflict, I'm sure someone could dredge up him ordering something taken down.
Again with "repeatedly" and "specific" - the youtube emails, for all their conflict are repeated and specific, many times. There's also instances of youtube employee's grabbing stuff from other sites and putting it there themselves, which mega are accused of. I'm pretty sure with youtube's channel system, copyrighted content is paid to be put there in the same manner, though I'm not sure how youtube's early users were compensated.
I doubt the thought occured to them to bring a criminal case against youtube - that's one of the points I'm wildly speculating on - or if it was the case, lobbying stemmed it.
I'll have a read of the ruling: (PDF) http://www.legalbytes.com/uploads/file/Viacom-YouTube%20%28G...
The only argument I've ever heard that could exculpate Schmitz is that "perhaps the video uploads could have been authorized." But that beggars belief. No reasonable person on a jury would buy that Schmitz seriously entertained the idea that those videos were authorized uploads.
"On September 23,2005, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley emailed YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, stating: "can we remove the flagging link for 'copyrighted' today? we are starting to see complaints for this and basically if we don't remove them we could be held lìable for being served a notice.
it's actually better if we don't have the lìnk there at all because then the copyright holder is responsible for serving us notice of the material and not the users. anyways, it would be good if we could remove this asap."
Their only mitigating behaviour is the moral dilemma they exhibit, I'm sure something similar could be pulled from Mega's email archives - again my point being the FBI/DOJ are better at making a case than Viacom.