I mean, tempora is pretty bad, rank and file stronger than the collection obtained by NSA, metadata is stored, content is stored, there are examples of "owning" certificate authorities and even examples of downgrading SSL/TLS to not include perfect forward secret ciphers.
And this is done for any content that passes UK borders. :|
Sure they can get my info. Or anyone's info. And they could totally reconstruct my life. But they only have the resources of to do this to maybe a couple thousand people. Out of a billion westeRners.
Sure my emails are probably buffered for a little while. But as long as I don't ride a jet into the Sears tower nobody will actually read them.
The people asked themselves: if a tree fell in the woods and nobody heard it, did it make a sound. And our answer is no it didn't.
The fact is the biggest intrusion in our lives is Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Google literally exists to spy on you. It's a many many billion dollar industry.
The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does.
What most people haven't thought of is that the government doesn't NEED to do that to everyone to massively impact society.
I lived in Cuba for a while. Almost everyone was left alone to speak as they pleased. But the government had data on what was said, who associated with who, etc. It was collected by neighborhood watch groups.
They knew when someone actually became a threat and had the means to make their life difficult.
Oppressive systems only need to oppress those who would make waves.
So the knowledge of the surveillance then kept people in line to the extent they feared the amount of retaliation brought.
If the UK government was to re-educate everyone who voted libdem then we would all know the extent to which the surveillance would be used - and then adjust our behaviours.
So it seems surveillance is always "in potentia", and oppression is enabled by it.
I'm not sure where I am going with this other than, don't feel disgust, just violently revolt the minute they over step "the" mark.
It wouldn't be every libdem supporter btw. It would be 300-3000 key actors, or less. That's all you really need to target. Most people stay in line without prompting. I mean that in a statistical, not a critical way.
From the leaks we know that they both do the same thing, which is to use their computer resources to sift through all emails they get their hands on, build profiles of people and connect them with each other. Neither could afford to have humans reading all the data coming at them.
The difference is that Google uses their conclusions to show you the most profitable ads, while the NSA keeps their conclusions to themselves until the day of your potential arrest.
Whether people consider the creation of such a profile to be spying is up to them, but my personal suspicion is that people would strongly object if they understood what was being done with their data.
Consider if you get into politics in some way?
Maybe you get a evening visitor telling you to either drop your ambitions, vote a certain way once in office, or in some other way dictate terms for not releasing something to the press.
Something that while not directly criminal, will be negative enough socially to make a mess of your life.
However I've not seen any suggestion that this is happening, nor is dragnet surveillance in any way a pre-requisite for this sort of thing.
It isn't the lack of means that stops democracies becoming dictatorships.
As far as democracy vs dictatorship goes, consider that there is a third (and probably many other) alternatives: inverted democracy: all the totalitarianism of a dictatorship paired with passive "participation" to rubber stamp the majority of the regime, which is not subject to any form of democratic oversight. I think we're headed there rapidly, if not already there.
Remember the study that showed that public opinion is less important than moneyed interests? That's part of it, too.
Google on the other hand? They spend millions upon millions of dollars trying to influence policy in Washington.
Who do you think is actually more likely to use blackmail here?
The same NSA that lied to it's oversight committees about it's actions? Or do you live under a different NSA than the rest of us?
They tried to hide by redefining the meaning of all sorts of simple terms ("collection" comes to mind) and narrow political answers like "not under this program".
There hasn't been any actual overview by either party... the actions of the NSA are aggressively hidden from them, and they prosecute whistleblowers.
Also when it comes to lobbying involving a lot of money and for draconian measures you should take a look at Hollywood and the entertainment industry. They've been using lobbyists for decades to pursue even more draconian agendas.
Non-partisan my ass. The NSA is it's own party. And from what we've seen over the past 3 years or so, they are - effectively - under NO oversight whatsoever. They lie to Congress with impunity, get rubber-stamp "warrants" from the FISA courts, and then do whatever the hell they want anyway.
The problem with google though, is that anything Google knows about me can be sought by the NSA with just one of those FISA warrants.
Google and Facebook are essentially NSA Reserve Branch.
The NSA also isn't charged with making criminal cases. There is a conspiracy theory about "parallel construction" but too much crime is totally unsolved for the NSA to be secretly feeding law enforcement data on a large scale.
I also wouldn't be so sure that Google or Facebook won't fuck with your life. Plenty of American companies have done extraordinarily evil things before. Then again so has the government.
Let's quote Wikipedia:
"In August 2013, a report by Reuters revealed that the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration advises DEA agents to practice parallel construction when creating criminal cases against Americans that are actually based on NSA warrantless surveillance. The use of illegally obtained evidence is generally inadmissible under the Fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.
Two senior DEA officials explained that the reason parallel construction is used is to protect sources (such as undercover agents or informants) or methods in an investigation. One DEA official had told Reuters: "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day. It's decades old, a bedrock concept.""
That's a formal government advisory to its agents that they should cover up the way that they actually encountered evidence. And that is total bullshit because it completely invalidates your right to a fair trial, among other rights. This isn't the NSA, solving crimes, it's the government law enforcement agencies querying the NSA database in order to solve cases they've already opened.
Your implication seems to be that this is supposed to make the practice more acceptable. Well, I'm not from the US or even a Five Eyes-country. I speak from the perspective of the billions of people who don't have these rights under the NSA and similar-minded agencies.
And you're basing this belief on what, exactly? The NSA party-line? I think a lot of evidence shows that they've been scarfing up damn near everything, FISA be damned, by using bogus interpretations of various laws. Are you really confident that the NSA aren't hoovering up your email, web traffic, phone calls, etc?
Just curious, as I see nothing to support such a belief.
I don't mean to detract from your mains points about why people aren't in an uproar over these things. But, there is a big difference between what "Google" can do to you, and what a government institution such as the NSA can.
In order for the NSA to actually hurt me the government would have to essentially go full on fascist. But even in that case, first thing they'd do was to crack open Google's database.
That's what the FBI did after 9-11. They went to VISA and Mastercard to find out what the hijackers were up to.
You are already tied to stupid things you said online. They have categorized this information and will sit on it for an indefinite amount of time. There are groups such as JTRIG who will use the stupid things you have said to turn you against people you may be aligned with, if they think it is necessary.
Should you ever run for public office or become an inconvenience, you are already in their pocket. It's already "full fascist", you just haven't toed the line of their rules yet.
The NSA programs chill speech of the majority, anyway. You always hear people faux-fretting about "being on a list" for what they say. It's a joke when they say it, but it's not a joke in reality. People are reacting to being constantly surveilled, and it's putting a cramp on a lot of discussions.
It's not rational for me to care about surveillance of the socialists, because I'm not a socialist. It's not rational for me to care about surveillance of unions, because I'm not in a union. It's not rational for me to care about surveillance of fringe elements, because I'm not in a fringe element.
But now they're surveilling me, and there's no one left to be irrational for me.
Complete and utter nonsense. Have you not heard about SQL's "JOIN" feature? Did you miss the numerous advances in machine learning?
> nobody will actually read them
If you haven't figured out by now that it's not a human that reads them, you're being wilfully blind.
Even if you are limiting it to humans, all it would take is you pissing off the right person. With your entire life in front of them, how many different types of revenge do you think they can find?
They buffer pretty much everything for a while so they can backtrack a couple days but that information isn't being filtered through a search algorithm.
Your email isn't in their database.
Assuming they play by the rules (they don't, but anyway...) all they'd have to do to get your emails anyway is ask GCHQ for them. GCHQ isn't American, so they didn't break any laws by grabbing the content and metadata for all your communications. GCHQ passes the data to the NSA, and boom, they have your data. Legally, with no FISA warrant.
The FISA court is a rubber stamp, anyway-- look at their approval rate.
If you're running an agency in the US that can't spy on Americans, you can make a deal with a similarly bound agency in the UK - they get your UK data, you get their US data, and you have all the US data you want even if you didn't collect it.
Just look at how the NSA gets its information right now. Most of it is just delivered by companies who keep the information themselves.
You want to find a list of gays in America. Grindr has a database for you, Google too.
First, your claim that we "aren't being actually spied on" is utterly false, given that the NSA has a multitude of programs which explicitly harvest and analyze the "metadata" (telemetry content) and also body content of all American electronic communications. They lied about this, then were refuted-- check the Snowden files online at the Intercept website. They have a dossier on every last one of us.
This brings me to your next point, that they can't spy on all of us. It's all automated, idiot. They have enough hardware to do it, and they've spent years making sure it's all done without any hands on from their analysts. This is also in the Snowden files. They don't need to "totally reconstruct your life", they already have it right there, with every shred documented electronically. Sure, they probably haven't integrated all the times you popped up on a CCTV or dashcam, but they have the data from your phone, which is even better.
Your emails are stored indefinitely and are in a searchable database, tagged by keyword, topic, you name it. Nobody will actively read them, but it doesn't even matter since the computer system has read them already. They know you aren't up to anything because they automatically checked as soon as the email left your outbox.
Your discussion of the tree in the forest is irrelevant; people react differently to events when they know that they are being watched, which is now the case on a societal level. I will say this again because it is critical for the next section: people react differently when they know that they are being monitored.
There is actual impact to people because of this aspect of human behavior. Investigative journalism is moribund because sources are afraid to come forward, meaning that the public has one less (of very few) way of understanding what the government (and corporations) is doing in their name.
Then there's the problem of the intelligence agencies spying on the political organizations that are supposed to oversee them. They capture all of the political communications too, after all. Remember when Dianne Feinstein publically claimed that the CIA was surveilling her and threatening her as a result of the torture report that was being put together? Think about all of the times that you never even heard about that because the blackmail was successful.
Speech has been chilled, with people afraid of saying what they really think for fear of ending up "on a list". Anyone who runs for office is sure to be already on the list, and frankly, if they're running on a left wing platform, may have already been targeted for disruption via JTRIG or an equivalent US group.
To speak a bit more about JTRIG, I want to emphasize that JTRIG is an active platform out of GCHQ that is currently operating whose mission is to disrupt, degrade, and encourage obedience among nonviolent, legal groups. They likely target public dissenters and protesters. This is not acceptable, and it isn't something that an actual democracy would partake in, but hey, we found it in the NSA's slide decks.
Moving on, I agree that Big Brother 2.0 takes a lot of data from the big tech companies-- the difference being that it's optional to participate. You can opt out, and shut out their tracking or spying, if you want. Can't do that with the NSA.
In conclusion, the actual impact is invisible to the public, but certainly present. The impact takes the form of things not said, blackmail in private, and disruption via proxies.
Some propaganda ministry trying to honeypot the Taliban, Iran, and Argentina is totally unrelated.
>if they're running on a left wing platform, may have already been targeted for disruption via JTRIG or an equivalent US group.
There is absolutely no indication that anything of sort goes on. There are no shortage of left wingers making all sorts of noise in the UK and US.
The NSA and GCHQ aren't allowed to blackmail politicians. If they wanted to break bad, even if you destroyed them today, they could reform in like 20 minutes by just storming Google's headquarters.
If you don't think that the government will follow the law and the will of the people, why do you want to make a law preventing them have any capability. Either they follow the law or not.
I must admit I laughed at this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Environment_for_Anal...
To clarify the problem: if Tempora grabs 100% of content and metadata from the pipe then hands it to the NSA while keeping a copy for itself, it's the same as the NSA harvesting the data itself.
This means that the NSA's hubbub about "we only collect metadata assuming you use our definitions for all terms" which has been previously proven false, is again conclusively proven false.