New CIA Chief to Gladly Spy on Americans, Even If Using Info Hacked by Russians
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/washington-...?
I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad. Call and that's it. Your 'representatives' are not your representatives. There is no pressure that you can place on them.
I mean, I like your enthusiasm, just wondering how come you didn't adjust it with reality of these days.
There is an excellent write up of how this works and why it works from a former congressional aide: https://qz.com/836737/fomer-congressional-staffer-twitter-ti...
Take action!
Write your senators numbers on a note by your desk, put them in your phone as contacts. Add your house representatives as well. When you hear about an important issue, make a quick call. Ask them to represent you on upcoming issues. Thank them for their position on issues you support, let them know you are disappointed in them for things you oppose.
An incumbent has over a 90% chance of being reelected until they decide not to run anymore. They literally do not need to care after they've told whatever lies they needed to tell to get elected the first time.
You're assuming that public officials are automata that don't suffer from risk aversion, don't need to raise money in close races, and don't change their behaviour based on whether they have public opinion behind them. I wouldn't bet on that being true.
They do not need to care about you.
Talking about Feinstein in particular -
* January 17, 2011 Approval rating measured at 43%
* May 12, 2011, Feinstein co-sponsored PIPA
* PIPA gets mass blow back
* 2012 Reelected
* 2013 moves to continue mass survailance
* After the 2016 FBI–Apple encryption dispute, Feinstein, along with Richard Burr, sponsored a bill that would be likely to criminalize all forms of strong encryption
* 2016 Reelected
She knows she doesn't need to give a damn about your issues with mass surveillance.
With today's advances in statistics and technology, people could be polled for their opinions on issues by hundreds of independent and transparent public polling companies. Just like jury duty but easier and on your phone. You can't buy all the people all the time. It's too expensive. But you can perpetuate the system that engulfs their representatives all of the time.
When you start to meet people in positions of power you realise that they're not a bunch of sleazy villains, they're complicated people who (for the most part) think they're doing the right thing in a difficult and often contradictory environment.
I can understand if it is a super complicated trade treaty, but something straightforward like "don't spy on your people, that too with not much oversight etc" - is that too hard to understand?
Confirmation bias goes a long long way.
Take gerrymandering, which is as undemocratic is it gets. If you already believed yourself to be one of the 'good guys', it wouldn't be hard to convince yourself that gerrymandering (as a tool of last resort) is an acceptable way to hold at bay the forces of moral degeneracy... especially when other 'good guys' tell you its okay, and you can find some character flaw or weakness in your opponent that you can use to licence your own.
Confirmation bias is well documented, but check out Daniel Effron's work on 'moral licencing'. He showed that people tend to horse-trade ethics, excusing biased or self-serving behaviour with the points scored from virtuous behaviour... one example being an experiment where the subjects exhibited increased racial bias when they'd previously been given an opportunity to state that they'd voted for Obama.
2016 Reelected
That is to say - may it's that high because they respond to people who call in.
This mechanism - calling your congressperson, threats to replace them in the next primaries, showing up to townhalls, etc, is precisely how the Tea Party seized power. The republicans they didn't replace fell in line with their agenda.
Just don't expect elected officials to pay attention to you if you aren't a part of their voting district.
What a weird coincidence. Someone should tell them that political activism is pointless.
Calling and showing up counts.
You call.
You show up everywhere they talk.
You run against them. etc
The amount of apathy in america is impressive.
"Eh, it'll never work" seems to be the rallying cry of today's america.
I'm sorry but that's not realistic, people have lives to live and survive through.
Trump is president because the US has an idiotic system that reduced the effectiveness of peoples votes for living in popular places.
Besides, we were talking about representatives, the people do not vote for the President, states do.
It's not all out of your hands and in the hands of "big money" or whatever boogeyman of the day is.
But feel free to state your case for why outsized spending on political influence is a good and/or neutral thing for society.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/senate-confirms-mike-pompe...
They were the first internet company to publish a transparency report, for example [1]. Now copied by all the big players.
I remember them fighting back over a decade ago against government requests for search data, when others simply complied. [2]
[1] https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/?authuser=1
[2] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/response-to-doj-moti...
Hey, no fair! That's our panopticon, not yours!
Also I have my doubts that she will run for re-election. Garcetti will probably take a shot.
So I write letters that say I'm contributing to her political opponents. You can do this if you live in another state. And money talks louder than votes.
Even if we win one fight, it's going to be a constant battle against powers who do want more and better surveillance, and the capability to do so is just getting easier and cheaper.
The only real solution is to have technologically enforced privacy, in ways that can not be blocked legally.
While we shouldn't stop the first fight, we really should be focusing on the second one.
Back then they needed to appear to be better than the soviets, and thus upheld the laws on privacy.
But now there is no comparative low water mark, and whats worse they now have one or more snitch in every home. And that is compromised computers.
Every phone, every laptop, and soon enough every IOT device, will be a potential snitch on our activities.
And where they earlier needed large staffs to listen, watch, and take notes, they can now automatically transcribe every conversation with timestamps down to the second. And soon enough they can even do it with video (if not already).
Keep in mind that this is all tech that the likes of Google and Amazon is working on to provide more services for us all...
Well, if not other legal means left, you have other options. You happy Americans can buy guns legally, and "right to revolution" is pretty much written in your constitution.
It's also highly likely a portion of the army would defect if things get that far, making it less a revolution and more a civil war.
Personally, I think a civil war is likelier than a revolution, due to the army dividing. Though to be clear, both seem rather unlikely.
You should read my comment from a year ago that addressed why the situation would be much more complicated, and certainly not "farcical".
On the same note, what is happening right now in the States is pretty much half of the country revolting, for better or for worse.
Yes. The price of freedom is vigilance. If you are not creating your future, others will create it for you. This is true not only for privacy, but every freedom we enjoy.
In the last few decades there has been a trend toward more people taking a lot of our comfortable modern lives for granted. Some with a better understanding of the current political landscape have seen the people trying to dismantle the foundations of the freedoms and comfort we enjoy. The enemy is organized and powerful, so the battle seems hopeless.
Everyone needs to remember that previous generations had to fight the same powers, and they won. It was hard work, but we only have the many of the freedoms, civil rights, and middle class lifestyle thanks to the previous generations that fought power. We can win the war against privacy, but it will require a lot more solidarity and focus and a lot less infighting.
The smart way to win battles has always been to trick your enemy into choosing not to fight. Maintaining power is easy when the enemy gives up the fight or fights among themselves.
> the capability to do so is just getting easier and cheaper.
Then the technology should be fought (civil war), or its manufacture prohibited (Butlerian Jihad), or even better, put to use in the other direction. The latter may require a lot of creativity.
> The only real solution is to have technologically enforced privacy, in ways that can not be blocked legally.
Except that doesn't exist except in specific situations. If the political side is ignored, technology doesn't matter because the boot, rubber hose, and rifle can prevent technology from being used. With modern methods of social manipulation (e.g. Sesame Credit), the firearm can be replaced with peer presure and social standing.
Both the technological and political battles need to be fought, becaujse they support each other and cannot stand on their own.
Take a look at any given day on HN. Programmers want freedom to program in unrestricted languages like C, they want to make the high salaries of data mining companies, they want to continue using protocols that are hard to make secure like e-mail etc.
I don't think you have to decide much over which fight to fight considering there isn't really one in the first place.
This seems crazy. The only fight is the first one.
If use of encryption is made illegal (for example), and the penalties involved include going to prison, will you, reverend_gonzo, personally still continue to use encryption?
If so, I applaud you, but my intuition is that only a tiny percentage will be willing to take that risk.
Any technological advancement, even breakthroughs that took decades to make, can be made illegal in a day. What use is privacy technology if you can be put in jail for using it?
Even if the risk is small, it will always be there, and a proper boot-on-face government like China will easily squash adoption of even the most miraculous privacy innovations.
My point is that it is not possible to eternally prevent the government for from surveillance. The technology is quickly getting easier and cheaper, and will very shortly, if not already, be available to any company who wants it. Look at things like Siri and Alexa. As those technologies get further refined, what's to prevent them being added to your smart TV, your smart refrigerator, your smart light bulb?
What's to prevent somebody, whether its your government, another government, or marketing firms, to pay other companies to add this technology to their products? To various extents, this has already happened.
If you want you information to not be available to the highest bidder, the only way will be to hide it, and that will require increasing vigilance and technology.
My point is that any of that technology can be made illegal in an instant, making it completely irrelevant.
Without political rights and protections, privacy technology is worthless.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
-- Hillel the Elder
What we need to do is have laws which protect us against not only government surveillance but company as well as private individual surveillance. Government surveillance is but one aspect of surveillance. One way to mitigate the effects is to dull the effects legally.
The day will come when not only governments can snoop, but just about anyone who wants to and has means will be able to; so just preventing the gov from doing it will be at most a pyrrhic victory. But you're welcome to try but you won't stop foreign governments from their abilities to snoop on you.
Eventually we'll just have to live knowing just about everything about us is known but that that knowledge cannot be held against the individual, in a legal manner.
I don't think the cold-war tactics of escalation and countering with new measures is the ultimate outcome.
That's the optimistic endgame. I don't think there is a technological solution to this.
The more pessimistic view suggests a future totalitarian surveillance state.
It's going to be an interesting four years.
But I don't think that'll be enough. We should focus on the 3rd fight, which is equal access to information. If loss of privacy is bad, a one-sided situation is worse. My professional feeling is pervasive surveillance will outpace privacy tech and policy wise.
So the best available option long term (100+ years) is to make everything completely open. Don't allow only those in power to have privacy because it will solidify their position.
I do not know how governments(any form) can provide services to a user base of hundreds of millions/billions without detailed usage data. Attempting to guess the usage patterns of a user base that large is improbable. At some point in the future society will be faced with a decision to collect data for the improvement of resource allocation in all of its forms. We are currently in the before you can crawl period of data collection, of which we now collect just enough data to draw mostly incorrect or narrow hypothesis about its nature.
A realistic example is road construction. The public charges the government with constructing resource intensive roads, with only superficial data about their usage, traffic counts and building permits. In this scenario we ideally hope to get roads that support the most common traffic patterns, while providing decision makers with the results of the current system and not the actual patterns that created them. While I am sure they can deduce some form of meaningful analysis from something like traffic counts they are obviously an after the fact data set, that when used to plan future development lead to false analysis. The alternative data set would be all GPS meta data for all connected devices, and then applied to the decision process. The from where and to where piece of geo-analysis would fundamentally change the planning process.
A similar example would be for the Facebook UI team or networking team to provide new features and continuously optimize current features, while being only provided page views and raw user growth. No referral data, click tracking, dwell times, return frequency, workflow analysis, network paths, geographic usage data, browser info, or bandwidth data. Simply allocate the resources of the teams based on pageviews and raw user growth numbers. You would be able to research new features, but only by asking 100 users what they want or where they are from. Each feature you create cost $10mil and once launched can only be changed for $100mil, and the new feature deletes 1% of your user accounts.
I am not saying that privacy is not relevant, but I am saying that at some point in the future data will be more important, critically in the health sciences and public works(globally).
also the following statement is false, because he was confirmed as of today: "However, the Senate blocked Mike Pompeo, Trump's nominee for CIA."
It's nice to have the anti-war left back, but I'll miss the small-government conservatives. My guess is the Patriot Act will stick around again but Democrats will be back to hating it.
As far as "primary perpetrators a week ago", I mean I'd have preferred that Obama do more to protect civil liberties but he is the guy who pardoned Chelsea Manning, tried to close Gitmo, and god knows what else he pushed back against. Running the executive branch means that by default you're the primary perpetrator, but there are degrees of perpetrating here.
* commuted sentence - still in jail, was in jail this whole time, still no accountability that I see for things leaked by Manning and Snowden, and alarmingly high collateral damage rates in drone killings.
Yeah, yeah, so different from Bush. Definitely not another typical 8 year cycle. Everyone's acting like Trump suddenly has unlimited power to be a tyrant while Obama couldn't do things like this just because those mean old white men got in his way. He expanded executive power plenty and didn't use it to keep very many campaign promises.
I'm right there with you on the 8 year cycle. I despised GWB, as many did, and voted for Obama with full support, only to watch as he continued the very erosion of civil liberties that I held against Bush. And yet, in the echo chamber of my social circle, the condemnations, the rants, the protests, had all gone silent. It seemed much the same too in the larger picture of the culture with the sources I looked to for information. Silence and rapture where previously there was outrage.
It's been in peril for the last eight years and probably eight years before that. That suddenly people just came to their senses is a little too late. Surely these same people HAD to believe at some point a Republican would be in the White House (I mean fuck people, in a two party system it's a 50/50 chance) and that person would probably want to expand mass surveillance, right?
I'm sorry but I don't have much sympathy for people who thought electing a Democrat would absolve them of mass surveillance and protect their civil liberties.
Trouble is, those are all things Democrats defended for their 2008 / 2012 president or their 2016 candidate. I don't like Trump, but the Democrats are being enormous hypocrites here. Silly games as usual.
Is this true? I'll have to dig up the history on the previous 40 odd Presidents and see (I honestly don't know). Forgive me, but this just sounds like one of those made up things you read on the internet.
Edit: Well if wikipedia can be believed:
"1 President had neither served in the military nor elected public office before becoming president: Donald Trump. Trump, instead, was chairman of the Trump Organization, and a reality television star."
- John Adams
- Thomas Jefferson
- John Quincy Adams
- Martin Van Buren
- Millard Fillmore
- Grover Cleveland
- William Howard Taft
- Woodrow Wilson
- Warren G. Harding
- Calvin Coolidge
- Herbert Hoover
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Bill Clinton
- Barack Obama
And then 6 with the least amount of experience entering office:
- Ulysses S. Grant
- Grover Cleveland
- Woodrow Wilson
- Dwight Eisenhower
- Barack Obama
- Donald J. Trump
You'll notice there were three on each list - Wilson, Cleveland and Obama. I'll let you decide on the merits of their administrations and how successful they were. Either way, your experience and military service are not clear indicators of how successful you'll be as a president. Harding, Wilson and Grant regularly make the list of the worst, while several non-military types like Clinton and Obama were two term presidents. Eisenhower is generally (no pun intended) regarded as a great president as well. Don't forget the founding fathers Jefferson and Adams are both seen as revolutionary hero's.
Honestly when you look back, it's a crap shoot.
EDIT: You forgot to mention that Trump did oversee over 500 business entities that were valued at north of $4 billion. His organization has interests in real estate development, investing, brokerage, sales and marketing, and property management. The company owns, operates, invests, and develops residential real estate, hotels, resorts, residential towers, and golf courses in different countries.
Of the many problems mass surveillance brings, the least hyperbolic one I see pending is corporate leverage to wrest private resources like farmland, home ownership, water, vehicle and computer ownership away from individuals. With their complete economic models of the citizenship, banks and businesses can ensure through operating costs, fees, interest rates, etc. that we never gain complete control of our own resources, that we'll always have to be working for the system in the way it wants.
If we're run as a completely data-driven entity with greedy power holders choosing the parameters, the only lucky ones who can opt out are the clever who are able to expand the surveillance economy. This violates the will of the Constitutional pursuit of happiness. We should be free to live independently, happily and simply from a modest amount of hard work without getting drawn into the black hole of the surveillance economy.
We "killed God" and Nietzsche asked if we have even the faintest idea of what that implies, and I feel regardless of that, killing man is already well underway, with a similar sleepwalking quality to it. It might start with garden variety rush tyranny and mass murder, but maybe it goes way deeper than that, deeper than even AI or automation, wiping personhood (for lack of a better way to put it) out at the root with nobody even feeling it. We get used to everything, why not get used to regressing to individual mindlessness for the sake of some ill-defined greater good of some ill-defined greater entity? Crazier things have happened.
I like the way you place privacy in the same place as Nietzsche's dead god... a gift that may disappear if we don't keep it alive.
- Have hundreds of millions or billions to spend on lobbying and otherwise playing the regulatory capture game
- Create a reasonable sized public following of single-issue voters
As others have said, this is a battle that comes up over and over and over. Unless there are voters willing to go nuclear (cross party lines, support insurgent challenges to incumbents) these rights are precarious.
I would imagine that if Pompeo had used such a hypothetical scenario in answering it would have been harder for a senator to vote against him.
It's not like the russians would tell the US government about a threat and the US government would throw the arms in the air and say "Well, shit. He's a US citizen, can't do anything then!"
If only
It's not a post-truth world, it's a post-hypocrisy world.