NSA secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years | Hacker News Reader

NSA secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years

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474 pointsgreenyoda209 comments

I think the most dangerous thing is that what Snowden predicted actually happened by now. After all the revelations, nobody is interested anymore. There's this general fatigue and powerlessness that leads to a feeling of "well, yeah, everbody knows by now... what's the news here?" - even for me as a security expert and privacy proponent.

The real danger is nobody cares anymore, as this enables all further constitution violations and hollowing of citizen protection worldwide.

When I saw the movie Idiocracy, I said this is a bit exaggerated. Well, we are heading there in acceleration.

It's astounding how little people care about the many walks of life.

They'll start caring again about privacy when people start being dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night for participating in protests, not just against the government, but against large corporations, too.

And many people will lose their lives in the process, or will be imprisoned for years until things change again, and so on. I guess we'll have to do real fighting for our human rights once again (unfortunately).

>They'll start caring again about privacy when people start being dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night for participating in protests, not just against the government, but against large corporations, too.

They still will not, since it will be others, and a small minority, that does that and gets dragged, etc.

The problem is that a society that stifles those small minorities (from labor activists in early 20th century to MLK, Snowden, and so on) ends up worse for everybody.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Something like that.

Although this perhaps shows a society split into various fractions (jews, blacks, trade unionists, gays, etc), and each fraction is taken one by one, until it's time they come to get the author's fraction. I.e. everybody eventually gets "taken".

Whereas in my example, it's more a society that has a small amount of people who work for change, and they are the ones that get "put away"/stopped.

In this latter case, nobody explicitly comes to "get/put away" the majority. Their lives just deteriorate (worse laws, more discrimination, etc.) and they don't even know why.

There's this really interesting assertion in Weight of Chains 2 by Boris Malagurski:

Serbia (Yugoslavia) before the Balkan Wars had an excellent education system that produced many scholars in the diaspora still today.

The West/NATO/EU bombed that to the ground, along with the economy (factories, banks, telecom).

Those who are still in Serbia now and are in charge have not been able to recreate an education system that is effective- in fact, 33% of Serbs are fuctionally illiterate in high school.

The ruling class of politicians resemble reality TV stars like Trump more than anything else.

Many Serbs there vote like Americans- they either are enthusiastic about a candidate for populist reasons.... or they don't vote at all.

What's the net effect of this? Those in power are truly unqualified and dangerous, but the critical mass of apathetic and potentially illogical voters wlll keep them there.

As a result, the intelligent minority suffers.

And many leave.

I call Bullshit on you. The one of the product of that excellent education system was Milosevic as well. Serbia with Milosevic started the last Balkan Wars in its desire to renew Dusan's Empire, or in common tongue, to make a greater Serbia. First in Slovenia, later on in Croatia then in Bosnia and Herzegovina. When it started on the south, in between Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, it became too dangerous not to stop it. The US waited for Srebrenica to happen to put a stop on it in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This time the US and the EU correctly recognized the danger of leaving the situation to deteriorate to something that would be danger to the region and the ordinary people. Those in Serbia included.

Your version is as true as it was true that Iraq had WMD. Or that those against Assad are all "moderate rebels." There are definite similarities.

In reality, Bosniak Muslims were supported by al-Qaeda, bin Laden and his closest men had the passports made by the Bosniak Muslim government, which was also supported by the U.S.

It was all before 9/11, or "Iraq had WMD" affair, so it was very easy to sell.

Another schizophrenic view of the world.

Which fact from these that I've specified you not believe?

WMD in Iraq story was actually fabricated, the UK actually stole an article of a student Ibrahim al-Marashi to present it as the result of the work of their intelligence services. bin Laden actually had a Bosniak Muslim passport. There were "Bosnian mujahideen" soldiers from the foreign lands fighting there, just like now in Syria. They were actually supported by the U.S, but also by the "allies" of the U.S. from the Muslim world. The "moderate rebels" in Syria as the U.S. calls them, are in fact much bigger Islamists than Assad ever can be, etc.

There are clear decades of similarity in the politics.

I don't dispute that fact. The Muslims in Bosnia are moderate in nature. It's traditional. Ottoman empire was against the type of Islam like the one that originated in Saudi Arabia. I don't dispute the fact that WMD was a stunt of the crony capitalism of Cheney and his friends. But those Muslims in Syria, 'moderate' rebels, were victims of Assad family for decades. It's bound to happen, sooner or later, for people to rebel, when victimized. One doesn't need to study history to recognize this basic truth.

> The Muslims in Bosnia are moderate in nature.

The real "moderates" haven't had a chance or influence. The Muslim Bosniak leader in the nineties was a known Islamist. He hasn't accidentally received the support of the Islamists abroad. The Wahhabis are there since that times (decades already):

"Sharia Villages Bosnia's Islamic State Problem" (2016)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/islamic-state-pre...

Regarding "the nature" the history of the WWII (1939-1945) is also clear, even then the inherent religious intolerance (most of the Quran) towards the others was used:

http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/muslim-waffen-ss-13th-divisi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_...

Going back to even earlier times, the Ottoman empire removed some typical obligations inherent in Islamic Sharia law only after it was defeated, only around the middle of 19th century. The "moderation" of Muslims probably started only after Austria took over the control of Bosnia in 1878. It was also surely helped by the abolition of the Caliphate by the secularist Turkish president Ataturk in 1924. But then see WWII and the Nazi influence, above. Similar to what happened in the nineties.

Regarding Syria, the "rebels" were fought against by Assad also because they were Islamists, that means, wanted the rule of the Islamic law for everything. Their fanaticism and readiness for destruction is now widely known. There's nothing in these beliefs that anybody (but the Islamists) can wish: intolerance towards women, towards other religions, and the death for insulting the "religion of pieces." But the rebeles were supported by the Arab states and the U.S. because Assad wasn't an Islamist and he was potentially closer to Shia Iran (and Sunni Arabs don't like that) and because he's too close to Russia too (and the U.S. politics doesn't like that).

Thanks to the support from the abroad, the Islamic State claims to have a functioning Caliphate since 2014, a religiously (eschatologically!) important part of it in Syria. Also see the effective destruction of the secularism in Turkey, an U.S. ally.

Same old.

The Muslim Bosniak lader was a religious man, after decades of Communism, which prohibited the religion. This happened on all sides, and the atrocities were committed by the Christians, both sides, Catholic and Ortodox, between themselves and on Muslim population. Number of accounts in front of the International Court for War Crimes tells all bout that.

Ottoman empire was in war what you call Wahhabism. They were enemies then and they are enemies now.

Assad regime, his father and him, are of a different version of Islam, Alawites. Let's put aside the fact that Syria was dictatorship for decades, with Sunni population of 74%, and that of Alawites of 12%. One can't expect for 12% to rule for decades with an iron fist over the majority of the population without problems. As I wrote previously. The war in Syria started after Sunni population, students and the other children of Arab Spring, asked for the elections and Assad took military and tanks on them. Later on extremists found its way in. I'm just pointing out stupidity that caused the war. You're thinking is that of post-stupidity.

Religion wasn't prohibited in Yugoslavia. Islamism and Sharia, sure. That guy was an Islamist.

> The one of the product of that excellent education system was Milosevic as well.

Not the best phrasing, one could deduct from it that the education system was broken.

Of course bad people will benefit from education as well as good people, but this is not a reason to stop educating people.

By "excellent education system" I mean the combination of Nationalism and Communism, which, I first hand experienced, as National Socialism. Every story I've learned about Nazis, what they spoke and believed in, was present in the speech and in the deeds. I am well aware of why and how that happened, the rise of National Socialism on Balkans, one of them being 50 years of Communism and lack of the benefits of balanced democratic evolution of the society.

>I call Bullshit on you. The one of the product of that excellent education system was Milosevic as well. Serbia with Milosevic started the last Balkan Wars in its desire to renew Dusan's Empire, or in common tongue, to make a greater Serbia.

Rather that's the party line. Because other sides weren't angels either, and a lot of the atrocities/stories pilled on the Serbian side were manufactured BS.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/16/denying-the-srebrenic...

In the end, it was all for creating another protectorate (Kossovo) -- and militant islamism penetration thriving.

There's nothing about those wars that you can teach me, nor the idiot from the link posted.

Being directly involved (if that's what you mean by "can't teach me") doesn't help for more partial/accurate views.

The exact same answer as yours could be given by anybody on the other side as well.

I was on every side.

Milosevic and Tudjman were nationalistic idiots who LITEALLY conspired together to start the war.

It was agreed upon. Banque Franco Yugoslave was jointly owned by them- they started the war so that they could raid state assets from it under the guise of war and strife.

Please don't be so one-sided. The Yugoslav education system in the 70s was excellent and produced scholars from all nationalities and religions who are still working today.

Milosevic was a partisan idiot elected after a decade of economic instability (once again orchestrated by the West)

> The real danger is nobody cares anymore, as this enables all further constitution violations and hollowing of citizen protection worldwide.

It is amusing to me that -- in context of your comment -- the current second comment starts with "Well, this isn't news".

It's not news to me. But it does seem like most people don't care. Or don't care enough. However, what could they do, even if they cared enough?

If people care enough, they can bring down governments...

And in much worse conditions...

It's hard enough getting people to use VPNs and Tor.

Most people don't see it as a problem. They regard NSA as looking out for them, and confide that as long as they themselves do not engage in terrorism, they've nothing to fear from it.

Which, to a good first approximation, is true. But those of us with a sense of history mistrust any such gigantic agglomeration of unaccountable power, because we know how deeply susceptible such apparatuses are to employment toward unsavory ends.

The trouble is that there's no good, quick, simple way to bring this home to people. You end up sounding like Chicken Little, or so underplaying the significance of the issue that even a sympathetic interlocutor fails to recognize its gravity.

I don't really know a third way; I don't even know that there can be one, other than waiting for some suitable example in point, one that can't be explained away as an artifact of specific circumstance, and building the discussion around that. But even that strategy is fraught at best, and the easiest way to lose any argument is always to yield the initiative. So I don't really have a good, generally workable option here, as regards persuasive discourse on the issue, and if anyone else does, I'd sure like to hear about it!

Yeah, well. They can because of the "much worse conditions". If you push people hard enough so they aren't fulfilling the lowest level of Maslow's pyramid, you'll get your bloody revolution. NSA issues is way too abstract for that.

>Yeah, well. They can because of the "much worse conditions". If you push people hard enough so they aren't fulfilling the lowest level of Maslow's pyramid, you'll get your bloody revolution.

I'll have to disagree with that. People often stay subservient when in dire conditions, but also have been known start a revolution for mild (or stronger) discomforts. Mankind is not driven by "bread" that predictably.

Don't you think that comments like this one reinforce the subjectively perceived feeling of powerlessness?

Who are you benefiting by posting this? (I'm not saying this is the case here, but there are those people who want us to actually feel powerless, because it then translates into actual powerlessness.)

I'm sure you can think of more constructive ways of commenting.

Asking "what can I do that's really worth doing?" seems potentially constructive to me. Asking "how can I not feel so powerless?" seems as much so.

Your comment, on the other hand, reads a lot like arguing the power of positive thinking to deal with a broken leg. If we're going to talk about relative constructiveness of comment content, that seems to me like a good place to start!

This is a big problem, and it's frightening. The US government, in the extent to which it's leveraged a technologically advantageous position to develop its insight into the behavior of people within the US and without, has achieved a scale and a power unprecedented in recorded human history. It can destroy people, within the US and without, on a whim - even by accident! And never even notice or care, in the large, that it has done so. This is legitimately scary, and to feel a sense of powerlessness, in response to the perception of oneself alone before such power and with no effective recourse or means of defense, is in every sense a rational response.

I think it's worthy of people to express such perspectives, the better that others might say "Hey, I feel the same way. You're not alone." - or "I felt the same way at first, and here's what I'm doing to change that." - or say nothing at all, but at least realize that they are indeed not alone in recognizing the existence and scope of the problem, and need not feel quite so isolated in that recognition.

You seem instead to argue that these very rational perceptions be suppressed, or at least concealed in the public sphere, for fear that they'll inspire others to see the world likewise. Compared to the vast and overwhelming scope of the problem in which these perceptions originate, this seems like a rather petty cavil with which to castigate one's fellows.

Perhaps I have misapprehended you in some way, and you'll address the fashion in which I have done so. If I have not, then perhaps you'll explain your reasoning in sufficiently lucid fashion to reduce my frank bewilderment at the idea that a comment such as yours, in a thread such as this, could in any way be considered "constructive", rather than the converse.

I don't feel powerless. Balmer is bankrolling transparency and Project Sunshine is trying to increase our ability to interact with the federal government.

Private industry has created databases like PolicyGuru dot net to help at the local level.

Things are going to improve even if it takes a generation to get out the swamp monsters.

Private industry created the infrastructure by which the NSA conducts these searches, and the willingness of companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook to "interact with the federal government" in support of its illegal activities is a big part of the problem.

I care, but I don't have any faith in the factual truthfulness of the american government, the american media, or any public figure really. Not to single out america, it's just where I live. I'd be surprised if it were different anywhere else.

It seems like it's just the way of things. Start out shiny, and slowly erode to decrepitude, to be pushed aside by the new shiny.

At least in America you have a variety of news sources available with different political and social agendas, including news sources that were able to legally publish material from people like Snowden and are free to report on issues like this.

I many countries, you don't even get that and couldn't start your own news source with your preferred agenda even if you had the resources. Don't buy into the "we might as well live in <insert oppressive censorious dictatorship here>". My wife was born in one, the difference is a factor in my daily life.

Just because we are better than some countries in some ways does not mean we are good enough. Media and the Government have lost the trust of many Americans.

How do we improve America so those institutions are worthy of our higher standards of trust?

Which media? The media that published Snowden? Or Manning? The media that broke this NSA unlawful behaviour story?

Western media IMHO isnt really 'an institution', its hundreds of institutions. Me? I read the BBC for general current afairs, The Economist for in depth exploration of issues and topics and a bit of the Guardian here and there although it is a bit left wing for my tastes. Oh and once in a while Fox News just out morbid curiosity about what's going on in that particular alternate dimension of reality. There's plenty of choice out there.

I used to love reading the English edition of Pravda back when I was a student. I really miss the USSR, Putin and co are all the shittyness without any of the Red Star chic.

>The real danger is nobody cares anymore, as this enables all further constitution violations and hollowing of citizen protection worldwide.

The upside is that a society that doesn't care, eventually gets what it deserves.

That's an upside?

well, it wakes up, rebels and all, sort of normal cycles in history.

Feedback is good.

I don't see this as an upside. You can't really blame people for that - this is a systemic issue, and it was predicted it will happen. People, in aggregate, don't respond to abstract problems like that by any form of prolonged care.

>You can't really blame people for that - this is a systemic issue, and it was predicted it will happen. People, in aggregate, don't respond to abstract problems like that by any form of prolonged care.

They should, and I can blame them for that. That's the duty of the citizen. Not recognizing the issue at all is not an excuse.

Blame all you like, it doesn't make any progress towards solving the problem.

They don't care anymore because they believe it's also done for their own security.

What do I do, as someone who cares? No, seriously. Should I throw a bit more money at the EFF? Start my own political party, or enter an existing one and try to steer it in my direction? Try to get employed by one of these organizations and then promote a better understanding of their mission internally? Move to another country where people care more (which?)

Identifying the problem is a good first step, but what can we do about it?

>Should I throw a bit more money at the EFF?

Emphatically, yes. They're the ones challenging the NSA in court.

Does it solve every problem? Of course not. Is it part of the solution? As long as the judicial branch continues to function correctly overall, yes. Hell yes.

Clandestine agencies are not subject to the same judicial process as the rest of us. Thats why they have "secret courts" and the magic words which trump the law: "national security".

Yes, and this modus operandi can be attacked through the court system.

Even if the courts ruled it as illegal, how can the ruling be enforced on clandestine operations?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The solution to one problem should not be discounted on the grounds that it doesn't solve every problem.

>Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

You say this as though there were a known solution to the problem.

You may as well say "what about the heat death of the universe?" Quid de morte ad universum calorem, if you prefer ;)

>>Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

>You say this as though there were a known solution to the problem.

The opposite, actually.

So then did you have an actual point, or were you just bringing up one of the biggest unsolved problems of all times?

I'll say it again: you could have argued "what about the heat death of the universe" and it would have been just as substantive a contribution...

>bringing up one of the biggest unsolved problems of all times?

Yeah. Suing the NSA is not going to solve this problem, which was my original point.

Encrypt everything. I wouldn't trust the political process to work itself out in the near future, so a technical approach may be the answer in the meantime. I've moved all my friends to Signal not because we're having sensitive conversations, but because we're voting with our actions.

Yes. And privacy does give you more options. But be careful not to be too obvious about it, because that makes you a target.

When everybody is a target, nobody is a target...

Tell that to Anne Frank.

She was part of a subset of Everybody.

> But be careful not to be too obvious about it, because that makes you a target.

Good. It's probably better that a young curmudgeonly asshole like myself that has zero respect for unquestioned authority go through the years long process of bringing a clear case of 4th and 5th amendment violations through to the supreme court.

I personally would rather rot in jail in contempt if it meant that these questions of personal property, privacy and self-incrimination were discussed and settled legally. It's a question of civic duty at that point.

No you wouldn't, that's internet badassery coupled with youth at work.

Versus grumpy old person pessimism? Don't pretend to know my convictions.

I'm not old, I'm just not young enough to romanticize prison.

Too late to edit, but here's a citation:

> ... Once the amount of risk is determined, consider cost, time, and effort of implementing OPSEC countermeasures to mitigate risk. Factors to consider include:

> (1) The benefit and the effect of the countermeasure on reducing risk to the mission.

> (2) The cost of the proposed countermeasure compared with the cost associated with the impact if the adversary exploited the vulnerability.

> (3) The possibility that the countermeasure could create an OPSEC indicator.

DoD OPSEC manual at pp 13-14

https://www.opsecprofessionals.org/official/081103_DOD_OPSEC...

I'm sorry to be the party pooper here, but...

Signal was intercepted:

http://heavy.com/tech/2017/03/wikileaks-vault-7-cia-bypasses...

My favorite most depressing take on this by Peter Gutmann - "Crypto won't save you either"

http://regmedia.co.uk/2014/05/16/0955_peter_gutmann.pdf

The OS was hacked, big distinction there.

Also, they would have to actively target your phone for surveillance. I'm much more concerned about the passive interception aspect, and I don't for a second believe that I'm preventing myself from being surveilled.

The fact that they should have to go out of their way to break the 4th amendment is important to me.

The thing about endpoint-to-endpoint security is that it really sucks if one of your endpoints is compromised.

The "Signal" was not broken & the encryption worked, the part that didn't was when the encryption was removed and the user presented with plain text.

Along those lines:

I've setup family members and closest friends with a Raspberry Pi or in a couple cases cheap Intel Atom machines, that I can configure with Ansible.

I run a minimalist "Facebook clone" UI with photo gallery on each box. From their phones or laptop people drop files into a bucket, mostly just photos, and it's SyncThinged over to all nodes. When on local wifi, we can browse each others content.

It wasn't too difficult as we're a DIY group. Not at all interested in feeling like we're friends with the world or even just our former high school classmates.

I have no problem with notions that our government and laws should require our society fair and protective of everyone. That sort of thing. But giving it all up for private interests to enrich themselves, while life generally gets more expensive for the rest of us is bullshit.

Undermining this thing is do-able, in a simple to manage way these days thanks, once again, to open-source and commodity computing.

Very cool, do you have a github or suggestions on technical choices?

Some argue for disengagement, coupled with strong security and privacy. The cypherpunk equivalent of dropping out.

There is something to be said about forming your own group with like minded people.

Then discuss and work towards some action. Protests, fight corruption. Don't sit behind your computer, meet, mingle and execute on something.

Put money toward an organization that will hire full-time UX designers and engineers who can make open-source encryption usable by the masses.

Why Johnny Why Johnny Still, Still can't encypt [2015] https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08555

Good idea. Is there such an organization?

Maybe (https://pep.foundation/)?

If you are a US citizen contact your representative and let them know you want people held accountable. Be active in social media calling for the same (if you're on social media).

I know many wont do that based simply on political affiliation which is sad but expected in todays environment.

Tell them to put Jim Clapper on the stand and get some answers.

Start a revolution. I'm only half joking.

I think we can't solve these problems within the current political and economical and system. We have to found a new radical political movement.

A lot of the problems we face: the crisis of representational democracy, populism, unemployment, xenophobia, the surveillance state, terrorism, ... cannot be solved individually, but I believe must be fixed simultaneously.

We got to get over the fear of the last 40 years against dreaming up Utopias. We should look at the past, at western democracy, socialism, meritocracy, communism, and see what worked and what didn't, and come up with an alternative. It will be as big a break as hundreds of years ago when people came up with the idea of a republic in absolutist times.

And here's why I believe the movement will grow: we can make the same promises Trump made, about prosperity, keeping one's identity, leading a meaningful life again... But as opposed to him, we can actually fulfill these promises.

And then we become really powerful, create parallel structures, and question the power of governments head on. It worked several times in history.

I'm intentionally leaving the deals vague, since I can't speak for everybody. But I believe core values will be tolerance, individual rights, decentralism, and openness to learn from mistakes and change.

I know it sounds crazy, but I think we won't get more freedom without a major rewrite or at least refactoring of society...

> But as opposed to him, we can actually fulfill these promises.

Man on internet claims that his statements are totally more trustworthy than man on TV.

I'm not disagreeing with you per se - but "fuzzy on the details but this will totally work I promise" is not exactly a radical new line of thought

So you say start the revolution first and then figure out how things will work afterwards?

"tolerance, individual rights, decentralism, and openness" sounds nice, but are not enough alone to bring food on the table, keep the lights on and the warm water running, which is something most people want to be sure of, before they join your revolution ...

Otherwise I am with you on the dreaming part about how a new society could look like. But I think this is something which needs to be much more concrete, before you can start to think about "revolution", unless you want something like a October Revolution, but then count me out ...

> the crisis of representational democracy

This is only a crisis if you're the loser, though, which seems a bit like sour grapes.

The problem is not specifically Trump or even throwing out the filibuster in the senate. It's the kind of highly targeted gerrymandering and ad hock messaging based around new technology. Combined with doubts that votes are even being counted that's corrosive to the very idea of democracy.

Of course Obama was going to cause a backlash, just like Bush did and Trump will. But, we have gotten to the point where 'power' and 'the will of the people' have got little to do with each other. And that's not a stable path long term.

EX: We don't talk about it, but several million Americans don't get representation in the house or senate. Sure, that's the way the system is built, but frankly that's not a good enough reason on it's own.

The US was not designed as a direct democracy, though. Bemoaning the design only when 'your side' loses is a problem that should be relegated to young children. I haven't voted for the winner for quite a few elections now but I don't think throwing out the entire system is the right answer because I didn't get my way.

If you want to start movements in individual states changing the first past the post system, I think that's a logical first step. Colorado recently changed their primary system to be more open, so we will see what that impact has on their elections soon. But what I see is people wanting to throw out the entire system and start over, which is the rhetoric that got Trump elected in the first place.

I assume by 'several million Americans' you're talking about the territories and Washington DC. The territories consistently vote to keep themselves territories, so they choose to remain "unrepresented" in Congress. I don't think letting DC have a vote in Congress will help diminish the 'power' and 'will of the people' problem you are concerned about.

Sure, the current system is based on past choices. That does not mean it's a good system. I don't really care about Trump vs Hilary. I do care that because I moved my vote went from token effort to completely pointless.

If you look at the history of US presidential elections the map used to be a lot more fluid. Compare say 1972 with 1964: http://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/ And compare that with the string from 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016.

That recent trend is not by accident. Both party's have carefully crafted their message to maximize their chances of winning. But, that divide is all about minimizing the power of choice which is inherently corrosive.

My vote could be considered completely pointless every year, because I do not vote for either of the 2 major parties. So should I just give up and quit voting? Should a Republican in New York just give up voting? What about a Democrat in Kansas?

I think the change you should be advocating for is not throwing out the entire electoral college system, rather you should be advocating for small changes over time the system. Small changes might be easier to get through and I think immediate and severe reactions end up being worse than small changes (see the PATRIOT Act among others for examples of immediate action with huge unintended consequences). Citizen ballot initiatives could certainly start changing how delegates are selected, but you don't see (m)any Democrats calling for that in a state like California because it would hurt them overall, just like it would hurt Republicans in Kansas.

As a side note, I would be curious when states started passing laws binding delegates and how that relates to the outcome over time given by your map. I wonder if there is any correlation.

I haven't voted for the winner since 1996. As I don't see my own views or those of the major political parties changing any time soon, my voice is largely ignored in the current system.

And it will likely continue to be ignored until the following happen:

1. Abolish gerrymandering in favor of a strictly algorithmic approach to redistricting that cannot take into account voting data from prior elections or current party affiliations.

2. Abolish first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting, probably using approval voting and some means of apportioning representation that is proportional to approvals.

3. Alter ballot access laws such that no party gets preferential treatment, and the burden is low enough overall that those people wishing to participate in politics are able to do so without quitting their day jobs.

And how, if we try to throw out the entire system, do you expect that to happen when it is clearly against the interest of the two major parties?

That's why I said the push shouldn't be to burn down the whole system, it should be minor changes that both major parties can agree to implement. You can't shoot for the moon if you can't even get a launch pad.

The probability of it happening within the current system is zero. The probability of it happening spontaneously after nuking the current system from orbit is infinitesimal. The expected value calculation from throwing out the current system is strongly negative, whereas the expected value from maintaining the status quo gains at about 2%-4% per year.

Therefore, the likely course of action is clear. Such reforms will never be implemented, and I will essentially be permanently disenfranchised.

I can react to this inevitability with outraged dismay, or with grim resignation. I know what would make me happy, and that it makes sense, and also that it will simply not happen, because this representative democracy is a sham. I can try to ruin things for everyone else because it isn't fair, or I can accept them as they are and take my pathetic, lopsided share of that 2%-4%.

I'll take the latter.

If, however, the status quo implodes on its own, or explodes because someone got rid of it, I'd be all too happy to try to push the new thing that replaces it towards a better direction.

> And how, if we try to throw out the entire system, do you expect that to happen when it is clearly against the interest of the two major parties?

If eliminating the existing system is the goal, the way it is achieved is (as has been the case for many changes which aren't supported initially by the major parties) to first move it by, and in States which have, citizen initiative processes which supercede the preferences of elected partisan politicians.

That was exactly my point. Small changes make larger impacts than asking to nuke everything.

> 2. Abolish first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting, probably using approval voting and some means of apportioning representation that is proportional to approvals.

Approval plus proportional is a bizarre concept; approval, to the extent it makes any sense for public elections (and there are serious problems with it for that purpose) makes sense really only for inherently single-winner elections.

For proportional systems with large bodies elected together, proportionality to first-party votes is probably the most sensible; for bodies small enough that doing that has significant wastage due to the threshold necessary to get one seat, something like STV (possibly modified to drop loser elimination) makes more sense than approval.

(A proportional, STV-like generalization of approval with a form of winner elimination might make sense, but seems intuitively worse than STV itself, even if approval ballots had consistent meanings.)

I only chose approval as an alternative to FPTP because most current ballot-counting machines are capable of handling it with minimal alteration, and it reduces the effects of strategic voting.

It seems obvious to me that any voting system that involves ranking would tend to discourage more open ballot access, as people are more likely to honestly and accurately rank 2 or 3 people than they are to rank 10. If it can handle proportionality almost as well as single transferable vote, without additional complexity to the voter, it may actually be better fro ma practical standpoint.

Approval ballots is just a special case of ranked ballots with only two ranks, so as far as considering and honestly rating a large number of candidates is concerned, it shares any problem ranked ballots have.

While there are some good arguments for allowing ties in ranked ballots (unforced vs. forced preference), I think there are pretty big problems with forcing tied rankings.

> If it can handle proportionality almost as well as single transferable vote

I don't think it can, but because there is no clear mapping between actual preferences (or preferences that would be provided on an unforced preference ballot) and approval ballot (or any other limited-rank-preference ballot) markings, that's a hard empirical question that's not really analytically addressable.

>we won't get more freedom without a major rewrite or at least refactoring of society...

correct you are. our problems are too intertwined with the current political system to be solved by them. without exception.

there's no point in waiting for the perfect moment, because it won't ever come. our best bet is to make use of the utter chaos the current administration is causing as an excuse for destroying our moribund institutions and remolding them into something fresh and more useful.

Decades of organizing and advocacy against the US War on Drugs got medical marijuana legalized in 29 states, and recreational marijuana legalized in eight states plus DC.

Psilocybe spp are legal nowhere in the US.

Darknet markets have made all drugs available everywhere.

Just sayin'.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the Federal government is still trying as much as possible to continue the War on Drugs no matter what the states' laws actually say.

True.

But I haven't seen news about mass arrests of buyers after Silk Road got pwned. Not in the US, anyway. I mean, could the courts handle the volume?

State lawmakers move on to federal lawmakers and generally appear to continue try to please their voters. By starting at the state level we have kicked the legs out from under the thing. It is falling.

That's excellent, no doubt.

The American Revolution is one of the few outliers in history were such revolutionary action actually lead to such good results (relative to more likely possible alternatives). The cost of a revolution is heavy, and generally the outcome is almost certainly as bad or worse as the states of affairs that sparked it.

I'm a hopeless cynic, but I always find a bit of reluctant optimism about the present after reading a bit of history. Especially the dirtier sides of American history, politics, business, social norms, discrimination, etc. When I do, I can't help but conclude we Americans are living in the best version of America that has ever existed, to date, even with all the shit in front of us. And possibly even one of the least divisive and polarized versions of it as well, even though the popular consensus is just the opposite.

Basically, the system actually seems to kind of... sort of... work. No thanks on the revolution.

There's a strong argument to be made that the American Revolution was successful because it was actually a rebellion. Organized polities broke their ties, but largely preserved themselves and their leadership structures.

Wow, that's a striking point that never occurred to me before. Do you have any source that discusses this viewpoint in greater detail, perhaps with some comparisons to other revolutions?

Today a revolution would be illegal. Not just illegal but even talk of a revolution, or openly espousing that the idea should be considered.

Well, the American Revolution was illegal at the time. And it was illegal to plan. So I think that just kind of comes with the territory of having a revolution.

Revolutions are always illegal. The American Revolution was very clearly illegal as far as England was concerned, and the US Civil war was illegal to the Union. Even the Founding Fathers, some of whom certainly believed the right to revolutionary violence was necessary and healthy for a free state, would not have accepted the right of the people to string them up.

But your second sentence isn't accurate. The US is almost unique in the degree to which discussing the violent overthrow of the American government is not only tolerated, but held sacred by many people. From right wing talk radio to the Tea Party to Republican political ads during the Obama administration to NRA rallies, intimating the need for revolution and "Second Amendment solutions" is common enough that it may be the oldest meme in American culture.

Of course, there is a line beyond which it becomes conspiracy to commit murder, and then it becomes illegal, which is to be expected as every state assumes its own legitimacy. But the chilling effect you seem to be trying to suggest doesn't really exist as far as I can tell.

I disagree. Under 18 U.S.C.A. § 2384 I think people have been prosecuted and will continue to be when they speak out against the government and advocate for its overthrow. Whether violent or not, sedition is illegal, and if you make too much notice I believe you will be prosecuted.

> the crisis of representational democracy, populism, ...

Oh jeez what a travesty - the people getting what they want rather than a focus on "everyone but us first"!

> xenophobia, the surveillance state, terrorism, ...

Yes a reasonable fear of mass immigration from places that don't vet their refugees well enough isn't a legitimate concern and should be mixed in with an actual fear like the surveillance state.

> last 40 years against dreaming up Utopias

Venezuela is doing pretty good with their attempt at a utopia.

> But I believe core values will be tolerance, > individual right

Choose one.

Sorry bud, I don't mean to be rough. But I'd love to see the world through your rose colored glasses.

A good time to remember Mencken:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

As someone who has dipped into the libertarian infinity pool of crazy, and flopped right over the side into the freefall insanity of pragmatic anarchism, I am aware that most lasting societal changes have only been accomplished by creating rivers of blood--the Reign of Terror, the Soviet Revolution, the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, etc. And I am also aware that the new boss is usually either the same as the old boss, or quite a lot worse.

But nevertheless, after the reset, things often get better for a while--if you survived, that is--before they get worse again.

So you can either screw yourself up to do some bloody murder against those whom you believe to really deserve it, and make a real change, for better or worse (usually worse), or you can parade around making some fake change that lets you feel better about yourselves, but probably won't do any real damage, such as a devastating nuclear winter, or another miserable dark age of terror, brutality, serfdom, and slavery. You can pick out your targets now, and wait for the right time to pull the trigger. Or you can make signs and sing Kum-Bai-Yah. But maybe there's another option, that has never been tried before.

The usual problem is that the masters of the universe have no incentives whatsoever to change their own behavior or give up their own power. But there is a magical, mythical substance in the Illuminatus! trilogy called AUM. This was described as a drug that permanently changed someone from a neophobe into a neophile. It changed minds with one dose. So perhaps, like so many sci-fi speculations later found to have landed near the marks discovered by future science, a cocktail of known hallucinogens and entheogens might be employed to bestow an artificial chemical sense of compassion and empathy upon those who lack one of their own.

In short, black-bag some elites, and shoot them up with a witches brew of MDMA, LSD, DXM, Datura, nicotine, cannabis, salvinorin-A, high fructose corn syrup, fluoride, chemtrail distillate, et cetera (Poe's Law disclosure: the latter three were satire), and see if that can cure them of being selfish assholes. You flip the enemy to your side, and you gain power without killing anyone--or at least without producing dead bodies, as forcibly making permanent changes to someone's brain against their will could be construed as psychological murder.

It's the same problem as eradicating any parasite. If you kill 99% of them, that just leaves the niche open for that remaining 1% to repopulate. So you capture some, sterilize them, and release them back into the wild. Those continue to compete among their own kind, and then die off without progeny, which crashes the whole population enough that it can now be controlled by other means. Just as the parasites subvert others to work for them, you subvert the self-interest of the parasites so that they destroy themselves.

There's a revolution in the US every four to eight years. You just don't remember them /because/ they happen peacefully. And if those don't give you the drastic change your spoiled mind craves, that may just be because most people are happy enough with the status quo that they consider it unlikely that anything better would emerge from chaos–kinda like you don't throw a puzzle in the air if only a few pieces are missing.

1990 would also count as the biggest revolution in our lifetime (assuming there are few WW2 vets on HN). Plus China has changed drastically, without bloody revolutions, and that whole EU thing. Mandela. Gandhi. Venzuela, Turkey, Brexit (for the worse). Iran, Cuba (for the better).

> There's a revolution in the US every four to eight years.

Democracy is a fast-path civil war: "yeah, I guess we could go actually shooting each other but let's just count who has more men and move on".

I don't crave any drastic change. I realized long ago that society is not a thing I can fix. So I changed myself, to not get so upset whenever confronted with more evidence that life is not fair. It doesn't really matter to me that the US elected a reality-show host as its President, because "the US" never really belonged to me. The illusion I carried of it in my head was never real. The real US doesn't care one infinitesimal iota for what I think. I'm just a kook, with no valuable insights whatsoever. Historically, the US has been generally content to leave me alone, as long as I pay more than the minimum measure of tribute, and don't stir up trouble. Abandon the illusion, and you lose all the cognitive dissonance that it fuels.

So have yourself a revolution. Or don't. Or rearrange the deck chairs and rename the ship. Do any of those things, but you're still caught up in the shared delusions of tribalism writ large.

Vonnegut said it best: "To find the substance of a granfalloon, just prick the skin of a toy balloon."

Every four to eight years, there is a great heaving shift in what people think they are supposed to be, with little to no fundamental basis in reality. Real wages have been stagnant in the US since the 1970s. Technology is better. Environmental catastrophe looms taller. Younger people agitate, and older people dissipate. Charlatans and con men ply their trade on the unsuspecting. Those who wish to eat must work, even if the work is gratuitous and unnecessary.

What really changes for that middle 80% of Earth's population? They gain freedom of speech? No one is listening. Freedom to own property? They can't afford to buy it. Freedom to cross borders? The available work-for-hire can move away faster than you can chase it. All the while, people like Putin and Trump wield the power to reduce all those people to radioactive dust without care, while meting out lesser (still deadly) consequences at whim, with even less possibility for remorse. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The tsar becomes the party leader. The shah becomes the ayatollah. The king becomes the president. Mr. Machiavelli sidles up, whispers into their ears, and the pigs move in to the farmer's house.

Brexit is TBD. Seriously. The thing hasn't been implemented yet (hardly even an implementation strategy exists), so calling it for the worse is premature.

You may very well be right, but it's too soon to make that judgement rationally unless you want to call it a forecast.

Also, I'd add the Velvet Revolution to your list.

> In short, black-bag some elites, and shoot them up with a witches brew of MDMA, LSD, DXM, Datura, nicotine, cannabis, salvinorin-A, high fructose corn syrup, fluoride, chemtrail distillate, et cetera (Poe's Law disclosure: the latter three were satire), and see if that can cure them of being selfish assholes.

No, it'll give them a bad trip and they will hang you by your own guts. This (and more) had already been tried fifty years ago, read about project MKULtra and the book "Acid Dreams".

As I recall, the goals of that project were somewhat different.

I am specifically suggesting a cure for antisocial personality disorder. Hallucinogens have been successfully used clinically to treat addiction and other self-destructive behaviors. Anecdotal reports from recreational drug users sometimes include sensations of being connected to everything else on the planet, and coming down with a profound and newfound respect for life. MDMA reportedly enhances natural empathy.

Currently, the only proven, permanent cure for sociopathy is to put a bullet in the sociopath's head and then cremate the body.

While that is effective, it is morally abhorrent to go around murdering people for having a brain defect. And most mind-altering drugs are barred from serious research into peaceful clinical applications, due to being scheduled substances. There may be a banned substance, or some combination of banned substances, that could form the basis of a treatment or cure for antisocial personalities, and particularly for the narcissistic sociopaths.

Alternately, a pacemaker-like device implanted into the brain might work, but that seems dangerous and expensive.

If no cure can be found, and no cure is possible, the logical thing to do would then be to devise an objective test, targeting 0% false positives, to identify sociopaths, and exile them away from all normal humans. Or murder them. But only a sociopath would be able to implement such a solution, so you might see the problem there.

> As I recall, the goals of that project were somewhat different.

There were many, from "truth serum" against captured enemy spies through mind control over the US population (they considered adding psychedelics to tap water) up to "pacification" of Soviet leaders in the exact way you described.

> Hallucinogens have been successfully used clinically to treat addiction and other self-destructive behaviors. Anecdotal reports from recreational drug users sometimes include sensations of being connected to everything else on the planet, and coming down with a profound and newfound respect for life. MDMA reportedly enhances natural empathy.

It only worked that way for people who already wanted it to work for them that way.

Let's not fall into the trap of assuming that since CIA-funded scientists performing secret and unethical experiments to accomplish military-political objectives couldn't make the drugs work, that it couldn't be done above-board by clinicians who genuinely want to cure a bona fide brain defect that is utterly devastating to everyone who would ordinarily be close to the affected individuals.

MK-Ultra wanted to make normal people more biddable by the US government. That's a far cry from attempting to cure the apparent combination of antisocial personality disorder and narcissism that seems prevalent in the behaviors of many of the worst heads of state (and other, less-privileged government officials) known to history.

We know it's possible, because the majority of humans manage to grow a sense of empathy attached to their limbic system that actually makes them feel bad when they hurt other people and feel good when they make other people happy. The human brain naturally develops this capacity when exposed to the correct combination of chemicals and stimuli. So I have to believe that a cure is possible, because otherwise we have no business letting those monsters anywhere near our livelihoods, our relationships, or our institutions. They are currently physiologically incapable of caring whether the rest of us live or die, feel fear or joy, love or hate. They might as well be randomized time bombs strapped to stray cats. If you let them go, you have no idea where or when they will go off.

I believe that a significant fraction of the world's ultra-rich elites are either naturally narcissistic sociopaths, or have conditioned themselves to numb their sense of empathy and their humility. If the dangerous ones can be cured, they don't all have to be indiscriminately thrown under the guillotine next time. Because that often just allows the reserve corps of narcissistic sociopaths, formerly kept in check by the previous top predators, to assume power.

I want to believe in a cure. If I couldn't believe in that, I would have to support committing crimes against people whom I cannot be certain are truly antisocial personalities--in the name of the "greater good", of course--and that would mean that I would be one of the monsters unfit to participate in civilized, cooperative society. I'd have to wonder whether I genuinely wanted to help other people, or whether I was just removing the competition for their future exploitation.

Are you certain it's a problem with their sense of empathy not being properly attached to the limbic system? Because IMO, it seems more likely that bit works just fine even for them, but they use strong cognitive dissonance to hack around it.

Also, you are taking it as a given that the problem is that a lot of high ranking power positions are taken by people with sociopathic and/or narcissist personality disorders. I'm with you on that btw, no need to convince me, but I'm not sure if it's a generally agreed upon fact :)

Also also, AUM worked not just with one dose but also a (near?) 100% success rate. But that was in a work of fiction, specifically, one with the premise of "what if ALL conspiracy theories ever, were true, simultaneously?". It's one of my favourite books for sure, contains a lot of real wisdom as well, but more in a philosophical sense than practical. There's no way even a perfectly researched cocktail of hallucinogenics, MDMA, other drugs and I dunno what else, would attain a practical permanent success rate past 10% even.

I think if it were not a physical problem in the structure of the brain, we would not currently have a 0% cure rate using existing psychiatry.

In a philosophical sense, AUM is not an actual chemical cocktail. It is the basis for a viewpoint wherein a past enemy may become a future friend, and the normal human fear of the unknown is the barrier between them.

So you recite to yourself the Litany Against Fear from Dune and offer to your enemy the opportunity to become less alien to each other. A dose of real-life AUM takes decades, or even generations, to administer.

This is why most wars are preceded by a psychological campaign to dehumanize and alienate the designated enemy.

Actively oppose all political candidates who have done nothing to fight back.

Some ideas:

1. Integrate privacy into your work. Educate your coworkers about the issue, refuse to implement anything that has a negative impact on privacy.

2. Stop patronizing companies that help the government spy.

3. As you said, donate to non-profits that fight against spying.

4. Contribute to open source projects that protect privacy.

The absolute first step is to take control of your devices. LineageOS or Replicant phone. GNU+Linux on computer, openwrt or similar on router/switches, ipfire similar on firewall. Firefox instead of chrome or opera. VLC instead of iTunes. Emacs/Vim instead of sublime. Blender instead of Maya. Etc. I'm working on this myself. It's not easy, but it is worth it.

RMS was and is right: either the user controls the program or the program controls the user.

When you fix a bug, contribute it back. When you write a program, make it (l)gplv3.

Firefox instead of chrome

Although I understand your sentiment here on philosophic grounds, it would be far more practical to run Chrome, because the likelihood of NSA hoarding effective chrome 0days is much smaller than hoarding FF 0days.

Ideological purity is nice, but practical defense against the enemies of your ideology is better.

And the likelihood of Google streaming a copy of all your URL bar keystrokes to the NSA archive is larger still. Or hell, even if they don't stream them live, they surely store them for analysis and can respond to subpoenas.

Is there any evidence of this type of telemetry? Assuming you use it (or better, Chromium) as just a browser (e.g. don't log into it) behind your VPN, proxy, or overlay network of choice, I can't imagine this threat model being too bothersome.

And you're far more resistant to watering-hole attacks than you are with FF.

> Is there any evidence of this type of telemetry?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#User_tracking

> I can't imagine this threat model being too bothersome

Your entire browsing history reveals too much about you making your profile unique. Then any connection to your other data reveals your real name.

> the likelihood of NSA hoarding effective chrome 0days is much smaller than hoarding FF 0days

Based on what rational? I think the strongest influence on 0-days is market share. Hence why switching to gnu+linux alone isn't enough (but it's the right start). According to http://www.netmarketshare.com/ Chrome is now almost 60% of marketshare, and lets not forget how many people are using chrome on android devices.

I find your claim to not stand up to scrutiny.

Regardless, this is the mentality that has gotten us into the situation we are in anyway. It's like a technological variation of the ends justifies the means. No, I disagree and I find it to be a fundamental problem with the way many do their computing in the modern world.

While we do have Chromium, it has still had privacy issues, and Google has shown themselves untrustworthy when it comes to data sharing with the world. They had every opportunity to give us a GPL phone with linux on it, and instead we got a half-proprietary, non-rooted series of backdoored android phones. Relying on Google is not the way to go for those who care about privacy and security, as they have repeatedly violated their original motto of "don't be evil".

If we really wanted to base the discussion on data though, I would like to see numbers on fixed remote exploit bugs in both to see who is actively fighting this better. I also feel like once firefox has a 64-bit rust based render engine they will suddenly regain a lot of market share.

Hate to appeal to authority, but tptacek has addressed this many times previously, citing going market price differentials between FF and chrome bugs.

The security model of Chrome lends itself to far fewer serious vulnerabilities than in FF.

I do agree with you that rewriting the entire browser in a safe language like Rust would be a significant shift in the security situation.

> GNU+Linux on computer

Why not Qubes OS?

Qubes is Gnu+Linux, it's a fine choice but not the only one.

You truly care?

Find out how to file a lawsuit, and then do so for LUDICROUS amounts of money. Make the National Debt look small (say 250 trillion might get everyone's attention.) And as it turns out, since Wikimedia is now in the clear to sue the NSA over this stuff thanks to a federal appeals court, you can walk right in on their heels and do the same. [1]

The ludicrous amount of money will suddenly wake everyone up, because everyone's going to catch wind of it via the news. You simply don't miss a lawsuit this large.

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/wikimedia-v-nsa-4th-cir-...

Jim Bell had some . . . interesting ideas about how to solve it.

Apparent Problem: governments and people who accept the legitimacy of governments exist.

Apparent Solution: a secret, untraceable and unaccountable murder network that keeps killing people until only the anarchists and killers are left. Oh, and the most effective killers become the de facto power brokers of the new world order.

... something something liberty?

> What do I do, as someone who cares?

Find a way to make other people care.

I think this comment hones in on not just this problem, but a lot of problems we face in the modern world. We have plenty of issues to get up in arms about, and do, but the tasks are so colossal and the adversaries seem to much more powerful that I think the average person does not understand what they can do, besides be mad. And this causes these events to seem like fleeting passions. Sure, we can call senators, but they already know we are upset. Complaints just fall on empty ears. Sure, we can vote in other representatives, but the choices are limited. We can become representatives, but I think people feel that they will be squashed or do not really want to be that involved in politics.

So what do we do? Complain?

What can you and who's army do to NSA?

That's right Orwell's bitches, you can't do nuffin.

Except there is one way, the only way, but you're not going to like it, the same way Chemo is an indiscriminant carpet bomb that kills cancer and healthy cells.

Cryptopocalypse.

The End of All Crypto.

No more crypto, no more NSA. It's that simple.

NSA has 1 Achilles Heel, the most lop sided asymmetriccadvantage. They need crypto a helluva lot more thanyou or I do.

Without RSA and AES, how could NSA mass infect millions of Grandmother's PCs, every UK hospital, everyone in Fiji, kids playing Warcraft, every Yahoo webcam user, every SIM card manufacturer, every Certificate Authority, every VPN provider, every cell phone in Abottabad for a decade, etc etc etc?

They couldn't! Because how would they exfiltrate all your lolcats, Pepes and dick pics back to Bluffdale via TACLANE and technically impressive covert implant radio channels and radar retroreflectors?

Exactly. NSA only fears one thing more than losing their Secret Laws, Secret Courts and implicit GODMODE.

They fear the whole world being able to steal their own stolen data, they fear being thrown outside naked naked in a blizzard surrounded by wolves.

Now you may be an Innumerate who believes cryptography is magic and that unless you're the next Turing or von Neumann that you don't stand a chance.

dana_carvey_wrong.gif

NSA is weak as fuck. Tottering on the high wire. Their entire existence could cease in a snap of the fingers.

There are only about 5 cryptographic primitives that prop up this wretched corrupt regime of Valligarchs, Monopolists and CORE SECRETS moles who are the legs of NSA's evil system.

Very few professional mathematicians write about this, because the ones who could, are themselves employed by the same NSA system. Never expect a man to understand a thing when his job depends on not understanding.

The moment the Discrete Logarithm Problem is cracked, everyone at NSA is dead, or unemployed like Whip & Buggy makers.

Cracking DLP is mathematically equivalent to factoring arbitrary integers. No, bigger RSA key's won't save you. Once DLP is solved, you can factor any number bigger and bigger into P and Q. DLP will be the end of RSA.

But wait, it gets worse. DLP will also be the death of AES and any ciphers based on S-Boxes.

When you can factor any composite integer, well guess what, you can also factor any polynomial.

I won't tell you more about that one, because I would prefer you don't believe me so that someday when I show you how, I can watch you cry after you realize how dumb you were for believing in BS.

Hash functions won't be spared either. SHA2 is one big ass S-Box. It will fall too.

Cryptopocalypse is coming. There won't be anyway to fix it. NSA's handful of decades old peimitives will be smashed and scattered to the wind. You have to understand this will be final like Judgement Day.

"Someone will invent a new cipher and put NSA's Humpty Dumpty back together again."

Not when the proof that cracks DLP also proves that One Way Functions do not exist. Nowhere. NTRU and multilinear ciphers that are not yet ready for prime time will be dead on arrival.

Remember what I said about how far arbitrary factoring goes? Multilinear is not any safer.

If I ran NSA Cryptologic Exec, right now today I would be dismantling the whole spy machine. Pulling the plug on daya centers. Scuttling 100's of programs.

Because if NSA doesn't cry Uncle, say they're sorry, and roll back their Orwellian Dystopian Nightmare, when that glad Day of Cryptopocalypse arrives, so much of NSA's dirt will be plaintext and the whole world will see the truth with their own eyes.

Enraged peasants with torches and pitchforks would be the most optimistic outcome for NSA.

Of course I realize NSA can't and won't stop themselves. Smoking GODMODE is like crack. You can't physically give it up no matter how much you want to.

The way I see it, if we can just hang on a little longer, we'll get to watch Ft Meade sacked and picked apart into rubble by thousand of angry hands. May God have mercy on any NSA'ers too dumb to flee. It's going to look like Vlad the Impaler. I can't wait.

https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/us-13-Stamos-The-Factoring-...

> No more crypto, no more NSA. It's that simple.

Not at all, they will still record all your comms to make sure you aren't spying on the US. Also keep producing malware, etc.

> DLP will also be the death of AES and any ciphers based on S-Boxes.

Source? The PDF you linked says nothing about AES and it looks like it would if this was true.

You're absolutely right. When I saw this headline, I just thought, "yeah we know, is anyone surprised?"

It shouldn't be like this, we should be outraged every time. I wonder if they planned it like this.

What do you mean nobody cares anymore? This is a very strange notion I see propping up more and more in people's minds, as they get overloaded with information they don't know what to do with.

There are lots of very experienced people and resources allocated to this problem across the world working on it round the clock. But this is a hard problem. It's going to take multiple generations to achieve a mature resolution. Some problems don't fix themselves in the timeframes it takes John Oliver or Alex Jones to write a skit.

I find the press and their stand up comic proxies in their quest to "inform and educate" the public are creating a whole lot of unnecessary anxiety and panic.

It's a great way to hold everyone's attention without serving any purpose other than producing media figures. And in the attention economy constructed by Youtube/Twitter/Facebook no question this benefits them to a great deal.

Just because systems exist today that are bringing to your attention every single problem known to man doesn't mean you need to be involved in the solutions that are above your paygrade. Especially if your career and life experience don't involve the skills to do something about this. I am sure there are problems out there you can apply your skills and experience too.

This sort of defeatist attitude is very infectious and especially effects the psyche of people with the skills who could actually play a role down the road.

> Just because systems exist today that are bringing to your attention every single problem known to man doesn't mean you need to be involved in the solutions that are above your paygrade.

Ironically, these are the same systems that are causing the problem in the first place. You would put the last nail in the coffin of civic engagement?

At which paygrade am I allowed to cast my ballot? Voice my concerns? Is my own privacy "above my paygrade"?

I'm wondering how you think this process works. When you say:

> There are lots of very experienced people and resources allocated to this problem across the world

It sounds like a curing-cancer-style problem where what's needed is some scientific breakthrough for a specific problem... So... Who are these "very experienced people", and what "resources" are allocated, where? Or how far exactly is this "above my paygrade"?

Because this appears to me, fundamentally, a difference of opinion, or maybe just even priorities. If you get enough people to care, just watch how fast policies can change. And while I may have wasted my "career and life experience" on skills that disqualify me from this super-elite circle of "people allowed to care", my sorry excuse for a brain can't think of something more important than public advocacy of these issues, nor can it find fault with what John Oliver is doing.

But, you know.. whatever.

Off the top of my head, examples of people who have more means and expertise than a random HN commenter:

1. nonprofits like EFF

2. investigative journalists who search for truth and expose corruption instead of writing emotional pieces telling people what to think and helplessly worry about.

3. software, hardware and network engineers building end-to-end secure systems as opposed to ones designed for mining user data which inadvertently (or deliberately, you decide ;)) end up being abused by spies and hackers.

OP was answering the question "What can I do–should I donate to the EFF or what". Your 1. and 2. directly depend on a public that is engaged, and arguably the people doing (3) also form their opinions based on publicly accessible journalism, including the John Oliver-pieces (which happen to be 30-minute exposés with lots of real journalism going into them, on mostly neglected topics like the injustice of court fees and bonds)

I agree totally. It is only recently that I've taken measures to protect my privacy.

I think it's less that nobody cares and more that there are so many things to care about and it's not clear what's worthwhile. Most of the suggestions people make are more-or-less symbolic.

It seems to me that outside elections, either being a lawyer or supporting the people who are has the most impact.

I disagree, the real danger is people don't care as long as it happens to those who hold different political beliefs. Worse some openly celebrate it.

This is partly being prodded along by politicians under the guise "well they may/might/did break the law" so its okay to spy.

I think a big part of the reason is that the common man confuses privacy and security. You see this with statements like, "Well, I don't have anything to hide... so I don't care." The media and politicians didn't (don't) help with this confusion, either.

No one cares because it doesn't change anything

People don't care until they see concrete harm to themselves. Look at how many modern day genocides we outright ignore. If we can do that, then what is a little spying in comparison?

I'd move that a level up and say until they see concrete anything.

All of the privacy rhetoric (I realize that sounds dismissive, it's not supposed to) is based on either philosophical notions or slippery slopes. "Something bad might happen to you in the future!"

It makes for effective fundraising but poor impact on policy.. especially when the groups behind most of the privacy erosion like the Googles and Facebooks of the world provide an actual product people like.

It's not that nobody is interested anymore. It is that the onus is on regular citizens to protect themselves. Once you have an understanding of the magnitude of the privacy problem and see what you would have to do to protect yourself you tend to tip your hat to the empowered opposition and industry partners and realize,in the venerable argot of our time: you lost the game.

I think the practical way to go about this is to distinguish between what's ACTUALLY dangerous, actually harming people (beyond the loss of their privacy), and what's POTENTIALLY dangerous. Because I think it's easy for people to conflate the two.

For instance, are people being rounded up and having bad things happen to them? Yes. People suspected of being illegal immigrants (or undocumented) and who are also suspected of being violent criminals are being rounded up. Also, there seems to be the odd case or 12 of someone who is undocumented, but is otherwise a thoroughly upstanding individual.

The second thing I believe needs consideration is to determine exactly what line does the government need to cross for this POTENTIALLY dangerous privacy invasion to become ACTUAL, PRESENT dangers.

The problem, of course, is getting consensus. Particularly when there's heavy foreign influence on the Internet & government. When so much of the news media promotes racism & nationalism. The possibility of the people being divided and conquered is a POSSIBILITY, given our acceptance of nationalism.

Well, this isn't exactly news. What's interesting, however, is how interagency sharing doesn't get mentioned often in this debate. Such as SOD, where DEA, DHS, FBI, IRS, etc can access the data.[0,1,2,3] And use it secretly in criminal investigations, through parallel construction. Which, by the way, involves criminal conspiracy to suborn perjury.

0) http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130...

1) https://www.deamuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/042215-...

2) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/08/fbi-changes-...

3) https://www.wired.com/2017/01/just-time-trump-nsa-loosens-pr...

One unanticipated consequence of the Snowden revelations is that other agencies now know what to ask for.

Maybe so. But SOD started in the 70s. Its focus was drug cartels. I'm guessing that NSA staff reached out to the FBI.

Yeah, but SOD isn't data sharing exactly (or wasn't?). To quote the Reuters's article:

You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle

This isn't a defense of the program or of parallel construction of course. But it is indicative that raw data wasn't shared, and other agencies didn't know the source or get any idea of how it was obtained.

This is pretty much the very same problem the German BND has right now, I'd guess pretty much any intelligence service which conducts mass surveillance has this problem of "surveil everything, except stuff from your domestic population".

How to find out if your target belongs to the domestic population without looking into any content of that target? German BND supposedly does some of the filtering by country domain extension i.e. users with a "@xyz.de" mail address are supposedly exempted from BND scrutiny.

Which is of course yet another flawed approach because not every German has a .de mail address. Case in point, I have an account with German mail provider GMX that ends on .net. That method would also make it stupidly easy to evade any scrutiny by the BND.

Imho this is a problem that doesn't have a good solution or any solution at all, for this to actually work in reality security services would need to be clairvoyant.

So who's going to prison over these "illegal searches"? Oh, let me guess - nobody, because intelligence agencies seem to always be above the law?

Intelligence agencies often have judge Dredd mentality- "I never broke the law, I am the Law!"

The law has power only because it can be (potentially) enforced.

Why should the people in power go to prison for doing illegal stuff just because they got caught?

If they don't imprison themsleves, who's going to force them? What do they have to lose by not doing so themselves?

These are the simple questions (with relatively simple answers) you need to ask.

If they have nothing to lose, then why do you expect them to follow the law? Until you give them something to lose, why should you expect them to change their behaviour?

You're exactly describing the reason why there is checks and balances. "People in power" is supposed to be a heterogenous group with different interests and formal functions. Your post suggests that it doesn't work properly in your country anymore. I wonder where exactly one could pinpoint the weak spots and systemic issues.

>Your post suggests that it doesn't work properly in your country anymore

Your post seems to suggest that the default is it working, is that really true? Does it actually work anywhere?

IMO the weak spot is that there's only one executive branch, and they have discretion over whether to enforce the law in any given case. They can choose not to arrest themselves, or prosecute themselves. If the system were structured with two executive branches, each of which had the power to enforce the law against members of the opposition executive branch, and a sense of opposition / competition could be maintained, then this wouldn't be an issue.

There's also the issue that the executive has all the real power. The courts and congress can send strongly worded letters, the executive has all the guns. This hasn't yet become a direct problem in the US, but it has in many other countries.

Except now we'll have two executive branches with even more power that will secretly agree to work together against the other branches.

Every place has only one executive branch. That does not make everybody there share the same goals.

You have a structural problem within your country, because the FBI should be clearly working towards arresting the NSA people, for example.

Government oversight is a joke. You don't even have to obey subpoenas to show up to testify, as we saw with Bryan Pagliano.

[1]: http://observer.com/2016/09/not-a-single-democrat-held-clint...

The word "Obama" is mentioned only once within the 81 comments so far posted...

Why is this worth noting? The surveillance state is far bigger than any one person and has been operating clandestinely for decades.

Maybe because the title and bulk of the article directly attributes the problems discussed to Obama and his administration? That the ability to abuse such things was made easier during his term? The problem may be bigger than any one person, but that doesn't mean we don't discuss their possible role in that problem.

Who's to say that NSA did not blackmail Obama into expanding its powers or relaxing oversight?

Who's to say serpent people aren't running the UN?

Would not a discussion over Obama's possible involvement in the problem possibly bring such a thing to light? Is "he might have been blackmailed" a reason for everybody else to not discuss something?

The "one person" is the President of the United States, the very person able to single handedly stop this and the one who takes responsibility for managing these things. If politics is to have any impact on governance, actions of all the political players have to be judged equally.

The article is working hard associating all 702 related problems with Obama starting with the title "Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years" (different from the HN title). The Circa site seems to make it hard to peek behind the curtain so from wikipedia:

> The revived Circa formally went live on July 18, 2016 with a redesigned app, and a website using a new URL, Circa.com. Circa is currently led by John Solomon, the former vice-president of content and business development for the Washington Times; Solomon was hired by Sinclair as Circa's chief creative officer in December 2015 and promoted to chief operating officer twelve months later.

> Sinclair aims to "let the content drive [Circa]" and not let the site adhere to any set political or cultural viewpoint, describing Vice News and Breitbart as "partisan-driven" news sites the new Circa would not intentionally emulate. Though Sinclair has aired conservative political content on its stations, its intention with Circa is to present information with "no spin, just facts and transparency" and in "an irreverent tone" that will allow the site's target audience (young adults 18 to 35 years old) to form its own opinions.

What ticks me off is no one will assign blame to the commander in chief, who willingly let this go on.

> willingly let

I believe the US continues to have a president right now, at this very moment. The past tense is confusing.

> and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,”

I for one hope the people involved get a very stern talking to.

At least a sternly worded letter that'll go in their folder at the minimum.

IMHO, US shall be governed by law. This is fundamental of our values. NSA misbehavior shall be severely sanctioned. If we relinquish these values, what distinguish us from the dictatorships we fight.

I think that the privacy issue will get worst quicker under Trump, which is why I voted for him. I think that it is required, for it to get better, because people don't care enough yet.

It wont happen that way. How many times has America been through this kind exercise? Truman gave us a dire warnong and not enough cared. Look at Iraq, Vietnam, Hiroshima and Nagasaki--they were all unjustified atrocties, and that is the truth--which you will come to if you research them--but it's too easy to make up believable bullshit that the people gobble up. Most of us are conditioned to follow leaders, and "great men are almost always bad men." Who has time to think or worry about this? Our jobs, lives, bills and healthcare are overwhelmingly stressful and if that wasn't enough we are conditioned by our culture to religiously value money over everything else, which keeps us in line and productive.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - George Orwell

Something big needs to happen to prevent this.

When has accelerationism ever worked before?

I think for a lot of relatively wealthy, straight, white people there's not a lot of downside to 4 or 8 years of Trump, which led to some pretty awful accelerationism risk calculus.

Please get out of here with that crap, the loudest majority of anti-trumpers tend to be young, white people who think they speak for every other race and religion.

I think the idea is to get people to "right the ship" by forcing it to lean too far to the other side, causing them to quickly pull it back to center.

thanks, that what I was trying to say.

Trump seems to think along these lines as well, though in a different direction.

"When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster, then you'll have a, you know, you'll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great."

http://video.foxnews.com/v/3179604851001/donald-trumps-2014-...

If he doesn't manage to work with the Republicans to raise the debt ceiling (Mick Mulvaney doesn't seem to care either way) then we might have a chance to see what happens when the economy crashes hard, with no deficit spending to cushion the fall.

Brazil since 2010.

Not sure that's true. His team seems to have been the victim of it, so that complicates things. May be a wake-up call to the party that's currently in power. It's fascinating because political abuse was exactly what Snowden and Greenwald warned against and yet they don't seem to care much because they dislike Trump. Deep down everybody is a political hack.

One of President Obama's last acts was to expand and entrench mass surveillance by the Federal government.

>New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA—which collects information under that authority with little oversight, transparency, or concern for privacy—share the raw streams of communications it intercepts directly with agencies including the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report today by the New York Times.

This in direct conflict with his earlier promise to do the opposite.

>On January 17, 2014, President Obama gave a public address on mass surveillance. Obama promised increased restrictions on data collection of American citizens, which would include the requirement of court approval for searches of telephone records. In addition, Obama called for increased oversight and admitted the dangers NSA surveillance posed to civil liberties.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveill...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla...

I didn't read Obama correctly... He was a pretty good liar. Hopefully I am not wrong with Trump.

Thats not the problem, the problem is that no one seems to care anymore. Thats very, very disturbing.

Privacy is of course important. We should take it seriously. And i think its our duty to encourage other people to do so, and i know there are many people does not care.

It's not OK that this doesn't shock me!

Putting on my marketing hat -- protecting privacy sure has lousy marketing. Privacy is so abstract and sounds passive.

Why don't people talk about how upcoming politicians can be blackmailed by having this surveillance info lying around? Or our current politicians, who vote and decide on the powers granted the NSA, are easily blackmail-able with this surveillance info?

That's always been my biggest concern. It appears to have happened to Trump's team, which is very ironic because the republicans are supposedly the national security hawks that want this surveillance; but at the same time now the dems turn a blind eye because it happened to someone they despise.

As a non-American, whose rights to any sort of privacy whatsoever have been deemed zero by people on this very forum from the start[0], I really just want to point my finger and say:

"Ha, ha!"

I guess it's my turn to finally say, "is anyone really surprised?".

Okay having gotten that off my chest, I have a question too :) It's about the timing of this release, just in the last few weeks before Trump got elected. I have a little theory that sprung to mind reading the article. Is it maybe because NSA was violating the restrictions left and right, because obviously they believe it's for the Greater Good, or something. But they are probably also aware that the mere existence of all this data is dangerous by itself, you slurp it up, filter, categorize, store, etc. Now it's like nuclear waste sludge, waiting to fuck shit up when it ends up somewhere it shouldn't be. And maybe during the Obama administration, who, you may not have liked the guy but at least he is you know, SANE[1], so the NSA believed that these violations were for the Greater Good/for the better. But now there's Trump. And he's a wild card. Literally no telling what this guy will do or won't do. And then there's these rumours about Russian connections[2]. So now the NSA is suddenly like, wait a minute, all this data is still here, and we're spying on citizens, and we're collecting all this shit, and ... Trump's in power. Maybe better limit ourselves, before he (or his underlings) start using it in very, very badwrong ways. Like, the NSA trusted they could wildly overstep their boundaries in a relatively sane governmental environment, but now they're not so sure any more and kind of worried about what powers they actually gave this administration?

Does that sound about right? It's just some thoughts I had about the matter.

Good luck getting your privacies back, and all though. Honestly.

[0] because violating my privacy is "their job" even though I am a human being with a fundamental right to privacy just like you guys, I've nothing wrong to have that taken away from me! We all live on the same planet, and no, my government's intelligence service is NOT spying on the entire Internet just the same, because they can't, they don't have the unique position and resources of the NSA. And if they would, I would not defend them for it.

[1] Disclaimer: I don't have a background to actually diagnose people. But I do know a thing or two about it. So there's the blatantly obvious narcissistic personality disorder. And then there's the part where he's just simply not qualified, he doesn't know shit about 20th century world history, international relations and diplomacy, etc. Believing you can do this super important job, is also pretty insane. The spokespeople, in their eyes you can see they want to scream we don't know what the guy is saying half the time either.

[2] Trump almost literally admitted he fired the FBI guy because he was investigating him about Russia. I mean he also denied it, but even though that's one of his insane shticks, to say something and claim the opposite a bit later, in this case, saying both does not in fact, add up to saying nothing. It's really crazy that. But the jury's still out, right?

Wikipedia states that circa.com is a recently acquired property of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, who is known for mandating stations to carry canned editorials as news [0]. Google also shows this report as surfacing ~month ago [1].

I agree that what the government did is insane, but this is a pretty poor source.

[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/08/527462015/...

[1]: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22I+think+what+this+e...

emptywheel.net is generally a good source for lawyerly concerns about surveillance.

I don't have time to track down if she has anything on circa's issues specifically, but:

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/03/17/ron-wydens-complaints-...

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/05/03/i-con-the-record-trans...

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/05/02/i-con-the-record-trans...

... etc.

I think the article is wrong on the definition of "about data." The definition I read was, "about data" is information that mentions a foreign intelligence target, even if it's sent between two Americans domestically.

This was, apparently, perfectly legal to query as long as you were querying a foreign target. The NSA overstepped pretty egregiously and had to shut those queries down.

The article say it's data "about" Americans, which is true but confusing.

Pleass stop posting circa trash.

Shoot the messenger, huh. If you don't realize there is a problem with "702" authorizations, whether it involves your preferred candidate Obama or not, then maybe you aren't paying attention?

Do you want Trump or any president, or more accurately, unelected intel agencies abusing power like this with no recourse and no oversight?[0]

Doesn't this concern you? Well.. it's up for reauthorization later in the year, and now there is extensive evidence it lacks oversight and has been abused.

Politicians of both parties have turned a blind eye to the problems, and if you follow some of the proceedings in Congress lately, they are loathe to criticize or even bring up the issue in depth. They all want this to continue.

Does anyone care?

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170514/10071637362/inspe...

Agree completely. And I can't imagine that the self-disclosures at the end of the current term will be worse than this.

>Shoot the messenger, huh.

In this case: absolutely!

NSA stories are too important to be dragged down by some news aggregation platform trying to feign original, investigative journalism on a site that's borderline unusable on the desktop.

Circa literally numbers every passage—interspersing ads every few—while providing a cringe-worthy video of their reporter reading a script in a tone too grave to possibly be genuine.

>Do you want Trump or any president, or more accurately, unelected intel agencies abusing power like this with no recourse and no oversight?

That doesn't change the fact that clickbait trash is still clickbait trash, and should be discarded because it detracts from the quality of the overall discussion.

With reader view in Firefox, it's fine.

Agreed. Impossible to read, horrible broken UI (pagination, really?). Fonts too large. Too much white space.

So, since the experience is bad it invalidates the information provided? Most information from the government comes to us in the form of simple documents, I guess we ignore that information as well?

Oh my, Is people so naive that they really believe what NSA is telling them?

Some people huh, really ?

This is an old story.

And, even if it wasn't, I don't want to sound cynic or excessively sarcastic, but it would be the biggest case for "no shit, sherlock".

edit: grammar

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