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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Through a sufficiently creative definition of spying, nobody has been spied on in human history. Otherwise, we're forced to contend with the fact that we are being caught in the same dragnets that were advertised to catch the next Osama. (Not advertised to us, of course - we had no serious chance to vote on it.)

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It makes sense to collect everything possible, then discard what you don't need later, because when conducting an investigation you don't know in advance which data are of interest.

If your communications are intercepted, stored, but then never looked at, and eventually deleted - this is functionally equivalent to having never been collected at all.

We have already had proofs of the LEAs inability to keep TS information safe, expect a worse level of protection for routinely intercepted phone calls, emails, ...

It's very very difficult (some people say impossible) to assure 100 percent that people's data have been safely stored and transmitted for their whole retention lifetime.

That's an argument for ensuring that such data is properly secured, not an argument against collecting it in the first place.

If you ask me, keep one or the other. The inability to maintain the operational reliability of a datastore (including backups), does not inspire confidence.

Assuming this is an incident and not a coverup.

There's one big difference: if your data was never collected, then a breach (internal or external) doesn't endanger it. If it was "collected but never looked at," then it's subject to the integral of every mistake, malicious action or rule change from now until they loose it. One of the major things that Snowden revealed was that random nobodies had huge access to sigint material.

It's the responsibility of the communicating parties to protect themselves against interception if they consider this to be an unacceptable risk. Using end to end encryption for message content secrecy, and obfuscating message routes using e.g. Tor to help mask source and destination pairs.

The US government can break TOR and pretty much everything else when they really want. That’s no protection.

Do you have any evidence of this?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/judge-confirms-w...

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/06/25/can-you-trust-to...

https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/3/5868159/new-report-says-th...

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/0...

Which dragnets? Be specific. The phone metadata dragnet doesn't exist anymore, and the way it was used according to Snowden's documents when it did exist could hardly be called spying on OP.

Here's a detailed writeup. It had been claimed that the phone tracking was reduced, the rest clearly remains:

https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-su...

I understand that some disagree with the other (and past) positions of the ACLU and may be disinclined to trust its website. Fortunately this issue isn't a particularly party-based one. Here's another good source, although it also says a lot about the history of the leaks:

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

If there is any accurate secondary source that is clearly conservative, It'd be welcome for me to see it in a reply. There's no particular reason why we'd have to porkbarel this issue - presumably there would be no party affinity at all.

Edit: I know that there is lots of text behind those links, but the issue is an expansive one. I sincerely invite you to read them!

> If there is any accurate secondary source that is clearly conservative, It'd be welcome for me to see it in a reply.

You can find a lot of this in the things Julian Sanchez has written for Cato.

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